My father needs a new laptop. And I have one sitting around, that I abuse as a server. A waste of resources and not ideal use case for a laptop. So I took my homeserver, put a ssd inside and gave him a new destiny. My father is happy but I have no cloud anymore 😔. To reserve energy I chose to run the laptop only when I send a wake on lan package to it.

The why and how Ever since the end of the bush era 2008, every Intel chip comes with an embedded subsystem called the intel management engine. Every i3, i5, i7 and i9 processor has this engine. It is a black-box and has access to every peripheral device like RAM, camera, microphone hard drive, … even when the main processor is turned off. Some say this is a backdoor for the NSA, some say this is pure paranoia.

Intro Everyone needs a router in their life. Many don’t care which, some care and pay a lot of money and a few care a lot and pay little. The ideal scenario would be the last option. Today I teach you how. It is easy as pie and costs you about 30-40€. Also as always I’ll include some bonus hacks. Let’s start. GL.iNet a company that produces portable, privacy focused routers running OpenWrt I own a GL.

Intro I love technology, the useful, disruptive kind of tech. IOTA is such a technology. It promises a completely decentralized protocol to transfer value and data. This means no central entity, no power and influence center that controls others. If you want to no more about IOTA check out my post “IOTA the next industrial revolution”. Obviously I am an IOTA fanatic. If you have some constructive thoughts, please contact me on telegram @ByteVagabond ; always open for a good discussion.

It is a hot summer and my brain is to overcooked to program anything… Suddenly a bright light appears of nowhere and screams at me: “You are a privacy slut! All your files are stored on Google Photos and OneDrive. You are using Gmail and Instagram. DO SOMETHING!”. So I did. I quickly deleted instagram and went from gmail to mailbox.org. But before I could delete all my files from those cloud services I needed an alternative.

Recently i was asked to configure a TV to automatically turn off and on on certain times and then display content in form of a website. A so called “kiosk screen”. I utilized a Raspberry 3b for this, set up Raspbian and wrote a short bash script that runs as a service on boot up. Part 1: Setup Raspberry Pi In order to have not only terminal output on our screen we need to install the full version of Raspbian, which comes with a GUI.