Finding stories in everyday adventures
This is a quick reference of different data recovery software (macOS). I had to use these after I accidentally deleted quite a lot of photos on my external drive. Many of the photos were from our recent India trip incl. birthday celebration for Oliver, and site-seeing (Jaipur, Delhi). Needless to say it was quite a debacle to have lost those photos. Most software allow you to see file names, sizes, timestamps of recovered files, and …
Before Our dresser as shown above in the photos went through a major makeover. This was always the plan, when we bought this used dresser off Craigslist. The original tan color was all worn out, and had marks all over. Worse thing is that the drawers were in horrible shape, with the old fashioned rails which were broken and would sag if drawn out. When Oliver started messing with these drawers, I knew it was …
Over the weekend I decided to try out Apple Music. We’re invested in Apple ecosystem – have 2 Apple TVs, both wife and I have iPhones, and Apple Watches. I own MacBook Air, and a Mac Pro, and recently we bought a HomePod mini getting rid of all Alexa’s. With the HomePod mini, received a 6 month trial of Apple Music so decided it is time to try. Wife had already been trialing Apple Music, …
For a long time, the hot tub in our patio was a luxury that we could never enjoy. When we bought our Chesterfield house, we had high hopes that the hot tub will work, but it never did. When we got it looked at by a skilled technician, we found that it has a leak which will take a lot of $$$ to diagnose and fix. We even had home warranty for it, but it …
Quick commands to create user and group in macOS with specific uid and gid, and to add a specific user to newly created group. Add group sudo dscl . -create /Groups/<name> gid <gid> Add user sudo dscl . -create /Users/<name> sudo dscl . -create /Users/<name> UniqueID “<uid>” sudo dscl . -create /Users/<name> PrimaryGroupID <gid> Add existing user to new group sudo dscl . append /Groups/<name> GroupMembership <user> Wish macOS actually used useradd/groupadd like linux systems, …
Read moreCreate user, group and edit group membership in macOS
If you have an immediate need to reboot your TV Tuner but are feeling lazy to not go down to basement to your server room, then fear not, there’s a CLI called hdhomerun_config Download the binary from HDHR site: https://info.hdhomerun.com/info/hdhomerun_config Run the command hdhomerun_config 1076C29C set /sys/restart self
Current Modem Xfinity xb7 Firewall / Router / DHCP eero 2nd gen mesh wifi (6x units throughout the house) Local DNS & Ad Blocker (pi-hole) Dell 9020 SFF Intel i5-4570 8GB RAM 120GB SSD Network distribution HPE V1910-48G JE009A Switch (48-ports Gigabit) for wired ethernet eero 2nd gen mesh wifi (6x units throughout the house) Cat5e Ethernet wiring to home office, media room and living room Primary Server HP Proliant DL380p G8 2x Intel Xeon …
HP V1910 is an excellent enterprise grade managed switch for homelab usage. You can easily get it for cheap on eBay. Now, as I was messing with management UI, I noticed my settings weren’t being saved. Well, it turned out that I needed to hit the Save button (!) This took me several frustrating hours to figure out, after my settings weren’t being persisted post-reboots. You’re welcome.
Before This is our old and worn out mailbox and was like this when we bought the house. In a year timeframe it actually got worse and the post was leaning forward causing mailbox to open up (poor magnet too). One time, it got opened and our mail contents were all over the street. Needless to say it was a time for an upgrade During The old 2×2 mailbox post was completely unusable. The wooden …
Just got Eero to replace Google Onhub Routers. Quickly found out that Eero lacks a DNS server which means I cannot access any of my home servers using their hostnames. Also, all my home servers were not showing any hostnames in Eero App which was very weird. Ping from my macOS computer wasn’t registering Why do I need hostname access? I’ve management URLs and Shared drives that use hostname. I’m not going to use IP …
Read moreHostname Pings Don’t Work Post Eero – How to make ’em work