241–250 of 510 posts
I used a live CD to boot it, but could not fix the boot partition.
Since I was able to read the root partition I chrooted into it and started nginx from there.
It ran like that for a week while I was preparing a replacement.
I wanted a smart thermostat but my 30 year old natural gas heater didn‘t support them. I only had a wheel which I could turn to set the temperature. So I took double sided tape, stuck a plastic gear on the wheel and put a servo on with another gear on the side, connected to a raspberry pi, that would turn the wheel when my phone would enter a geofence around the flat. Picture: https://ibb.co/nDvwndp I even had a bash…
One of them involved pointing an old webcam to a segment display, convert shitty image to monochrome in a way that makes vague shapes for the digits and other state icons but clamps everything else to oblivion, and just use some fixed pixel position to "read" and get device state from that.
Made some fun prototyping though.
Also reminded me of: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/ITAPPMONROBOT
Not my idea or implementation. Our startup built a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It was successful, and customers wanted the same thing but for Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE had no plugin architecture. But Windows has Windows hooks and DLL injection. So we were able to build a macro-like system that clicked here and dragged there and did what we needed it to. The only problem was that you could see all the actio…
Not my idea or implementation. Our startup built a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. It was successful, and customers wanted the same thing but for Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE had no plugin architecture. But Windows has Windows hooks and DLL injection. So we were able to build a macro-like system that clicked here and dragged there and did what we needed it to. The only problem was that you could see all the actio…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your company had remote embedded devices but didn't keep one "locally" for debugging issues?
There's a zillion things that you can't necessarily test for locally. When you have a fleet of IoT devices deployed in other people's environments, there's literally no way to test everything. Your question comes down to "Why didn't you just deploy bug free code using perfect processes? That's what I always do." I mean, cmon.
OP's description suggests it was an error that's common to all the deployed instances that received the update, rather than some specific combination of environment and that deployment.
It would have allowed them to run the same deployment locally and use physical access (serial, a display, sd card, whatever) to capture the error log.
What they came up with is clever but it's very surprising that they needed it, especially given that they have very limited remote access to the units that are in the wild.
Years later I went back (like 10 years later?) and they showed me a sleek new tiny thin client box, and when it loaded there was my VB6 screen with the familiar two buttons. Apparently the users loved it and so they had ported it across to the newer devices ever since.
I used to work at a small company. We had a few remote embedded devices that did work and sent data back to the mothership over the internet. Their firmware could be remotely updated, but we were always very careful. Well one day a mistake was finally made. Some of the devices went into a sort of loop. They’d start running the important process, something would go wrong, and they’d just retry every few minutes. We ca…
How you could have enough control over the machine to reroute the error log to (what I assume was) a Pastebin api, while also lacking access to any of the files on the machine? In my mind you'd be required to ssh into the machine to upload, and if you're ssh'd in, why not just cat the log?
My wife was pregnant and tired of doing cold video outreach for our recruiting business, so I wrote a python script that took her best video and just spliced in audio of her saying different people’s names and LinkedIn profiles. To hide the lips not matching the audio, she did a little wave that covered her mouth at just the right time. Example: https://www.loom.com/share/3162a767905c422b8fd423f7448e16f8 It ended up…