August 31, 2021

Build a Raspberry Pi 4 Docker Swarm Cluster with four nodes and deploy Traefik with Portainer

I decided to run all of my supporting homelab services in a more flexible setup, making it easy to deploy and test new features, while also ensuring that already running and needed tasks are stable and constant available. Therefore I decided to create a four node Docker Swarm cluster with four Raspberry Pis 4 8GB […]

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September 4, 2020

Build a smart MagicMirror with two displays running on Raspberry Pi

This project was already build in 2015, but due to a recent reinstall of the MagicMirror software on my mirror, I decided to share the whole build including the up to date software setup process from scratch. Also I can tell that it ran flawless for the past 5 years now, so pretty stable 🙂 […]

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July 27, 2020

Polish your Raspberry Pi: Clean boot, splash screen video, noconsole & ZRAM

In general the Raspberry Pi is great learning tool. One reason is the great default verbose boot and console messages you see when booting or shuting down your raspberry pi. But for some more polished projects, its quite handy to hide all of that and have a nice boot loading animation instead. In this instance […]

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July 24, 2020

Quickly resize and shrink Raspberry Pi SD card image on MacOS

From time to time you may want to quickly copy a raspberry pi image from one system to another....but only have a smaller SD card. Or you started your project as a tryout on a crazy 64GB sd card, and realize later that 8GB would be way enough. So what you want to do, is […]

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July 15, 2020

Raspberry Pi Photobooth in a classic vintage plate camera

I always wanted to have an old vintage plate camera from the early times of photography in my home as kind of a decor item. Inspired by walking across old flee markets in Germany, I thought it may be cool to put more into it, than just having the plate camera as a decoration item. […]

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May 31, 2020

Test your internet bandwidth on CLI or Terminal with python and speedtest.net

We all know this situation: you are on a fresh setup of Linux remote server or a headleas Raspberry Pi, and somehow the speed is not feeling right. Besides a iperf LAN speedtest for your device you can quickly check your connection speed to the outside with this handy python script command: If you don’t […]

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May 31, 2020

Setup secure SSH to key only access with custom user/port on Raspbian/Ubuntu

This quick guide shows my standard routine for setting up secure SSH on new fresh installs of Raspbian or Ubuntu VMs. First if you are still using any system default user like "pi" or "root" or "admin", change this and create your own, custom user. Lets start in this example with our new user name […]

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May 29, 2020

Build a PROXMOX virtual server on SuperMicro SuperServer 5018A-FTN4

Introduction Over the years I piled up a lot of different projects running in my home on different Raspberry Pis. Because this amazing little piece of technology can literally do anything, I love to tryout and build things with it. Roughly every third project turned out to be one I will keep running and so […]

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November 25, 2019

Raspberry Development Environment on MacOSX with QEMU

This is a quick guide on how to setup your Mac to mount and run Raspbian images for rapid rpi prototyping, testing and tinkering. It enables your Mac to start and simulate a Pi 3 and all its (web)services via the terminal. So you can start tinkering in no-time before deploying on a life rpi. […]

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October 25, 2019

Pi VPN Box: Anonymous Raspbian with ExpressVPN and jDownloader

This is how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a powerful VPN box, that automatically connects to a VPN on boot and keeps itself connected by trying to reconnect when disconnected. If it gets disconnected from the VPN at one point we are ensuring that all traffic gets drop until we are back connected with […]

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October 25, 2019

Raspbian update routine script

This is a little helper script that runs all the update commands of the Raspberry Pi in an order. Making it more comfortable to use and also possible to tie to a cronjob for automatic system update schedules. Lets start with creating the script file in our home dir: Paste the following script into the […]

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October 21, 2019

Automatic backups for Raspberry Pis to a Synology NFS share

Problem to solve: If you have some Raspberry Pis at home and you like tinkering around with them like I do, then you probably know that feeling that all of a sudden nothing seems to be working as it used to be and you want to re-roll to a certain point and just start all […]

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October 11, 2019

Install nodejs & npm on Raspberry Pi 2, 3 or 4

First update the Debian apt package repository to include the NodeSource packages: Now that we have added the NodeSource package repository, we can move on and install Node.js! After it finished validate install by typing: You should get a response like "$ 12.10.0". Now you are good to go to run npm.

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