Banana Pi in 2024?

Recently I needed a quick and easy way to mount an external disk with an ntfs file system and share it to the network.

So whatcha gonna do? Connect it to a server, mount it, create a samba share for it - done.

So I thought of my long forgotten Banana Pi M1 as it would an absolutely perfect little machine for the job. I am planning to turn it off most of the time, boot it up by wake-on-lan and auto-mount and share the external disk, which automatically goes into standby when nothing is happening with it. The perfect scenario.

Leading a Monday morning meeting for an IT team, even as a full-stack developer using PHP and Symfony, requires effective communication, organization, and leadership skills.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to conduct such a meeting:

1. Prepare an Agenda: Start by creating a clear agenda for the meeting. Outline the topics you want to cover, including:

   • A review of last week’s accomplishments.
   • Key priorities for the current week.
   • Upcoming deadlines or important milestones.
   • Any scheduling or personal matters relevant to the team.
   • Open floor for team members to share updates or concerns.

2. Send Out the Agenda in Advance: Distribute the meeting agenda to all team members before the meeting. This allows them to come prepared and have their thoughts organized.

The AES algorithm is widely used to encrypt data of any sort.

It has been battle-tested for many decades and is still recommended as one of the most secure algorithms.

In this article, we will see how AES encryption works and how the algorithm may be implemented by you, too!

The Cipher

There are two fundamental properties to this cipher, namely:

• Diffusion which is about hiding the statistical relationship between the ciphertext and the plaintext.
  • If even a single bit is changed in the plaintext, the cipher should change completely.
• Confusion which is about complicating the relationship between the key and the ciphertext with the aim of making cryptanalysis more challenging.

AES encryption consists of 4 “simple” steps that are repeated for several rounds.

When mounting an (external) NTFS disk in FreeBSD, especially in TrueNAS right here, with write permissions (777 actually) you would do the following, which can also be found in the FreeBSD manual

# list currently attachded disks
geom disk list
# load fusefs
kldload fusefs
# or install, if not installed - then load like shown above
pkg install fusefs-ntfs
# make your mount directory for your disk, e.g.
mkdir /mnt/usb
# show the partitions on the disk, decide which one to mount, e.g. the first, 'da0s1'
gpart show da0
# ...and actually mount it, use ntfs-3g instead of 'mount'
ntfs-3g /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usb/
# and/or add an fstab entry for automagic mounting after boot
# /dev/da0s1  /mnt/usb	ntfs mountprog=/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g,noauto,rw  0 0
# and unmount if you are done
umount /mnt/usb

Intro

I recently purchased a 3D resin printer for D&D miniature printing.

I had quite an interest in 3D printing for some years now and have seen the topic as a somewhat useless hobby with no actual real-world usability for me directly.

Of course one is able to create anything you can imagin (and print when it comes to size) like replacement parts for oldschool consoles or simple shapes like a hanger for your headset for example but I did not see any use in it, especially since all the small things I could imagine would already exist for purchase or my hobbies would not require special parts like mentioned above.