console

Sometimes a Pi just won't boot. Or it'll boot, but it'll do weird things. Or you don't have an HDMI display, and you can't log into your Pi via SSH. Or maybe you're like me, and someone 'accidentally' cut your Raspberry Pi in half, and you want to see what it's doing since it won't boot anymore.

The Raspberry Pi can output information over a 'serial console', technically known as a UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter). Many devices—including things like storage controller cards, which in a sense run their own internal operating system on an SoC—have a 'UART header', which is typically three or four pins that can connect over the RS-232 standard (though many do not operate at 12v like a traditional serial port! Use a USB-to-TTL adapter like the one I mention below).

Simply Embedded has a great overview of UART if you want to learn more.

A few days ago, my personal AWS account's billing alert fired, and delivered me an email saying I'd already exceeded my personal comfort threshold—in the second week of the month!

Knowing that I had just rearranged my entire backup plan because I wanted to change the structure of my archives both locally and in my S3 Glacier Deep Archive mirror on AWS, I suspected something didn't get moved or deleted within my backup S3 bucket.

And I was right.

But I wanted to write this up for two reasons:

This is a quick blog post, mostly for my own reference.

I finally got sick of a certain government website thinking that preventing pasting passwords into certain forms was some sort of security feature, so I am documenting my workaround in Safari for stupid forms written by compliance-minded folks (the same who think that expiring passwords every 30 days leads to any kind of better security).

In Safari, select Develop > Show Javascript Console (or press ⌥⌘C, that's Option + Command + 'C')¹.

Paste the following into the console and press 'Enter':

var allowPaste = function(e){
  e.stopImmediatePropagation();
  return true;
};
document.addEventListener('paste', allowPaste, true);

Now you can paste to your heart's content.

¹ If you don’t see the Develop menu in the menu bar, choose Safari > Preferences, click Advanced, then select “Show Develop menu in menu bar.”

I have two FOSCAM WiFi IP cameras set up in my house (in addition to an outdoor Arlo I use for security purposes), and generally all three of these cameras give a reliable connection and work without much intervention.

Recently, however, one of the FOSCAM cameras decided to stop connecting to the wireless network. I needed to get access to the camera via the wired interface, but I didn't want to have to bring the camera all the way to where my wired networking drops were located, because it's in a bit of an inconvenient area of the basement in the midst of some cleanup we're doing.

So I plugged the FOSCAM directly into my Mac's USB 3.0 ethernet adapter, and got blinky lights... but couldn't connect to the camera because it's wired connection is configured to use DHCP by default, and there's no Bonjour/zeroconf configuration.

To get around this and directly connect to the camera, I did the following:

About a month ago, when I was settling down with my wife to watch a quick episode of Cake Boss via Netflix, I turned on the Xbox 360, but all the sudden, I received (for the third time on this Xbox) a nice present from Microsoft: the dreaded red ring of death (RROD).

"Not to fear!" said I, "I'll get a free warranty repair, like I did the first two times this happened!"

Little did I know. Luckily, however, I found a guy via Craigslist who repairs Xboxes and lives in St. Peters, MO (not too far from here!).