My Thoughts - Nam Vu Personal Site

February 4, 2020

Home Computing – Centralized

I recently came across a sale post on facebook for a number of decommissioned Wyse thin clients. The guy was selling it for $20 a piece. Normally I’d just scroll past that but I for some reasons I was feeling especially low-bally that day so I asked, half-jokingly, if he’d be willing to part way with some of them for $10 a piece. To my surprise, he actually said yes. I guess he probably bought a shipment from China thinking it was some kind of SFF workstations. Anyway, long story short, I now have 4 Wyse thin clients that I don’t know what to do with.

Or do I really?

I’ve always wanted to get into building a homelab, and this just give me more motivation to do it. While I do have a home ‘lab’, I don’t really have a real home server to put inside it. I had an old Q6600 antique that I use from time to time to watch DIY videos but let’s face it, it can never cut it as a real home server.

I’m thinking of building a dual xeon server with a healthy amount of RAM as a central server, running Proxmox or ESXi, serving the thin clients that I will be distributing around the house. So far I think I could replace my father’s, mother’s, my wife’s and maybe even my workshop current computer with a simple thin client. Not only does this setup saves a lot of space downstairs, it may actually provide a performance boost for my parents as they’re current using very old computers.

Xeons are super cheap these days, as do ECC RAM modules. The only pricey part is perhaps, the motherboard.

(to be continued…)

February 2, 2020

Unix bash script to install all Google Fonts to your computer

Having access to all Google Fonts is crucial for any designer these days, so this script is pretty much essential whenever you make a fresh install of your OS.

Credit to Quinton Pike on Github

Install

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qrpike/Web-Font-Load/master/install.sh | bash

Uninstall

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qrpike/Web-Font-Load/master/uninstall.sh | bash

December 3, 2019

Như một thói quen

Muscle Reflex. from r/funny

November 28, 2019

Snowfall Effect (WebGL) Test

See the Pen
Snowfall WebGL Shader by Nam V (@vnt87)
on CodePen.

November 27, 2019

The ‘Prebuilt Hackintosh of 2013’ in 2020

Current status: SUCCESS! (see update Feb 20 below)

Yes ladies and gents, I’m talking about the venerable “Dell XPS 8500“.

Bought it back in ’13 because of that very article. My particular config a 3rd gen Core i7 (3770), 0NW73C motherboard, 8GB of DDR3-1600 (since then upgraded to 16GB) and a GT640 video card.

I ran Sierra and High Sierra on it for a while, but for the last 2-3 years I only had Windows and Deepin installed. I wanted to put OS X on it once more but was waiting for a proper NVIDIA web driver (it was running a 1050ti), but alas Apple and NVIDIA couldn’t come to an agreement.

So last week I decided to swap out my Gigabyte 1050ti 4GB for a Gigabyte Aorus RX580 8GB (I’m lucky the Green cards hold their values better than Red’s) in hope of better compatibility. However I’m still having troubles getting even the installer to work.

Things I tried:

• Making a vanilla Catalina installer with latest Clover (using this guide)

Result: got to the Apple logo with progress bar, but as soon as the progress fills up I got a blank black screen.

• Making a premade Mojave installer with TonyMac UniBeast Mojave

Result: still got a blank screen but if I wait for it to go to sleep and wake it, I can get to the installer screen with Disk Utility + Install Mojave etc., but clicking on any of the entries will hang the computer.

Update Jan 30/2020:

Managed to get Catalina installed using the vanilla install method (with Clover). However this was done with the integrated graphic. Also, WiFi, Bluetooth and Audio aren’t working yet so I need to tinker with it some more when I have the time.

Update Feb 03/2020: SUCCESS!

So everything works now, apart from the Wifi/Bluetooth card (Dell DW1703, which is actually an Atheros AR9485 in disguise)I could easily grab a Broadcom card to replace it, but it’s not worth it for me since I could only get them from Aliexpress and they take months to reach where I live (Vietnam). Plus I have no real need for Wifi/BT on a desktop anyway.

Audio did take a wee bit of work, I had to go into System Preferences to get the icon to show up, and change the layout to 11 in config.plist. But after that it just works beautifully.

So, to recap. Here’s all the steps that I did:

Download Catalina from the App Store
Put it on a 16GB flash drive by using the /CreateInstallMedia command in the terminal
Install Clover 5103 on the flash drive (and copy some essential kexts while you’re at it, I only had Lilu, WhateverGreen, AppleALC, VirtualSMC)
Pop the flash drive into my XPS 8500 and boot from it (Legacy mode)
On the first screen, fire up Disk Utility and format the 512GB SSD with APFS
Install Catalina to the newly formatted drive, then restart with the flash drive still connected
Upon restart, boot into Clover on the flash drive, and choose to boot from the SSD instead of the installation media, you should be able to get into a fully working version of Catalina running on your computer at this point, albeit the drive is not bootable on its own yet.
Install Clover into the SSD.

That’s it, that’s as vanilla as it can be for a Clover installation. If everything goes well you should now have a fully functional XPS 8500 hackintosh!

Update Feb 10, 2020: Successfully added Gigabyte Aorus RX580 8GB to the installation! (Need to disable Legacy OPROM in boot option otherwise you will get a blank screen)

I will create another post soon with more details

Update Apr 01, 2020:

Just updated to 10.15.4 without any issue. Which is actually a pretty impressive feat considering that this upgrade broke some users’ Hackintoshes (especially for AMD Users and Intel Skylake and above users)

November 13, 2019

Go to school, kids, or you’ll end up working for Freenom

Look at this motherfucking piece of stupid shit

We don’t see any content on your website, so it must be fraud

-Some dumbshit execs at Freenom

No, you can’t make this shit up. You can actually read about it in this article on their piss poor excuse of a knowledgebase here.

November 7, 2019

Good bye Mr. Snowball

2005:
Wasn’t particularly an eventful year.
Lots of things hasn’t happened yet.
The first iPhone wasn’t due for another 2 years.
I wasn’t even in college, just a kid fresh out of High School.
And yet one thing made that year particularly memorable to me, to all of my family.
This guy right here.
I still remember vividly the day he came into our lives, such tiny little creature, with piercing blue eyes. So small and yet nothing seems to be scaring him. Footsteps, loud noises, nothing could even make him turn his head.
(We soon found out that’s because he’s completely, utterly deaf which is also why he never had a formal name, because nobody could’ve called him. He was simply known as “The Snowball”)
Then he’d proceed to spend the next 14 years of his life brightening up our days, without fail.
Today is no different really. After spending most of the days being awesome, he took a hearty meal from his favorite bow, went back to his favorite box, took a nap, and decided not to wake up again.
Today is a beautiful autumn day. I guess if you could choose how and when to go, today is as good as any.
Still, it’s never easy losing a friend who was with you for almost half your life.

2005-2019
Rest in peace buddy, you may have left our lives, but you will never leave our hearts.

November 5, 2019

Note to self: how to copy files to Google Cloud VM Instance as Root using WinSCP

If you use VPSSIM or any other administration script in your VPS or GC VM Instance, you’re probably finding yourself unable to copy or modify anything when connecting to your server using WinSCP.

The reason is that, by default, your server is configured to only allow key pairing authentication, so in order to login as a regular user, you have to do 2 things. First, enable password authentication and secondly, enable Login as Root

To connect as Root, you first need to set a password for your Root user (sudo passwd), then allow logging in remotely as root. To do so, fire up your /etc/ssh/sshd_config

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Add a line in the Authentication section of the file that says PermitRootLogin yes. This line may already exist and be commented out with a “#”. In this case, remove the “#”.

# Authentication:
#LoginGraceTime 2m
PermitRootLogin yes
#StrictModes yes
#MaxAuthTries 6
#MaxSessions 10

Scroll down a few lines and change this line:

# To disable tunneled clear text passwords, change to no here!
#PasswordAuthentication yes
#PermitEmptyPasswords no
PasswordAuthentication yes

Save the updated /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and restart the SSH server (service sshd restart)

Should be good to go now

October 23, 2019

Just discovered Figma’s Smart Animate feature

And it’s fucking amazing!

October 16, 2019

Sudden epiphany

To day I came across this article on Wikipedia about Urashima Tarō, and I was like

“Wait a minute,

That’s Từ Thức right?

That’s it, that’s fucking Từ Thức gặp tiên!”

And that’s all I got for today folks, sorry if I am boring.

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