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General
New category: FreeNAS
Just a short notice: since a significant portion of my posts here about FreeNAS, I took the liberty to create a category specifically for those posts.
First steps with the Raspberry Pi
Yesterday, two days after my order, my Raspberry Pi arrived in the mail. And despite having seen it on dozens of pictures, I still was amazed by its form factor. It’s incredibly small (although absolutely not fragile).
And here’s what I did with it:
I plugged the SD card I ordered alongside with the Pi into my MacBook and ran the stupidly easy installation of raspbmc. After the first part of the installation, I chose to do the network configuration in the second part since I didn’t have USB keyboard at hand. After that I was good to go.
I connected the Raspberry Pi to my LAN, the 2.1 set it shall drive in the future and to my veeery old TV (using composite. No, I don’t watch TV.), booted it up and raspbmc ran its updating and extraction procedures.
After another quick reboot I had a fully functioning UPnP renderer. I activated the options to control it remotely and fired up BubbleUPnP on my phone. It’s worth noting, that the last steps of configuration were the only part where I actually needed a screen.
As media source I could either use my phone or, what I’ll do 99% of the time, the Plex Media Server on my FreeNAS.
I’m using the Plex server because it’s much more capable than MiniDLNA. It has a nice web interface for configuration and sorting and streams the album artwork in a much higher quality than MiniDLAN, which only sends it as 160×160 graphics, despite having higher resolutions available.
The only thing which doesn’t seem to work is AirPlay. The Raspberry Pi get’s recognized as an AirPlay target, but my boxes remain silent when I try to play something.
I also tried rasplex, which has a faster bootup and AirPlay seems to work, but without a USB keyboard I had no way to configure it, so I’ll be staying with raspbmc for a while.
The NSA and surveillance … made simple
The Innovation of Loneliness
Blog recommendation: Infosec Reactions
A tumblr blog that features reactions on certain infosec events, like client meetings, script kiddies, etc. and presenting the reaction in form of animated gifs. Hilarity ensues.
A story about ‘Magic’
The internet is full of stories. One story that stayed with me for quite some time now, is the story about ‘Magic’.
It’s a bit more for the oldschoolers of yours, but it should give you a smug face if you like dry humour.
Golden Balls and a solution to the prisoner’s dilemma
More information about the prisoner’s dilemma: Wikipedia
Bits und so
There’s a german tech podcast called Bits und so (engl: bits and such).
Although it’s pretty much Apple fanboyism and other-OS-bashing, I have it in my podcatcher and listen to it every now and then.
It’s not my favorite but there is one special thing I like about it: it has really high quality standards. Those standards reached a new height today as they launched a video stream of their podcast.
Although It’s mainly an audio product, you can now watch it (as a premium member) via HLS or Flash/VLC. I love that idea 🙂
If you are a german speaker and want to read their announcement, here you go.
Mending your Twingos front wiper
Disclaimer: This has been applied to a 2001 Renault Twingo with 58 bhp D7F engine. Maybe for your car this isn’t working, although I saw many posts for other cars (other Twingos, Renault Clios, etc) where it did the trick. But I give no guarantees.
A few days ago my girlfriend came to me and said: “Your front wiper has stopped working.” That wasn’t something I wanted to hear.
Although I am not exactly what you’d call a mechanic, I took a look at it. I checked the fuse but it was okay. Then I googled a bit on how to find the relay, but I stumbled upon many posts regarding the same issue and most of the problems were caused by the motor itself. Apparently, the ground loses its connection over time. It is connected to the case of the motor and with a spring which over time corrodes. But it is easy to fix if you know how.
You need the following:
1. One (metric) 10 wrench
2. One (metric) 13 wrench
3. Some thinner and a cloth
4. Maybe pliers
5. A flashlight helped quite a lot
6. Some cable for diagnostics. As long as it has contacts on each side nearly everything should do the job.
1. Diagnostics
Turn the power on the car on and fully turn on the wiper. Then, take a cable and hold it to the metal case of the motor or any peace of metal connected to it. If it starts wiping, proceed. If not, check the other parts. Fuse, relay, switch. Or maybe the motor itself is broken.
2. Get the motor out.
The motor is wedged in right under the axle of the wiper itself, you can’t miss it. To get it out, you have to get three bolts loose (with a metric 10 wrench), that are holding it in its position. Those are a bit tricky to reach. After that, you have to get the wiper from the motor. That is held together with a metric 13 nut and it’s quite tough on so the force from the motor is distributed correctly.
Attention: it is a bit of a pain to readjust the wiper arm after have taken it off so I encourage you to somehow mark the position. A photo does the job pretty well.
3. Open the motor
After getting the motor loose, unplug the cables and take it out of the engine compartment.
On top of the little gears is a plastic cover. Four small lashes hold it in position, like the two I marked in the picture. I got them lose with a screwdriver. Take care not to break them.
4. Clean the ground and the spring
The ground is connected to the motor as part of the plug you unplugged while taking out the motor. It then runs along under the plastic cover and is eventually connected to the metal case.
The little spring I marked with the red rectangle accumulates some dirt and soot over time. I cleaned it with a brush and some color thinner.
I also cleaned the other contacts (on the right side) since those had a large portion of lubricant at their tips.
After that, I cleaned the location where the spring connects to the other side. That was quite dirty, too.
5. Reassembly
I reassembled the motor, connected the plug and applied power to it and it worked like a charm.
After that successful test, I bolted everything together again and reassembled as it has been.
6. Lubricate the struts
I also applied some lubricant to the struts running from the engine to the wiper arm because over time they run dry on lubricant.
Do that while letting the wiper run so you can reach everything and it gets distributed right at the moment you apply it.
Altogether, it took me around 120 minutes incl. research. Disassembling and reassembling is a bit of a pain if you’ve got large handy but apart from that it is easy.
Heshsum 