Words from FallingStuff – FallingStuff's Blog

Happy New Year .. a little late

No it is not the first of the year .. it is more around 3 weeks into the new year. I have not been in a coma all this time, although I have been sick with some kind of crud. No, I have spent the last 2ish months trying to put good reasoning behind why I did not achieve my personal goals in 2023 and 2024, watching what I have been doing and more importantly how do I do better for 2025… Let me explain.

I have a bad habit of over analyzing everything to the point of stagnation (yep, old school analysis paralysis) but I have taken it a step further and tried to put everything into small VERY specific categories, but then I forget the categories. I also have a habit of putting things onto a VERY specific schedule – “I will only do X on Y day”, meaning I have cut out the flexibility if something interrupts that schedule usually this is work affecting personal projects. Wrap it all up with my planning has not accommodated for the above meaning I forget what I am working on because I missed the release time and then forgot what I was working on.

This year I am changing up how I approach these things – all my projects are being pulled under a new, more generic title – Fallingworks, my site has always been about things I was doing … and since the things that I do tend to be all over the place, the new title is fitting. Plus, as a side note, the name change leans into more collaboration. I spent the last 2ish months putting together a list of all the ideas that I want to work on, including things that I was already working on… Big list of everything, just pick something that piques my interest then only mark it off when it is done, whatever and whenever that is. The last things I have are to make a weekly ‘status’ post for accountability and to keep things somewhat on track.

I have a lot on the plan for 2025 both personally and professionally, it is going to be an exciting year.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Sunk Cost Fallacy is a term I just heard recently but does it ever sound familiar, described as our tendency to follow through on an endeavor if we have already invested time, effort, or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits. In other words, I have already paid out all this money on this particular project and even though the project will not solve the problem I will keep on. This term embodies so many projects I have started over the years, particularly in the category of “I bought all these computer parts, I should use them to build something …” and the reason why my to do list of ideas keeps growing. Oh well, off to find another project …

Imposter Syndrome

Imposter Syndrome is a term I heard thrown around a lot in years past, but I never knew what it meant, so I looked it up. Imposter Syndrome is defined as the self-doubt of intellect, skills, of accomplishments among high-achieving individuals. In other words, you might have a ton of experience and years of experience but still end up doubting your own abilities or worse insulting those abilities. I can see how this would feel as it feels like something I have experienced in the past on any number of situations in not only projects but also my career.

Fear of Missing Out

For a while now I’ve been saying that social media is more harmful than good .. Ok more than I have been saying it as the studies in this article written by the Sloan School of Management at MIT point out. One thing that social media always brings is people posting only the best, making others fear that they are missing out.

That was a stretch for an intro but “Fear of Missing Out” or FOMO was another term that I had heard a lot and never understood what it meant. I finally looked it up and I understand how it is harmful to ones mental health. The first article that I ran across when researching came from from verywellmind.com and begins the description of FOMO by calling out scrolling on social media and feeling like something is missing in one life. The next article from NIH.gov reinforces the definition of feeling like something is missing when in a social context and adds emotional compulsion to gain some thing or do some action to achieve the result of being just like those social media posts.

My problem has always been video games – I find that I want to play games with friends because I have seen said friends with a game and I do not want to be left out. Sometimes everything works out and we have fun playing a particular game. Other times though I will break patterns, stay up too late and cut into much needed sleep or worse never play the game with anyone and waste the money.

This was another random trip off the beaten path to look at the meaning of a term that was scratching that curious part of my brain. It was not a deep dive but, in the end something that I could say is a bad habit I have from time to time that I could do something about.

Stale Chips

Like a lot of people, one of my goals for this year is to reorganize and clean up, my backlog keeps getting derailed every time I go looking for parts in my current storage… During my cleaning I stumbled across these two CHIP single board computers. They both powered up, but one never displayed anything on the screen … So, time for an update…?

I jumped on the original Kickstarter back in 2016 when these were first released for only $9 each. I do not remember where I originally heard about it, but I remember being excited to jump on such a neat concept and all the tinkering that would be had. Doing a quick search back at the news of the time, the CHIP was being really well received with a good amount of chatter around it – USA Today and NPR ran excited stories on the CHIP.

Seeing as how I can post pictures of these CHIPs I definitely received the Kickstarter reward, but in researching I see that a lot of people did not, it was disappointing to see that a lot of people did not. The reason for this lack of delivery was apparently that the company, Next Thing Co., was not entirely able to continue product and went bankrupt. With the company going bankrupt that unfortunately means support is, well almost non-existent, aside from dedicated folks keeping these little things alive and mostly supported …

Originally, the CHIP was flashed by a Chrome plugin, support for which Google has LONG since killed off in the Chrome browser so the first challenge was to get these chips back in working order. Thankfully with some quick googling I was able to put together enough steps to flash both CHIPS between the Flash-Chip Git hub and the JFPossibilites archives of CHIP materials. Even with the instructions from these sites I still ran into issues with the process, needing an older version of Linux and an even older version of software to finish the flash (this was just my experience though), but after a couple hours of tinkering …

Ta-Da! Success, a CHIP desktop! Turns out these little guys still work after all these years and being moved from place to place in storage, I am a little excited.

This image even had the original software that came on the CHIP from the factory …

Including the original 4.4.13 kernel from 2016 .. ouch (as of this writing, the current Linux kernel is 6.7.1). At this point attempting an Apt update returns a lot of 404’s and site not found since CHIP OS was based of Debian Jessie and long term support ended in 2020 and the repositories for Next Thing Co are also no longer a thing. At this point, these CHIPs are looking very stale and much like eWaste. These are a cool idea, but methods to support them make life difficult.

So, what now? Well, for the moment this is where the CHIPs get put back into storage. There are sites to work around the dead repositories and get some updates onto these mini computers (I would be lying if I said I did not try already), but to what level of update? Updating them to that degree was out of scope for this post – I was just out to write about a neat Single Board Computer – also, I do not have any good projects for them at the moment. They are capable little SBCs, so I think I will be revisiting them sometime in the future, until then, they are just a little stale.

Chromebook Linux

A while back I wrote about getting my hands on my first Chromebook, and while it was sitting around while I thinking of what to do with it, I stumbled across another one. This one was a Dell Chromebook 3189 Education, a cool convertible device that is “rugged” enough to be used with kids for school work. The machine only had one major problem – when I powered it up the Chromebook reported that the OS was no longer supported and it was time to get a new Chromebook – this is no good, just eWaste at this point.

So, is there anything that can save this machine from the trash. Maybe Linux. I have heard that Chromebooks can take Linux installs, which would work for a low spec machine like this. The next question is how to get started, and a some Google-Fu returns a how-to guide with a few ways to put Linux on these Chromebooks.

The easiest method being just to install it within ChromeOS, which only works on the Dell Chromebook I have, and failed the first 2 times I tried it. With a little persistence I was able to follow the instructions and get the Linux virtual machine loaded… Yes, a virtual machine.

Home Screen with Linux Apps icon

Linux apps?

Finally a terminal

So the first method is only a Virtual machine that requires you to launch something and then … click on something else not named terminal to get to a terminal. If I read some instructions somewhere this would have made more sense but walking into this process blind, this makes no sense. Really, I planned to wipe the ChromeOS out anyway so off I followed the steps of setting developer mode and wiping out what was on the Chromebooks and loading Ubuntu.

Ubuntu running a Dell Chromebook

Following the steps in the guide worked but there were some complications …

Have to push Ctrl+L every boot to get to the SeaBIOS and boot linux
The Asus C300 was too old for the SSL certs to download the flash script needing an extra switch added to the curl command and the script had to be modified to ignore the errors
Ubuntu on the C300 would also throw a System Program Problem detected message on ever login, Xubuntu was happy though
Grub was extreme slow to draw the boot menu on the Dell

Well the process works, mostly, kinda … If you do not enter the Ctrl+L at start up (that is the OS Verification is off screen), the system goes to the ChromeOS recovery error screen, and if you re-enable the OS Verification … the system becomes completely unusable and you would have to start over after restoring the ChromeOS. This was my experience though, your mileage may vary.

Workshop Wireguard

Several months ago I received a notice from Linode the costs of virtual servers were increasing. I was using the service to host some decently sized servers, and since my home lab was going to waste, I decided it might be a good idea to find a cheaper solution. I did not exactly like the idea of punching holes in my internet firewall and somehow I do not thing my ISP would have been happy with my server hosting anyway.

I had a pfSense router (separate from the main ISP router) dedicated to a small test network for an always on OpenVPN connection that I would use to change my geo location for testing purposes. I decided to just repurpose this network to host my servers on. After doing some reading though I found out that OpenVPN might work … but it was going to be slower and have a higher ping than another technology I had access to, not what I needed. So I set about learning how to Wireguard.

As usual, I am not diving into the specifics of setup – both for security concerns (I am not going to give up the passwords to my VPN tunnel) and also for the fact that as I went through the set up I found different providers had some different ways of labeling things. For the destination (that is the internet side of the tunnel) I used a hosted Wireguard provider (I figured they had more experience running a VPN server than I did) and on my network I configured the pfSense router as a client (terminology to keep in mind if VPN is not your day to day) finding the one blog that filled in enough of the blanks to be useful. On the surface, setting up the tunnel is relatively simple … except different providers label things differently in their documentation.

Also … I discovered that trying to reuse the OpenVPN router was a little more complicate than just adding the WireGuard services and going from there. Someone trying to follow along might not run into the same issues but I ran into handshake issues until I reset the router to factory and installed just the WireGuard services – something to note for future experiments. After the tunnel was up and stable, just needed to route ports from the VPN server through the pfSense to the server in the home lab.

The whole project, a big part of my ‘Workshop’ effort, has been up and running for a couple months now, and aside from the router locking up once or twice it has been very stable. It will likely make an appearance in the future from time to time.

DAK Organization

Several odd years ago I saw this really cool calendar / to-do monitor in a YouTube video that the person in the video said was from a company called DAKboard. When I found out one of these boards could be built with a Raspberry Pi, I started building. I have had the board hanging up on the wall for several years now, trying to keep up the need to do things.

DAKboard itself is, at the core, an online service thing, it has different levels of features based on subscription levels – the higher the level the more customizations and displays one can run from the same account. DAKboard also sells custom hardware in both a full display or just the brains to connect to any sort of TV or monitor that one has gathering dust in a corner (or a webpage … or a tablet…) . However they offer a DIY guide to setting up a board using a Raspberry Pi, which is what I set up some time ago.

I am going to skip the technical details of setting the display up, as it is largely personal preference on how one wants their board to display (plus there is that whole subscription thing…). I have mine set up with Google and Outlook calendars and tasks from Todoist, along with my local weather. I occasionally run into something I cannot do (say limited number of calendars) here and there but for the most part, I am not feeling too limited with a free account. Definitely worth a look if one is looking for a tool to help wrangle in tasks.

Washing the Chromebook

Back a while back I posted up a brief run down on an Asus Chromebook that happened to be in a stack of “broken” laptops I purchased. When I received it, the Chromebook had a cracked screen and was locked by the previous owner. As I was still new to the idea of a Chromebook (and did not want to try and hack into the thing) I went looking for some kind of option to wipe out the already existing stuff without needing a user password; sort of like the reset function in Windows. To my relief (and surprise) this reset existed as a function called “Powerwash” … a fancy name for a Factory Reset.

For this post I am not going to dive into the how-to of the process; the Chromebook I have is fairly old, the OS is no longer supported, and how-to is not the purpose of what I am testing here. As a reference or if someone those curious, the documentation is located here. The real reason for writing this was really just to see how much if a wash actually removed all the personal data off the machine.

The original plan was originally concocted back just after I finished up the course on using Autopsy forensics software back in around 2019 (see what I meant about backlog piling up …). Autopsy does not have a way .. natively .. to gather info from Chromebook – the machine runs completely off soldered on storage, so off to find another way to grab the info. A quick search later and I stumbled onto Magnet Forensics, it was free and looked simple enough to do what I was needing.

Basically, following the instructions would put the machine into a “recovery state” then this tool, housed on a USB drive, would come in and grab up all the data and drop it onto a part of USB that could be read from another computer. Simple enough. I browsed a few sites, downloaded a few files, and edited a few things on the Chromebook then followed the steps in the documentation. The trickiest part was getting the Chromebook into recovery mode, done by a key combination that has to be pressed at just the right time. After running the tool the first time, I ran the powerwash recovery on the Chromebook and then ran the recovery tool again, using a second USB drive.

Once I copied off the recovered data, it was pretty obvious that data was cleaned in the process seeing as the file with data (pre-clean) was 411MB and after clean was 7KB. Seeing this difference I thought I would just expand these compressed files and compare the results .. no need to go much father than a folder comparison.

Before cleaning / After cleaning with more files

So, nothing more to say .. Powerwash cleaned up the user data .. at least enough that the casual buyer would not be able to get data off the machine if someone were to sell it later.

Hosting a Website on the Go

Recently (relatively) I was going through some video recommendations and came across a video describing on how to host a website on a Raspberry Pi from just about anywhere including while traveling (like hotel WIFI or a mobile hotspot).

HakByte: Learn Web Hosting on Your Raspberry Pi with Dataplicity

Checking out the dataplicity site, the service is intended for management of IoT devices by making it convenient to connect to them wherever, without needing to jump through a lot of hoops (like configuring firewalls). I had a spare Raspberry Pi so why not give this a try and I went about setting it up.

The setup process is really simple, I am not going to spell it out here since the documentation is really clear – set up the Pi, connect it to the internet, run the script. Once complete, the Pi shows up in a dashboard letting one connect to the terminal or providing a randomized URL to connect with a web browser.

Once the Pi is reporting to the console and the URL is created then the next step is to create the website on one’s favorite webserver, which is a lesson for another time. All said, when finished, I did not really feel this would be useful as I thought for anything I might need, but I left the Pi online while deciding what to do… maybe I will put a model train online or something.