Had an interesting time preparing GPS systems for their Icelandic winter
Iceland23
Benchmarking libVIPS on huge image
Using the famous 7.9GB bluemarble image – I ran the vips-bench on my 12 core AMD 7900X to see how linear the speedup is with threads/cores – it speeds up well to 12 threads – but is really at full speed with only 8. What should be amazing is that we can process these huge files in only 5s !
System has 32GB DDR5 and was reading/writing to files in /tmp. I used a 3s pause between deleting output and running next thread-count.
Wifi upgrade
Having moved the broadband router to one corner of the house it was time to put a separate wifi AP in. The EAP610 from TP-Link was so good I have turned off the extra AP on the draytek router. Its also faster than mains networking (800 vs 400 Mbit/s)!
office PC silenced!
sadly I had to remove the motherboard to put this in but it was worth it for the quiet running
its a cool master hyper 212 by the way.. I also removed the noisy rear fan as this blows air out anyway
New kitchen – new wifi!
After weeks of kitchen work – we needed a better wifi link so I went for a TP-Link RE-450 which is a small plug-in unit which I hooked up to the ethernet point and setup in minutes. Nice design!
Trip to Arlesford
Home assistant!
I’ve been experimenting with homeassistant – to link up various IoT devices.. ikea, tp-link, philips, sonoff
I finally got around to adding a usb zigbee dongle (CC2531) with mqtt2zigbee and added a temp-hum sensor fairly easily. Next steps: moving hass to an ssd for safety and slowly removing philips and idea hubs!
fix for Boxster hood elastic
I finally found the right torx tool (right angle thing I normally open hard disks with!)
Open hood about 70cm, undo velcro straps, Loosen the screw:
Which releases the elastic
and outside its very easy to sew on a replacement a similar length. Clip back over screw and tighten! Hood now closes without catching on the sides! Previous fix only lasted 6 months (staple elastic over old one – as seen on youtube)
trip to Kathmandu
just back from an external examining trip to Kathmandu
It was a great adventure!
Air filter swap time
After one year – Boxster’s intake noise has become boomy again – which I think is a sign of a dirty filter. So I did a quick swap. Of course quick isn’t really fast – half-open top, unclip hood, bungee it all back, remove speaker, remove soft cover, undo torx30 bolts (memo to self: find short torx30 first!). remove metal cover, remove air box cover, unscrew filter, swap plastic holder, push back in, reverse everything else.
