mount

I made a custom ceiling mount for my camera

I shoot the 'A-roll' for my YouTube videos with a Sony a6000 and a small Glide Gear TMP 75 smartphone teleprompter:

Tripod setup with teleprompter and Sony a6000

Until recently, I had these mounted on a tripod just off the back corner of my desk:

Tripod in the way

Some people mount semi-permanent camera rigs on a pole on their desks (example), but my adjustable-height desk (by UPLIFT) is not rock solid, so sometimes when I'm typing or accidentally bump the desk, anything mounted to the desktop wobbles.

For lights, monitors, etc., a little wobble isn't a problem. But even with image stabilization in my camera, the wobble becomes noticeable if I have the camera physically attached to my desk.

Mount an AWS EFS filesystem on an EC2 instance with Ansible

If you run your infrastructure inside Amazon's cloud (AWS), and you need to mount a shared filesystem on multiple servers (e.g. for Drupal's shared files folder, or Magento's media folder), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a reliable and inexpensive solution. EFS is basically a 'hosted NFS mount' that can scale as your directory grows, and mounts are free—so, unlike many other shared filesystem solutions, there's no per-server/per-mount fees; all you pay for is the storage space (bandwidth is even free, since it's all internal to AWS!).

I needed to automate the mounting of an EFS volume in an Amazon EC2 instance so I could perform some operations on the shared volume, and Ansible makes managing things really simple. In the below playbook—which easily works with any popular distribution (just change the nfs_package to suit your needs)—an EFS volume is mounted on an EC2 instance:

Format eMMC storage on an Orange Pi, Radxa, etc.

To use eMMC modules on the Orange Pi, Radxa, Milk-V, etc. as a writable volume in Linux, you need to delete the existing partitions (on my old Orange Pi, it was formatted as FAT/WIN32), create a new partition, format the partition, then mount it:

  1. Delete the existing partitions, and create a new partition:
    1. sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk1
    2. p to list all partitions, then d and a number, once for each of the existing partitions.
    3. n to create a new partition, then use all the defaults, then w to write the changes.
  2. Format the partition: sudo mkfs.ext4 -L "emmc" /dev/mmcblk1p1
  3. Create a mount point: sudo mkdir -p /mnt/emmc
  4. Mount the disk: sudo mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /mnt/emmc

Note your eMMC device may be a different ID, e.g. mmcblk2 or mmcblk0, depending on the order the board firmware loads multiple devices in. Check with lsblk to see which device you would like to modify.