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Rustic Retreat

Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.

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SEEDStack

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Mission-Tags

Apollo-NG Mobile Hackbase

Apollo-NG Hackerspacecraft

Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.

Latest Mission-Log Entries

Personal Log: Digital Exorcism

When you leave the commercial/proprietary software ecosphere and jump into open-source operating systems, you will have to learn how to handle daemons. And once you've created a couple of those daemons yourself, taught them what to do and let them work in production, you gain a lot of experience and confidence in dealing with all kinds of daemons.

Yesterday, a couple of friends from the awesome http://co-munity.net/ecobytes project seemed to be in some sort of possible DDoS trouble and asked for my advice and experience to mitigate the issue. Now, to me, it is a very amazing experience to simply get root access to a lot of machines lately, operated by people which I have never physically met but in this case we are connected by elf-pavlik. And in today's world, voluntarily giving root access to someone else, is the ultimate token of trust or/and friendship. So I'd like to thank you guys for that vote of confidence.

Since it was supposed to be a DDoS, I've had my input filters clamped too early and saw that something was going on and a lot of traffic was moving but it somehow seemed wrong compared to other DDoS investigations I had to do in the past. After some failed attempts to block/null-route a couple of offensive networks, our analysis focus shifted to traffic distribution where we saw that one of the VMs seemed to be the top talker. And it also became clear that the traffic wasn't coming in, it was going out. I didn't take care to look at flow direction at all because I already assumed it was incoming traffic (DDoS).

Here's where Dashboards like this come in handy. You have all relevant metrics at a glance and can compare the current to some “normal” state in the past. Matching graphs and colors visually takes much less time than working on the console to aggregate everything manually for a quick situation overview.

It then quickly became apparent, that one of the VMs was the top talker so we moved onto that box and what started out as DDoS mitigation turned into digital exorcism. You know, when there are daemons that are possessed and controlled by some evil spirit to create some form havoc, mostly motivated purely by the ultimate overlord of all evil: Financial Profit. And what do you do when dealing with evil daemons? You go Exorcist on them.

→ Read more...

2015-03-28 10:37 · chrono

3D Printer extruder PEEK insulator meltdown

felix-extruderv4-peek-meltdown

chrono  :  Uhhhh, H0u5t0n, I have some good and some bad news
H0u5t0n :  Bad news
chrono  :  I think we have a problem with F3l1ks
H0u5t0n :  Could you be a bit more specific?
chrono  :  Well, seems as if the beige plastic element of extruder 0 melted
H0u5t0n :  You mean the beige PEEK insulator between the hot- and cold-end?
chrono  :  Affirmative
H0u5t0n :  How did that happen?
chrono  :  I was prepping him for a new job, manually set the target temp of 
           ext0 to 220°C for a quick cleaning extrusion of about 30mm of 
           filament when I noticed a sizzling sound which turned out to be 
           something dropping from the insulator onto the hot-end. A second 
           or so later, the whole hot-end started to drop out of the PEEK 
           insulator, at which point I set F3l1ks to standby to stop him
H0u5t0n :  Did you check the temperature at that point?
chrono  :  Yeah, unfortunately, I didn't take a screenshot due to the hectic 
           of the moment and octoprint doesn't offer a history function to 
           get some hard data. All I can offer is a glimpse I had after I
           stopped him and saw some obvious overshoot ranging somewhere
           between 240-250°C. Did you guys ever verify the thermistor
           readouts with an external reference thermometer?
H0u5t0n :  Uhhhm, no... I suppose we did not
chrono  :  Ok, I'll have to do that then. Could you put a spare PEEK into
           the next supply launch? I've already unmounted and secured ext0
           so we should be able to continue printing in the meantime with 
           ext1 - after a couple of more safety tests
chrono  :  Which brings us to the good news:
H0u5t0n :  Let me guess, you figured out a way to collect and ship F3l1ks's 
           metrics into the VFCC, to significantly reduce the risk of having
           to work without more reliable data again?
chrono  :  Errr, yeah... exactly

Since the VFCC already offers all the features needed to store, retrieve and visualize all metrics of the 3D Print Robot, it was only a matter of an hour to install and configure collectd on the Odroid C1 to gather all system and printing related metrics, ship them into InfluxDB and mash up this fancy Live - F3l1ks - 3D Print Robot Stats Dashboard

Live - F3l1ks - 3D Print Robot Stats Dashboard

→ Read more...

2015-03-25 12:02 · chrono

Personal Log: FUCK

Freedom of speech is nothing if there is no freedom to use language in every way we individually see fit. After all, in the end, language is nothing but a crude tool to transfer knowledge, a meaning or just the state of our rational/emotional mindset to someone else. The more cryptic or inhibited the sender is, when translating thought patterns or trying to communicate an emotional state, the more likely the chance of communication failure becomes: The receiver must rely heavily on interpretation and interpolation. This problem seems to be even bigger when people from different cultures communicate, since their social and language training is different, making interpretation even harder due to a lack of common training ground (also beautifully depicted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok).

But after watching http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486585/, I really kept wondering, if the life of those people really is so fucked up, that they're rather wasting their lifetime trying to pretend to be “decent” and “on the moral high-ground” while at the same time they just go home to eagerly receive the next ass-smacking from their wives to get one up. Fucking hypocrites. Now get the fuck out or not, I don't actually give a fuck because we have way more pressing problems to solve than allocating time and resources on debating/censoring the use of the word FUCK or any other for that matter.

And if you're often feeling offended by something someone says, ask yourself or even the sender (verify) if it was actually intended as an offence, before trying to censor words and oppress people, to distract and hide the deeper issues you're having but obviously seem unwilling to resolve yourself. Unwanted reflection of subconscious things, building up from too much exposure to double-think standards, can often be triggered by words associated with that. Sex probably is still one of the biggest contexts/meanings associated to the word family of fuck. As fucks can be used or (not) given in a plethora of meanings for amplification, a huge number of readily established and available idioms or even as simple expression deriving its meaning entirely from context or intonation it is the perfect candidate for a “War on Fucks”. For the children, of course.

Go read Bukowskis poetry if you want to see how even the most “offending” and brutish words showing things how they actually are without any fake metaphoric surface to shine things up. And still, this raw and honest way of working with words turned out very beautiful poetry worthwhile reading instead of some shit you think you're supposed to read in order to be accepted intellectually. Fuck that.

2015-03-25 08:17 · chrono