Pascal Riesinger

Building a RatRig V-Core 4

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 15:47:47 +0100

This is my build log for the RatRig V-Core 4, a high-end IDEX CoreXY 3D printer that I’ve been wanting to build for a while. I’m documenting the experience while it’s still fresh in my mind, since there are definitely some things that could be improved in the build process.

Overall, I really like both the printer and the build experience. The engineering is solid and the end result is impressive, especially if you’re coming from an Ender 3 S1 Pro like me. However, there are some issues with the instruction ordering and clarity that RatRig could address. The good news is that they actively listen to feedback and update their documentation regularly.

Cheapshot

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A “cheap” but fun camera rig

Exploring Notion's API

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 17:52:00 +0200

You can consider this post as sort of a public notebook. I started this since I’ve recently started dabbling with Notion’s API and stumbled across some things I wanted to take note of, should I ever run into them again.

`Content-Type` is important

If you interact with Notion’s API, never forget to set the Content-Type header to application/json. Otherwise you’ll get errors that you’ll spend hours debugging. I, for example called the https://api.notion.com/v1/oauth/token endpoint to exchange an auth code for a more permanent OAuth token.

plausible-exporter

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A prometheus metrics exporter for Plausible Analytics

Clearing the DNS cache on macOS

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 16:10:07 +0200

You’re debugging some DNS changes in your network and Safari (or curl / any other tool) keeps sending requests to an old DNS entry? With these commands, you can clear your system’s DNS cache:

macOS version	command
12 (Monterey)	`sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder`
11 (Big Sur)	`sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder`
10.15 (Catalina)	`sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder`
10.14 (Mojave)	`sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder`
10.13 (High Sierra)	`sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder`
10.12 (Sierra)	`sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder`

I hope this helps 🙂

My Highly Available DNS setup with Blocky

Sun, 01 May 2022 15:30:04 +0000

We live in a world where everything is connected to the internet. And I like that wold. For the most part. There are some thing that have been going in the wrong direction in the last few years, namely online advertisement and tracking. Luckily, there are ways to improve that situation, if you get a little crafty and craft a blocking DNS server.

Pi-hole: the good, the bad, the ugly

You might have heard of the Pi-hole project already. According to their website, it is used for “Network-wide Ad Blocking”. It was the first major project which made it easy to run a custom DNS server (NOT resolver; I might get into that topic in another post) and add block lists to it. It is a great project: There is lots of documentation, it’s super simple to setup (it’s literally just one script), it works perfectly fine most of the time and has an active community.

Silencing your Fyrtur blinds with custom firmware

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 20:50:43 +0000

I have IKEA Fyrtur blinds in my bedroom, as you might know if you’ve previously read this article of mine on how to connect your Fyrtur to deCONZ.

Now, automatically opening your shades some time before you want to wake up to get some natural light in would be a great idea… if the Fyrtur blinds weren’t so loud.

In my search on how to make the blinds a bit more quiet, so I can actually open them before I wake up, I found the following project:

Using Unmanic with VA-API in Docker

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 19:14:52 +0100

I love offline media. I’ve always had issues with streaming services and linear television. For example, you’re watching a show, get to the third season and boom, the show is removed from Amazon Prime, Netflix or your favorite service. And don’t get me started with TV, where you have to adjust your schedule around the program, if you want to watch a specific movie or follow a show.

So what’s the solution? Keeping your media offline and hosting your own media server. Now, aside from the effort of hosting the server (which is actually quite minimal), there’s another issue: storage space.

Paper Tracker

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A system for tracking the location and workflow of documents

Samsung SSDs with ZFS

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 12:04:50 +0100

This post is mainly a summary of this post by Thomas, because I know that I’ll loose that link at some point but I’ll likely need the solution mentioned in the post again at some point.

I have two 500 GB Samsung 870 Evo SSDs in my home server, being used in a ZFS mirror for “fast” storage. Now, the pool was working fine for a while, but at one point, I ran zpool status and it gave me the following output:

Why I moved my site to Next.JS

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 21:13:57 +0100

import RandomColorButton from “@/components/RandomColorButton”;

Since November of 2019, my website has been powered by Hugo. For those who haven’t heard of it yet; Hugo is a fantastic static-site generator written in Go, which is blazingly fast, has lots of pre-built templates available and is reasonably easy to use.

I was quite happy with Hugo, after I switched themes a few times to find the right one. It was quite nice: Write posts in Markdown, have an automatic RSS feed generated, have the site built and deployed in less than a minute.

IKEA Fyrtur smart blinds with Home Assistant and deCONZ

Tue, 18 May 2021 20:00:00 +0100

When searching the web for blackout blinds, I came across the IKEA Fyrtur line of ZigBee-controlled “smart blinds”. Since I’ve had a great exprience with IKEA smart home products, mostly from the Tradfri line, I was instantly intrigued.

I like Tradfri products, since they are controlled via ZigBee, which integrates nicely into my existing Home Assistant and ConBee/deCONZ setup and they usually are at a great balance between quality and price.

Checking Out SerenityOS

Wed, 13 May 2020 15:55:44 +0200

Have you heard of SerenityOS yet? It’s a free and open-source operating system whose development was initiated by Andreas Kling (also known as awesomekling) in October 2018 and now developed by over 140 contributers¹. Now, don’t be fooled: This is not your typical “it can boot into a text console and has ls and mkdir”-toy-operating-system. SerenityOS has a full GUI with a whole suite of GUI and console applications to handle day-to-day tasks (a calculator, text editor, even a Browser), to entertain you (Snake, Doom, Minesweeper) and for hacking on the OS itself (an IDE with a visual debugger, git, …).

React Hooks with Typescript

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 12:55:10 +0200

This post is just a list of snippets for using React hooks with TypeScript (since I always forget).

`useState`

useState equals this.state for class components. It makes it super simple to add state to a function component by returning a variable and its associated setter function.

import React, { useState } from "react";

// our components props accept a number for the initial value
const Counter: React.FC<{}> = () => {
  // since we pass a number here, clicks is going to be a number.
  // setClicks is a function that accepts either a number or a function
  // returning a number
  const [clicks, setClicks] = useState(0);
  return (
    <>
      <p>Clicks: {clicks}</p>
      <button onClick={() => setClicks(clicks + 1)}>+</button>
      <button onClick={() => setClicks(clicks - 1)}>-</button>
    </>
  );
};

`useEffect`

For creating side effects in function components, the React developers created the appropriately named useEffect function. It can be used for adding event listeners, fetching data, you name it. It replaces class component’s lifecycle methods componentDidUpdate, componentDidMount and componentWillUnmount. The function accepts two parameters:

Shucking Seagate Expansion Desktop Drives

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 09:51:11 +0100

In this post, I will share my experience “shucking” Seagate Expansion Desktop drives for putting them in my home server. But, before we get to the actual post: a word of caution.

Shucking your drive will likely void your warranty. You could damage or potentially destroy your drive while shucking it. I am not responsible for any damage done.

But what is shucking?

Shucking means removing a harddrive (HDD) from any sort of casing, mostly USB adaptors. It is a very popular thing to do for home servers, since (for some reason), USB drives are often times way cheaper than internal drives without USB adaptors.

Hosting Static Files for Free

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 14:52:46 +0100

As the title might suggest, in this post I will show you how I host static files for free (or at least for cheap, if you want to host lots of files) with Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare.

Backblaze B2

B2 is a service from Backblaze providing object storage, similar to S3 from Amazon. However, it is way cheaper than S3 and B2 even allows you to host up to 10GB for free, and after that it’s $0.005 per GB and Month. Downloads cost $0.01 per GB, but I’ll show you a way to work around that 😉

8051 Connect Four

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Connect Four implemented on a 8051 microprocessor

Pure CSS Tooltips

Thu, 11 May 2017 11:17:08 +0100

I don't recommend this method of creating tooltips anymore, since it's not accessible to screen readers and other assistive technology. Also, tooltips don't work on mobile devices, which comprise most web page visits these days, so keep that in mind!

There are many JQuery, Angular, React and VueJS plugins for doing tooltips, but sometimes, the simplest solution is the best. That’s why I am showing you how to implement great looking tooltips purely in CSS. Let’s get started by downloading my boilerplate from Github. Jump into the folder and open the index.html file. You should see the following:

Transitions in CSS

Sat, 29 Apr 2017 14:09:54 +0100

Movement and transitions are very important design aspects. They can guide your user through the application and help them understand states. If you are like me, you may have found yourself clicking some button over-and-over in an app with beautiful transitions, admiring the amazing work of designers and developers.

A good example for motion in an app. Source:{" "} Uplabs

So you know a bit about HTML, CSS and JavaScript and did some basic websites? But you want to improve state transitions with some animation? Look no further, the following guide will walk you from basic transitions to more complex animations using keyframes 🚀

ACRISS Car Codes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a mirror of the data on https://acriss.org/car-codes/, since it’s too slow of a site for my tastes.

🦷 Mama's ORAL-B SERIES 6 Guide! 🦷