Recently I came into the possession of a HikVision HWP-N2404IH-DE3 mini PTZ camera. It has POE, RTSP, ONVIF, can pan/tilt/zoom remotely, has optical zoom etc.. Hardware wise the camera is great. Proper build quality, nothing to complain about here. But the IT part looks better on paper than IRL. Worst thing is that I could not use the PTZ controls in the webinterface, because they require some Windows .exe to be installed to get that working.

A long time ago I bought several Lenovo Thinkpad T420 laptops (used of course). But my wife’s laptop gave her the dreaded error (after power loss): Real Time Clock Error - Check Date and Time settings. Press Esc to continue or F1 to enter Setup. Finally I got fed up with it, so I swapped out her old CMOS backup battery with a new one. Then I also did the same for my other T420’s.

For a while I’ve been using the Evoluent VerticalMouse 4 Right. At first I had to get used to this type of mouse, but after a day or so, I already got used to it. The strain on your wrist/arm is much less with a vertical mouse, so I can really recommend it. But I cannot recommend the blue LED light at the front of the mouse (facing the user). It’s a very bright LED with no added value to the user.

Recently the OS disk of one of my servers failed. Since the OS disk is a USB stick and I have had good experiences with Diet Pi for my raspberry pi’s, I thought I’d take a look if it is also available for AMD64. Guess what, it is! So I fired up dd to push the downloaded image to the USB stick, popped the USB stick into the server and ran the OS for the first time.

Blijkbaar hebben ze bij de webwinkel van onze geliefde ANWB ook uitdagingen met het versturen van e-mails naar outlook.com en hotmail.com (Microsoft e-mail adressen): Doet me denken aan mijn eigen uitdagingen met die Microsoft e-mail adressen.

Last weekend I wanted to check in again on my Freenode IRC account. I logged into my trusted irssi IRC client and was confronted with these errors: 21:01 [freenode] !*.freenode.net *** You must use TLS/SSL and authenticate via SASL to connect to freenode please visit https://irc.com/login/sso in order to create an account. SASL Configuration: https://freenode.net/kb/answer/sasl - Webchat: https://webchat.freenode.net/ 21:01 [freenode] -!- Capabilities requested: multi-prefix 21:01 [freenode] -!- Capabilities supported: account-notify account-tag away-notify batch cap-notify chghost draft/relaymsg echo-message extended-join inspircd.

One of my servers went belly-up. It is always unfortunate when you are confronted with a failing server. If you ever get messages like this, the hard disk on which your Operating System is installed, is probably K.I.A.. In the end I did a hard reset and was greeted with busybox (which was expected). Just wanted to share the kind of ‘weird’ messages you can see when you have I/O errors due to a failing drive (in this case it was a USB stick, not a HDD or SSD).

Recently I upgraded to my new, freedom-loving, pro-privacy Internet Service Provider Freedom Internet. I was already running a mailserver before I switched: postfix. For years I had no issues sending out e-mails towards other mailservers. After I upgraded though, it seemed I was unable to send e-mail to Microsoft e-mail addresses. I noticed it only after a few months, when I tried to reach someone with an @live.nl e-mail address.

My main system is currently running Ubuntu 21.04. For e-mail I’m relying on neomutt together with offlineimap, which both are amazing tools. Recently offlineimap was updated/moved to offlineimap3. Looking on my system, offlineimap reports itself as OfflineIMAP 7.3.0 and dpkg tells me it is version 0.0~git20210218.76c7a72+dfsg-1. Unicode Decode Error problem Today I noticed several errors in my offlineimap sync log. Basically the errors looked like this: UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 1299: invalid start byte UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xeb in position 1405: invalid continuation byte Solution If you encounter it as well (and you use mutt or neomutt), please have a look at this great comment on Github from Joseph Ishac (jishac) since his tip solved the issue for me.

A while ago I “discovered” the Linus Tech Tips channel on youtube. Last week I wanted to reference a specific part of a video to a friend and really needed to put some effort into it to find it again (the correct video and then the correct time in that video). So why not ‘document’ it here… The video I was looking for was the She should’ve studied - ROG RIG Reboot 2020 at about 12:26.