1. “Your word is your bond”
   1. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
   2. Make realistic timelines / don’t makeup a bad deadline just to look good for 15 seconds.
      1. You might satisfy an unrealistic expectation so have something done sooner than possible but it looks bad when you have to extend the timeline because it’s not done.
   3. Manage your time.
      1. Priorities your schedule based upon any prior commitments.
      2. If you need extra time to work the committed task and you can get it done on time if extra time is given. Start cutting things off your schedule: Cut out unnecessary meetings, conference calls or phone time. These calls can be rescheduled or make do without you for that time.
   4. If you can not make a deadline, give notice to all managing parties as soon as possible. If this is a project that will get back to your manager, give your manager a heads up he may hear push back about having to extend a deadline.
      • This helps management prioritize the next steps because if it is really important, they can help you clear your schedule to make the time or even assign additional resources depending how large of an issue it will create.
2. If you are customer facing, you need to have ‘two hats’ on.
   • Think of your company as a magic show
     • You know how the magic show works and are able to investigate the secrets behind the scenes.
     • The client is the audience and should not know the magic tricks. (the political / interworking of your company)
     • There is a time and a place to show your deck of cards to the customer, make sure you only limit the display to the deck of cards required.
3. Admit when you are wrong and don’t make stuff up just to have an answer. I have had a lot of discussions on this and some people think it’s ok to make an answer up just to have a quick answer and I find that as immoral. It is one thing to make an incorrect statement on how you thought something works in good faith but it’s completely wrong to make up something blindly. It’s ok to admit that you do not know the answer but will get the answer to the question for the customer. It’s ok to admit that you are or were wrong because you are only human and mistakes do happen. Keep an open mind, learn from mistakes and move on with the rest of life.

Let me introduce you to the ways of the Pi-Hole. Add a simple Raspberry Pi to your network, it doesn’t have to be top of the line, install Pi-Hole and point your devices DNS to the Pi. You don’t even need a dedicated Pi because you can even run Pi-Hole in a docker on any Linux server you have running if you have one. I can confirm this blocks the Ads at the time of writing this post and blocks 41% of unwanted network traffic in the process.

PiHole is a DNS sinkhole that checks your web queries / DNS requests to see if it should direct you to the site or block the connection. You can blacklist (block), whitelist (approve), use public lists to mass block or do everything manually.

Install onto a Pi is easy as… running “curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash“
Once setup it will give you a web address and password.

Now here is where I get to put my two cents in on the configuration. I use a few public lists in my configuration to expand the default ad-blocking to maximize effectiveness and manual whitelist to allow tracking for sites I like to have my history saved in.

• Log into your Pi-Hole interface
• Go to Group Management
• Select Ad-List

I use https://firebog.net lists so every URL that is green and with a checkmark to the left, add to the address field on the Pi-Hole Ad-List page and put a comment in if you want to track what they are for.
I also use the developerdan but only the Ads and Tracking list.

After this is done you need to update the Pi-Hole lists by:

• Go to Tools
• Update Gravity
• Press the update button

This will take a minute but should net you around 580k URLs to block. For me I do like some tracking and what this will do is block your YouTube watch history, twitch.tv VOD location, Amazon view history and many more. To solve this is easy.

• On Pi-Hole navigation select whitelist
• For the Domain add Amazon.com
• Select Add Domain as Wildcard checkmark box
• Press Add to whitelist.

Repeat for Twitch.tv, YouTube.com and any other site you find your history being blocked and would like that functionality. I also recommend adding aax-us-east.amazon-adsystem.com because that breaks the Ads inside Amazon for suggested products.

That is all you have to do, you can use an add-on to regularly update the Pi-Hole Gravity or just remember to do it manually once a month or every other month like I do.

— nothing important but just my back story as to why I hate Ads.

Now I know some-people advocate that these Ads provide revenue for site and people to operate but normally the people saying this are the ones running Ads or use them for revenue in some way. I wouldn’t have problems with Ads IF they were to respect me but they don’t.
Examples:

• Ads that track me: I feel weirded out when I search for something and now I have nothing but Ads for that thing and I switch devices from my phone to my tablet and the same Ads are there.
  • Is this just me? Because I feel like to stalking laws should apply because it really is that bad.
• Video Ads that interrupt videos I am watching: The come in at 130% the volume of the content I am watching.. If I am watching something chill, I don’t want the WWE Announcer popping up yelling “JOHN CENA!” like an asshole.
• Twitch.Tv that thinks it is cool to give you 9 (Not exaggerating) video Ads in a row at 15-30 seconds each.
• Web Pages that decide to popup a video player at 40% of your screen and auto play sound at maximum levels.
• My child has a tablet, I let her play kids games, every 10 seconds it pops up an Ad for another game, she downloads every single game in the Ad because she doesn’t understand. Or it show inappropriate Ads that automatically makes any parent in their right mind instantly reach over take it away and have to explain to their kids that it was inappropriate. Trust me, we are talking about a game with a sperm entering an egg, becoming a baby as a game which advertising to a freaking 4 year old.

I had an Amazon Fire Tablet “HD8”, wife got it for me a few Christmases ago, it ran slow as tar and showed me Ad at every turn. She bought it on sale and to get $15 off they make you agree to Ads. I hated that tablet so much but wouldn’t you know that once it stopped querying for Ads, that tablet actually worked like a dream. For that price, battery life and the high quality speakers it has, it is a better tablet than an iPad in my opinion.

Thanks to a comment from almulder on my previous post, I found out that UCTRONICS now provides a POE hat version of this product. At this time is UCTRONICS doesn’t provide any information on the POE specifications. This is very important to me because if I am going to recommends a product and invest ~$400 into Raspberry Pis I want to make sure they are protected to the best extent I can provide and a $25 hat per unit isn’t that bad. Without knowing what protection UCTRONICS PoE version provides, I will have to state this setup is far superior because the Professional version of the LoveRPi PoE hat provides “Transient Overvoltage, Undervoltage Lockout, Thermal Shutdown, Foldback Current Limiting” protection to the build.

Products used:

• 110V 2 in 1 Digital SMD Rework Station Hot Air Desoldering Station & Soldering Iron
  • I needed a new iron and decided to go with this cheap station.
• Soldering Station with Six Flexible Arms Metal Base Soldering Tool 6 Soldering Aid Vise Aluminum Base
  • 100% Worth it (IMO)
• 6 Pieces Solder Wicks No-Clean Solder Braided Wicks Desoldering Wicks, 1.5 meter Length (Lake Blue,0.04 Inch Width)
  • I pick this over desolder bulb any day of the week.
• 3Pcs Precision Ceramic Reverse Tweezers Stainless Steel Tweezers Cross Lock Electronics Industrial Heat-resistant Tweezers SolderingTool Muye
  • because they are reverse 100% worth it (IMO)
• uxcell 30Pcs 2.54mm Pitch 40-Pin 20mm Length Single Row Straight Connector Pin Header
• Raspberry Pi 4 Computer Model B 8GB Single Board Computer
• LoveRPi Power-Over-Ethernet (PoE) HAT for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ (Professional, Isolated (3KV))
• Hakko-CHP-170 Micro Cutter – Red

I am not paid, sponsored by, invested in or even remotely related to the linked sites, products or companies listed in this article. This is a blog post and honest recommendations of sites and/or products that I have used and documented to help everyone in our community.

What on you on about? Windows history is rooted in command prompt and even though it is not as tied into command prompt as it once was, it still has a uses to quickly trouble-shoot issues to this day. Just to give an example, I work with large file systems, opening the main folder in file explorer is a waste of time and will take minutes to do a task that should only take seconds. I can quickly go to the directories I need and even perform a file copy in a small fraction of that time. If I wan’t I can even open file explorer to the subdirectories that I want to actually view and not have to deal with the large root directory. Other tools it contains: formatting drives, partitioning drives, network trouble-shooting, simple scripting with batch files useful for basic programming and simple automation jobs and more.

This is the most over looked primary skill in someones toolbox, I don’t expect someone to know every aspect of command prompt but the minimum expectation is that you can move through drives and directories without tossing your hands up in frustration.

This is the gateway drug: Spending less than a few hours just to learn the power of Windows command line can lead you to stronger more powerful command lines (CLI) that are even more key to your portfolio, Windows Powershell and ultimately the Linux CLI. Learning batch file scripting is an easy way to checkout programming and maybe realize that you want to learn more languages like JavaScript, Python or any one of the other thousand flavors of development languages out there.

At minimum, a level one tech should be-able to have this in their resume by end of their first month on the job.

Checkout these Resources:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-use-command-prompt/

Windows Command Line Tutorial – 1 – Introduction to the Command Prompt

21 CMD Prompt Commands You Should Know

Udemy: Windows Command Line Complete Course(CMD, Batch Script) 2021

I am not paid, sponsored by, invested in or even remotely related to the linked sites, products or companies listed in this article. This is a blog post and honest recommendations of sites and/or products that I have documented to help everyone in our community.

In my opinion, a lot of managers don’t seem to look closer to home because they either don’t pay attention to the valuable local resources they have working around them or they don’t want to feel like they are cherry picking from other departments and would be embarrassed of what other department managers would think of them. Fortunately I look at it like they have already earned the right to be reviewed for a promotion. I find the other department managers appreciate the situation and could see each employee that I picked deserved the new opportunity to elevate their career.

I would always be social with everyone in other departments so I could see the success, failures, reaction to failures, work ethic and knowledge. With all of this information, I already had a benchmark of the persons performance, knowledge, and abilities but hiring from outside isn’t that much more complicated because it only takes a few questions to figure out.

I have personally mentored dozens of people obtain their goal of getting a better job role and would like to post the information here for your review and consideration. Each week I am going to post about one skill that managers and interviewers are looking for in a technical role like customer support levels 1, 2, and 3 but these can be applied to a wide variety of roles.

Tech Job Skills #1: Command Prompt

Here is a simple script, I came up with a way to json the temperature, pull the numbers into a file, average all of the temperatures and the loop to adjust the fan speed with the temperature.

Modify the IMIHOST, IMIUSER, and IMPIPW to fit your setup and you may need to create the /var/log/tempC/ folder.

#!/bin/bash
# tempC SETTINGS:
# Modify to suit your needs.

IPMIHOST=[enter idrac address]
IPMIUSER=[enter idrac user]
IPMIPW=[enter idrac password]
ipmitool -I lanplus -H $IPMIHOST -U $IPMIUSER -P $IPMIPW raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x00

temprat="/var/log/tempC/temprat.json"

while true; do
#create the json file of temps.
sensors -j > /var/log/tempC/temprat.json

#cat information to the file using JQ
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0000"."Core 0"."temp2_input"' > /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0000"."Core 1"."temp3_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0000"."Core 2"."temp4_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0000"."Core 8"."temp10_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0000"."Core 9"."temp11_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0000"."Core 10"."temp12_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0001"."Core 0"."temp2_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0001"."Core 1"."temp3_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0001"."Core 2"."temp4_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0001"."Core 8"."temp10_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0001"."Core 9"."temp11_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc
cat $temprat | jq '."coretemp-isa-0001"."Core 10"."temp12_input"' >> /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc

#tempC is the average temp of all cores.
tempC=$(awk '{ sum += $1 / 12 } END { printf ("%3.0f\n",sum )}' /var/log/tempC/tempC.calc)

#if temp > set fanspeed

echo "Temperature average is:$tempC"
if [[ $tempC -lt 49 ]]
then
ipmitool -I lanplus -H $IPMIHOST -U $IPMIUSER -P $IPMIPW raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x1a

elif [[ $tempC -gt 49 ]] && [[ $tempC -lt 59 ]]
then
ipmitool -I lanplus -H $IPMIHOST -U $IPMIUSER -P $IPMIPW raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x1e

elif [[ $tempC -gt 59 && $tempC -lt 69 ]]
then
ipmitool -I lanplus -H $IPMIHOST -U $IPMIUSER -P $IPMIPW raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x1f

elif [[ $tempC -gt 69 ]] && [[ $tempC -lt 72 ]]
then
ipmitool -I lanplus -H $IPMIHOST -U $IPMIUSER -P $IPMIPW raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x2f

elif [[ $tempC -gt 72 ]] && [[ $tempC -lt 76 ]]
then
ipmitool -I lanplus -H $IPMIHOST -U $IPMIUSER -P $IPMIPW raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x3e

elif [[ $tempC -gt 79 ]]
then
ipmitool -I lanplus -H $IPMIHOST -U $IPMIUSER -P $IPMIPW raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x5f

fi
 sleep 15;
done

Run the above in a shell to start with, test with the ‘stress’ app by running “stress –cpu 24”. With stress test going, my system doesn’t go above 70 in 10 minutes time and the sound is still bearable. You can adjust the temps on the elif lines as needed and the fan speed is controlled by the last hex in imitool line. Example, 0x1a could be changed to 0x1b or 0x1c which would speed up the fans and so on.

It’s not impressive programming but it works as needed, enjoy!

~The TextBox.Tech team

Recently I have been on a kick to organize my home server rack, to remove some wires I bought a few LoveRPi PoE hats for my Raspberry Pi’s but found that wasn’t really good enough on the look I was going for. Searching around I had found UCTRONICS Ultimate Rack for Raspberry Pi 4, 19″ 1U Rackmount with All IO on One Side, OLED Display, Power Switch, and Cooling Fan on Amazon.com and thought that was just what I was looking for. While looking at the images I could see that it didn’t provide enough room for the PoE hats that I had purchased and found the comments confirming as much. Fortunately this didn’t scare me off because I am used to making modifications to make hardware work for me.

Let’s get the warning out of the way, if you don’t know what you are doing or do not understand the instructions, please do not try this at home. You are dealing with power, power tools and can brick, break or burn down your equipment. This just a blog post of what I have done myself with over 27 years of experience with hardware hacking and I am in no way liable for any modifications that you do to mimmic or copy my actions.

I used the following tools:

1. Solder
2. Solder Iron
3. Desolder bulb or wire if required
4. Phillips screw driver
5. Dremel
6. Multimeter

At this point, make sure as a double check that nothing is jumping the pins together and use a multimeter to confirm.

Put everything back together and test out your new setup.

If you need a pinout of the Raspberry Pi, you can use this site simple-guide-to-the-rpi-gpio-header-and-pins

Simple modification that takes little effort and is sure to impress in any PoE rack. I would like to change this to just desolder the pins from the pi and solder longer pins up trough both hats but I don’t have any on hand and as you can see this does the trick as needed. I will add photos of the rest of the unit once I have purchased the next two Raspberry Pi 4s.

Update: I will be posting another story with the more proper way to make this modification around April 10th. The plan is to use these 20mm header pins to replace the 8 pins (1-8) on the Raspberry Pi but they aren’t scheduled to be delivered until 4/8. The idea is to remove the 6 pin PoE header cap, keep the header pin clips on, desolder the header raiser from the UCTRONICS hat and clip it down to shorten the female end to the hat directly. Don’t get me wrong, the two Pi 4s, using the above method works just fine and this was designed so we wouldn’t have to buy any extra parts. Since I am ordering two new 8GB Pi’s to fill out the space on the rack mount, I figured we should improve upon the design with a $12 part, this will allow all three pieces to be detached and the Pi will just have 8 longer headers in the back if repurposed.

Update 4/1/2021: The new post of the proper way to make this modification is published at Updated: POE Hack for UCTRONICS 1U Pi Rack

I am not paid, sponsored by, invested in or even remotely related to the linked sites, products or companies listed in this article. This is a blog post and honest recommendations of sites and/or products that I have used and documented to help everyone in our community.

These are my tips to help you start learning SQL

Not all SQL databases are equal, Oracle is different from Postgres and MSSQL Server is different from both but they all have similarity to each other. I would recommend taking note of which system you want to learn from first and using that system to build your base knowledge off of. If you do not have a specific product in mind, I would recommend Postgres as it is the easiest to download, install and start off with but has powerful options like arrays, hstores, json, and XML column options to learn from.

Download a sample database, this is an easy way to learn how the SQL creates tables, inserts data and views. postgresqltutorial.com has a good layout diagram and a starter DVD Rental database.

Learning the basics, my favorite site to direct people to for SQL basics is w3resource.com as they have information and exercises for many platforms.

Learning to join tables allows you to combine table information to build a more accurate representation of the data you need. This is important because information is split by tables in databases so everything you need to display is not on the same table. Example: In the DVD Rental database mentioned above, you have a “film” table with 13 columns but if you want to see the actors of each film you will need to join the table with the “actor” table.

As an example, in Postgres I would do something like this:

SELECT F.TITLE, F.DESCRIPTION, F.RELEASE_YEAR, ARRAY_AGG(A.FIRST_NAME ||' ' || A.LAST_NAME) FROM FILM F, ACTOR A, FILM_ACTOR FA WHERE F.FILM_ID = FA.FILM_ID AND FA.ACTOR_ID = A.ACTOR_ID;

This is an explicit join statement which allows me to join 3 tables to display only the information I want from two of the tables and adds an array for the actors names to keep everything one row even though you have multiple actors listed.

Use Udemy when they have sales going on, you can pick up a course for less than a happy meal. It could be specific to the database structure you are looking to use and they normally provide good projects.

Keep yourself engaged! For me, learning something that isn’t exactly useful isn’t fun or easy so make it interesting. I try to think of something I can use, in this case my main project for learning was creating a database of my financial bank records. This project provided database design, problem solving, logic creation and many more things that are very useful for SQL advancement. You have to learn how to create tables, import data exported from your bank in CSV format, create logic to parse this data into useful information. This design was to help me understand my financials, where our money is going and to help my family start saving for the future.

One thing I notice in the workspace, people show they want to learn but they are not willing to actually spend a few dollars on a book or a Udemy course and take the initiative. If you identify X will help me achieve a goal or career success, take the bull by the horns and figure out how to gain that knowledge without waiting a lifetime for it to be handed to you.

I hope this helps and if you have any recommendations, please let me know if the comments below.

I am not paid, sponsored by, invested in or even remotely related to the linked sites, products or companies listed in this article. These are honest recommendations of sites and/or products that I have used and documented to help everyone in our community.

Begging IT is out of the question so next best step is calling in my newly found favorite application by Emurasoft, EmEditor is a very powerful lightweight file/text editor that is well worth the $40 for the license. I had to import a ~8GB/15 million rows of user report generated by a client into a new implementation database and the CSV was erroring out. The normal Notepad++ wasn’t going to do the trick and EmEditor came into play like a wrecking ball, quickly opening the large file, allowing me to find the problematic line, and replacing using regular expressions just seemed to come naturally with this application.

Sounds too good to be true? Emurasoft puts the cards on the table and offers a free trial so if you are ever in need, this is well worth giving a shot.

I am not paid, sponsored by, invested in or even remotely related to this product or company. This is an honest review of an application that I have used on contracted projects.

Thank you!

~Thomas Davies