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Razer Synapse…why did you take over my RGB?

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So I decided to try a new Razer Viper V3 Hyperspeed Wireless Gaming Mouse (whew!).

I installed Razer Synapse to configure the DPI. All my RGB settings then proceeded to get reset, 3 fans had no lights, and my light strip was now only half-lit.

“Why?” I thought to myself. “This mouse doesn’t even have RGB!”

I had not asked it to reset my settings from ASRock RGB Polychrome (nor did it ask!). It just decided to take over, like a virus.

I figured omitting Razer Chroma would have been enough.

There is nowhere in the settings to tell Synapse to relinquish control, either. It is just enabled. Permanently as far as I can tell.

A quick Google mentions how it appears you used to be able to tell Polychrome to sync with Synapse or Chroma or something. Inside Synapse it states I am using an X870 Taichi…uhm, no. I am not rich, Razer. It’s an X870 Pro. It doesn’t even have the RGB areas Razer wanted me to configure.

By this point I was much too frustrated. I set the one DPI I plan to ever use and promptly just uninstalled the software.

I will state, the mouse feels wonderful. I much prefer the shape to the Logitech G703 I also recently purchased.

But the experience would have been exceptional had it not decided to wreck my RGB setup. Instead it was frustrating. I did try, briefly, to get all the lights lit up again but no combination of adjusting number of LEDs or etc brought them back. I think it’s because it was only detecting two of the ARGB headers for whatever reason.

By comparison, Logitech G-Pro software is amazing. No frills. Configure your mouse. Configure RGB if you want. Done.

WireGuard Guide Update coming!

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Today I realized my VPN has been setup kind-of-wrong the last oh… 4 years or so. I’ve just never had a reason to notice as I was always accessing internal things.

So, an updated WireGuard Guide for pfsense 2.7.2 will be forthcoming soon!

I’m also just working on adding some better CSS support to my powershell server status script as well. I will soon get that online.

PowerShell on.. a Pi ?!

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That’s right! If you didn’t know, powershell is (nearly?) completely cross-platform.

I’ve recently been working on a server status script for work and I chose to do it in powershell. It does threaded pings, generates html files, etc.

With zero modifications at all the script runs flawlessly on both Ubuntu Linux and my Orange Pi. All I had to do was extract the powershell tarball, chmod +x pwsh and run the script.

Truly awesome.

What blew my mind was Powershell was markedly faster on my Pi than it was on my Ubuntu server.

I’ll be posting more about the script soon, as I need to figure out some things still. But it will be released in due time. I really like it!

Revisiting Frigate & Home Assistant

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I’ve been revisiting frigate as of late, and using homeassistant for sending notifications to my phone. I wish I could do this without homeassistant…it feels so excessive just to get camera notifications.

Anyway, after months and months of procrastinating I hope to post my frigate portainer config soon, and an overall frigate configuration file that I’m using. I’ll also attempt to cover notifications on a separate post afterwards.

Hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

ITBacon is now ARMed!

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…with an Orange-Pi Zero 3! I’ve moved the website to this tiny little device that doesn’t even have a home yet.

A case of sorts is on the way. I did attach a heatsink to the CPU in the above picture, which was not included.

My impressions so far are very positive. I’m running their Ubuntu image and haven’t had any problems. It reboots in several seconds. It runs the website very well.

I even toyed around with building an arm version of q2pro with no problems at all.

Only downsides: USB 2.0 port not 3.0, and SD slot speed. SD speed is maxed around 22-24MB/s. So a high speed card will not make a difference.

Update: Now with a home of its own! This little fan lowered temps by 13+⁰C!

Quake 2

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Update: Please see https://quake2.itbacon.com for more information! Come check out my jump server, itbacon.com:27920

Had a lot of fun learning meson environments this weekend, and finally building a 32bit version of q2pro (in Ubuntu) to load old mods that never released source code. Now I can load gamei386.so mods. I even compiled an i386 version of q2admin just for the heck of it. I love how everything works still.

PacketFlingers excellent work with PakServe and pakutil made creating compressed pkz files a breeze.

Skullernets excellent work on q2pro made using it all just as easy. HTTP downloads, etc.

It’s absolutely wild to me that I can still load a quake2 mod from 20 years ago on a modern system. And everything works.

I’m running the best quake2 servers of my life and there’s nobody to use them anymore! It’s maddening.

I think I am mainly doing this for my own nostalgia at this point. There are definitely still a number of quake2 servers out there but there’s only a small, small handful of people.

I’d give anything for a truly active q2 community again. I want to play weapons factory, and freeze tag, and rocket arena, and expert CTF again.

Docker + Portainer + Frigate + Mosquito MQTT…

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Update 9-02-2023: I’ve stopped using HomeAssistant as it’s just not for me.

Update 8-01-2023: Ok! I feel fairly confident with everything now. Inititally my plan was to just give some docker run commands that would get everyone up and running quickly. But I have since discovered Stacks in Portainer, and I feel this is a much better method for deploying containers. Especially since it offers an easy way to upgrade them. Truly hope to have something together eventually!

Update 7-18-2023: I’ve managed to get an iPhone, an OBS stream, and my Amcrest camera into frigate using go2rtc as a restream source. Guide is coming along nicely!

…guide will be coming soon. I am slowly learning it all this weekend. I am really enjoying Portainer. I have a camera arriving tomorrow, an Amcrest one, and hope to have everything up and running by next weekend. Then I can begin taking some screenshots for the guide.

The absolute mixture and mess across the internet has made this challenging at best. But I really want to run my own NVR!

Oh yeah, and I’ll include Google Coral AI support as well assuming the card I ordered works in the PC I’m using for frigate. Hoping to make use of the wifi card slot.

I’m using Ubuntu for the base OS. Personally, I enabled auto-login and screen sharing so I can remote desktop in to it. I may switch to just plain VNC later on but this is working well for me at the moment. As I’ve always been a Gentoo Linux guy, learning Ubuntu (well, Gnome) has been interesting too. I haven’t ran a window manager in YEARS!