Hi. I'm James. 
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Below are some basic iperf benchmarks of the IOCREST PCI-E 2.5Gbps NIC. The adapter is confirmed to be using a Realtek RTL8125 series chip - specifically the marketing for this card states it's an RTL8125B, it simply shows as RTL8125 through lspci and lshw under the product field, however you can see under the configuration field it states firmware=rtl8125b-2_0.0.2. This is a very common Realtek chip used for a lot of 2.5Gbps NICs and you'll likely see the same one in use across many similar cards across a range of vendors. The testing was performed using a direct connection between…

In this tutorial I will outline one way to fix an issue with the Windows 10 bootloader if you’ve run into an issue. This isn’t the only possible option, however I found this worked for me after performing a restore of the main NTFS OS partition but not any of the boot or system partitions at this same time. This may also help if your Windows 10 installation isn’t detected on boot after performing a disk clone, or if you’ve installed a fresh copy of Windows 10 to fix a boot issue, and then tried to restore the NTFS OS…

Below is a basic benchmark of the Transcend Portable SSD 256GB - TS256GESD310C / ESD310C. Please note this is purely just for my own interest and for anyone else interested - this test is not performed for proper review purposes or under strict testing environment settings, so it may not be perfectly accurate, however it should represent ballpark figures of what to expect (unless I've made a mistake in my benchmark process!)

Below is a basic benchmark of the Western Digital My Passport SSD 500GB Portable 2.5" USB 3.2 Gen-2 HDD - WDBAGF5000ABL. Please note this is purely just for my own interest and for anyone else interested - this test is not performed for proper review purposes or under strict testing environment settings, so it may not be perfectly accurate, however it should represent ballpark figures of what to expect (unless I've made a mistake in my benchmark process!)

In this post I'll outline configuration steps for streaming video from an Icecast server with OBS as the source. The intention is to be able to self-host a video stream that could be used for a variety of purposes, such as "watch/view together" use. The configuration below has been tested to keep each connected viewer closely synced to the same point in the stream. The difference in sync between viewers stays roughly between 0-2 seconds in testing. If this isn't of importance to you, then you may benefit from increasing the Icecast queue-size and burst-size. A self-signed SSL certificate will…

If you've been running QT based applications under Gnome for long enough, it's likely that you'll eventually encounter issues with inconsistent theming and colour schemes when it comes to having QT and/or KDE based applications try to match or inherit parts of the Gnome / GTK theme you're running. Note that this scenario is not specific to Gnome, and you can experience this issue and also fix it the same way on other desktop environments. A particular example I've encountered occurred when moving from Fedora 32 to 33. The text editor Kate no longer uses a dark colour scheme if…

Below are some basic benchmarks of the Toshiba Canvio Slim 2TB Portable 2.5" USB 3.0 HDD - HDTD320AS3EA - Which in this instance has a Toshiba MQ04UBD200 drive inside. Please note these are purely just for my own interest and for anyone else interested - these tests are not performed for proper review purposes or under strict testing environment settings, so they may not be perfectly accurate, however they should represent ballpark figures of what to expect (unless I've made a mistake in my benchmark process!). At the time of writing, these can be sourced for ~$99 AUD and come…

Below are some basic iperf benchmarks of the Simplecom CHN411 USB C to 3 Port USB 3.0 Hub with Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Only the ethernet port was benchmarked as I don't have any very high speed USB devices to test the USB 3.0 hub ports with. The adapter is confirmed to be using a Realtek RTL8153 chip for the ethernet port. This is a very common chip and you'll likely see the same one in use across many similar looking adapters with different branding on the outside. The testing was performed using a direct connection between the adapter and a…

Upon installing Fedora 30 to an Asus Zenbook UX431F, I encountered an issue where there is no display output unless "nomodeset" is inside the GRUB config. This limits the display resolution to 800x600 for the Zenbook's screen which isn't ideal. External monitors will work just fine though. The first issue of note is that the Fedora live ISO will not output anything to the monitor when going through the normal installation process. At the boot prompt when using the live ISO you'll need to go to Troubleshooting and Install Fedora in basic graphics mode. Fedora should boot up and display…

For many years now I have hosted internet radio and internet radio events using a very simple stack of just IceCast + EZStream, tied in with a few very simple scripts and cron jobs. This has always worked incredibly reliably and kept these setups very minimal with less parts in the chain to potentially have an issue or drive up resource usage. The negative of this has always been a lack of flexibility. In the past I had looked into software such as Centova Cast, however this comes at a cost and isn't an open-source solution - which is what…

Below are some basic benchmarks of the Verbatim 16GB Store N Go Platinum USB 3.0 Flash Drive - Model - VBPLAT16GB. "Platinum" in this case refers to the colour only. There are also "Gold" versions of these same flash drives with the same specifications. Please note these are purely just for my own interest and for anyone else interested - these tests are not performed for proper review purposes or under strict testing environment settings, so they may not be perfectly accurate, however they should represent ballpark figures of what to expect (unless I've made a mistake in my benchmark…

Below are some basic benchmarks of the SanDisk 16GB Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drive - Model - SDCZ4816GB. Please note these are purely just for my own interest and for anyone else interested - these tests are not performed for proper review purposes or under strict testing environment settings, so they may not be perfectly accurate, however they should represent ballpark figures of what to expect (unless I've made a mistake in my benchmark process!)

This is a simple tutorial to get Rocket.Chat running on a Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 server.(You’ll likely be perfectly fine to run through the same process on a different Ubuntu version such as 18.04 if you’d prefer). In this case we’re installing this on a fresh server and we’ll be installing Rocket.Chat as a Snap and using Caddy as a reverse proxy. Caddy will also deal with issuing SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt. With this you’ll be able to get Rocket.Chat up and running within ~10 minutes, from there you can go on and make further server configuration changes for security…

This is a simple tutorial to backup and restore, or backup and migrate a Snap based installation of Rocket.Chat. First you’ll need to stop the Rocket.Chat server. service snap.rocketchat-server.rocketchat-server stop Note that we’re only stopping the rocketchat-server service, not the MongoDB service, which should still be running. Check with: service snap.rocketchat-server.rocketchat-mongo status | grep -i active Active: active (running) (…) Create a backup. snap run rocketchat-server.backupdb # You should see output similar to this: [+] A backup of your data can be found at /var/snap/rocketchat-server/common/backup/rocketchat_backup_<timestamp>.tar.gz Download that backup file over SFTP for instance, or transfer it to the server you’re…

I wanted a simple way of having my Slack status automatically update when I take a phone call using Zoiper. The majority of VoIP handsets or softphones support the opening of a URL during a certain event such as picking up or ending a call - which can be leveraged for various uses as you can imagine. Zoiper supports this method, but also has ability to execute files/applications on such events. In this particular project, when a phone call is answered Zoiper will launch set-status-in-call.pyw and pass the incoming caller ID using {number} which is one of a few supported…

I'd been searching for a portable external monitor and was mostly seeing AOC's offerings and the Asus Zenscreen, then eventually I'd been turned onto the brand "Magedok". Magedok have some incredibly good value offerings however there isn't a whole ton of information available online as far as reviews go. This isn't a proper review as it were, but I'll note my experience with the Magedok monitor that I ended up purchasing - Magedok 11.6 inch 1080P FHD IPS USB-C capacitive touch portable monitor (T116C) Unfortunately I don't have a great camera (or cameraman skills) to show off the monitor's panel,…

Are you traveling to Taiwan sometime soon and would like a data sim for internet access? I can recommend Chunghwa Telecom's offerings - this was the provider I ended up choosing during my travels. You can purchase a card with unlimited data on a time basis anywhere from 3 days to 30 days. You'll get some voice credit included for making calls too, it's a pretty good deal and certainly better than the options I'd come across nearby in Japan and Korea. For a 30 day SIM it's ~1000NTD or roughly $45 AUD at the current moment. Another great inclusion…

This is a nice simple script to display CPU core and disk temperatures on a FreeNAS server. Tested with FreeNAS 9.10.2-U1 Create a file with the following content - Mine is just called temps_check_script.sh as an example: # Write some general information echo System Temperatures - `date` uptime | awk '{ print "\nSystem Load:",10,11,12,"\n" }' # Write CPU temperatures echo "CPU Temperature:" sysctl -a | egrep -E "cpu\.[0-9]+\.temp" # Write HDD temperatures and status echo "HDD Temperature:" for i in(sysctl -n kern.disks | awk '{for (i=NF; i!=0 ; i--) if(match(i, '/da/')) printi }' ) ; do echo i: `smartctl -a…

Welcome to the first post of the "Me Know No Nihongo" series. In this series of posts I'll simply be going over some of my Japanese language learning - primarily using the textbook "Minna No Nihongo". I am by no means an expert when it comes to the Japanese language, in fact I am pretty far from that! Essentially I intend to use this series of posts as a means of revision for myself and to perhaps help some other learners out there that are using Minna No Nihongo. Even if you are using a different textbook, hopefully you can…

This is my current storage/labbing box, which originally started in a Fractal R3 Define case, and had slowly been upgraded over the years. As you can see, it's pretty damn messy to cable when you have no backplane! The front fans and also the rear fans are powered using chained molex adaptors which is certainly messy. The center bracket fans are plugged straight into the motherboard. I'm considering one of those fan controllers that have something like 8x 3pin fan headers powered by a single molex, which can then either float in the case or be mounted somewhere. Not sure…

You can schedule downloads and uploads in LFTP in a simple manner by using the `at` command. Anything following the syntax described in this image below should work. at now + 2 hours -- queue mirror --use-pget-n=10 yourdirectory/ at 1:00 tomorrow -- queue mirror --use-pget-n=10 yourdirectory/

Ever since the original Logitech G15 keyboard came out I've really taken a liking to the idea of having a little LCD screen near the keyboard for stat monitoring. I much prefer this to an on-screen overlay. The G15 and G19 are pretty old now and I don't believe the LCD screen concept ever took off past those models. Logitech now has "Arx" which aims to replace this concept. Logitech have keyboards now with an "Arx dock", which is basically a phone dock. The idea is that you can use the Arx software on your PC along with the Arx…

To get the best quality out of your video captures, it's best to capture losslessly and encode the content post-capture rather than trying to do it in real-time via software encoding or using hardware encoders. Unfortunately normal raw lossless capturing requires very fast storage and a pretty hefty amount of disk space. SSD drives can cope, but depending on the length of your captures you may well need over 2TB of space, which is currently quite expensive in SSD form. An alternative is to use RAID0 arrays or similar. If your storage cannot keep up with the required write speeds…

This is the method I've used to fix the `Can't connect to Group Policy Client service` error on Windows 10. Symptoms - Log into Windows, no desktop icons, start bar not really working, and a little lock icon in the taskbar with that error message. A system restore will probably fix this problem, however it wasn't an option for me as I've disabled the system restore feature. In the start bar type cmd so that you see the command prompt shortcut. Right click it and run as Administrator. Type netsh and press enter. Type winsock reset and press enter. Reboot…

Open the registry editor and browse to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet\Services \W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient Select - SpecialPollInterval The default decimal value will be 604800 seconds - 7 days. Change this to whatever value you wish. So for example, setting this to 3600 will force the NTP service to perform an update every hour.

If you’ve ever tried saturating a fast connection using FTP/SFTP you may have run into problems where you can only achieve limited download speeds using a single thread. Segmented downloading can often be a solution. Bare in mind that segmented FTP/SFTP will open many sessions to the server you are connecting to. Depending on the situation this might not be ideal, however if you’re sure you have sufficient resources to do it (without generating too much load if your server is within a shared environment), then it can work very well. You’ll need to install lftp - I run it…

Roughly three months have passed since connecting to NBN FTTN via TPG. I'm on the "up to" 100/40mbit plan. At a guess I'm ~500meters from the node. At this point I haven't had any issues with the horrible speeds/congestion that some users report. FTTN sucks compared to FTTH for a ton of reasons that I won't go into. The bottom line so far is that I'm more or less able to saturate the speed that I'm syncing up at regardless of peak/offpeak. Modem Stats (TPG supplied Huawei HG658) Line standard VDSL2 Channel type Interleaved Downstream line rate (kbit/s) 62945 Upstream…