I wanted a cheap, low-power, always-on person detector. Of course, I’m building this on a BrightSign XT5 player (more on that later). But since a friend said he was using a Beelink SER9 with a AMD Ryzen AI NPU (~50 TOPS) I thought I’d check it out. Can it actually run the detector? Short answer, as of today: no — and the reason is not the part you’d expect.
The lamp on my office shelf glows solid red the instant my camera goes live, and turns off the second the meeting ends. Nobody has to knock and wonder. My wife, a kid, the dog-walker — anyone who glances in knows I’m on camera without me saying a word. And by my own stubborn definition, that little bulb is a robot.
Most people think of a BrightSign player as the little box behind a screen that loops a video. That’s true right up until you realize the thing is a full ARM64 Linux computer with an NPU sitting idle most of the day. And you can run your own code on it. Natively. That’s what an extension is, and once you grok it, a whole world opens up.
One morning I opened my HP ZBook Ultra G1a and the trackpad was dead. Keyboard fine. Touchscreen fine. External mouse fine. Trackpad: nothing. Twelve hours earlier it had worked. I hadn’t changed anything. Welcome to bleeding-edge silicon on Linux.
UPDATED: On Ubuntu 24.10 just installing using apt “just works.” This workaround no longer needed.
How I mapped some basic keys to be the same on MacOS and Ubuntu and saved my sanity. UPDATED! UPDATED AGAIN!
I undid it. I’m still using my desktop (mostly remotely) and I do love my Lenovo X1 Carbon. But my primary machine is back to the Mac Book Pro.
I did it. I went total Linux on the Desktop again. Full blown beast of a real machine, and am getting a Lenovo X1 Carbon for travel.
Imagine my surprise when I could not sudo! Wait, what?
Tl;dr: read the web instead of Linux for Networking Professionals. This book is a broad, shallow coverage that is probably more easily learned from web pages for free.
Prometheus Alert Manager is an “AP” system, in “CAP” terms. How we made it more Consistent, including a forked repo of the Alert Manager code.
Back to the future, debian again. Ubuntu begone!
“Cattle, not Pets!” they say. Except that for a lot of development, coders make their own laptop their favorite pet. “It works on my machine!” becomes normal. I got tired of that and automated the creation of my dev environment..
I’m continuing to dive deep on modern typescript/node development. I fixed a bug in a new tool I am using (projen) and learned a ton along the way. This post is to share some of that.
Merry Christmas Eve! Playing with the Beaglebone sends me into another thought spiral.
I’m revisiting why I don’t like MQTT, and what I am doing about it.
Getting Started with the Beaglebone Black (Again)
A bug in VLC? Grrrr. Reminds me of the old days.
X11’s xdotool cli is snazzy, and solved an annoying window placement problem.
Some Thoughts on MQTT
Progress, but not where I want it to be. But it builds and installs the FreeRTOS AWS IoT demo.
A few quick notes on getting the AWS IoT C SDK running on Linux.
Dipping a toe into the FreeRTOS ESP32 world.
It’s back to the future again. Fidding with node.js a lot, but you know, C is still my favorite language. Dug up some old code to read/write from a serial port.
A quick measure of the costs of running on-premise computers.
The Blackburn theme for Hugo has a bug in how it shows social media icons. Here’s how to fix it.
Debian not good for me on the desktop - back to Ubuntu, lost the snaps.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W is likely the basis of my next few projects.
Ubuntu just went too far with the snap crap. Back to Debian!
A trip down memory lane: the first linux telephony drivers
One of the core principles of modern “DevOps” development is to treat your documentation as code, just like code. My team at Cisco open sourced how we do that.
Link to posted video “CloudSphere: Impedance Matching Legacy Apps to Prometheus Monitoring by Greg Herlein & David Wang”
Quick reminder how to enable RDP sessions from OSX to an Ubuntu box.
SSH tunnels are basically indistinguishable from magic.
The default behavior of Ubuntu 18.04 is not friendly for a notebook that swaps back and forth from desk to mobile.
From 1997 to 2010 I believed it was only a matter of time before Linux on the desktop became a reality. I gave up in 2010 and went to OSX. But we may finally be close! Here’s my notes on installing Linux Ubuntu 18.04 on a Dell Inspiron 15 7000. It’s the easiest and happiest linux ever for me.