Welcome to Ubermotive: A collection of blogs, rants and tech notes.

If you’re not sure how the billions of devices keep the time, you’ll be interested to know that I’m one of those timekeepers. Planet Earth has few authoritative time sources that are all in perfect sync, and the clock that we all agree on propagates from those. We call those “stratum-0” sources. The most accessible…

I’ve had a Brother HL-3150CDN for quite some time. Brother are still maintaining the firmware, with the latest release being in late 2023. Things are going driverless, and it does support modern communications such as AirPrint™ and IPv6 over ethernet. While it can do these things, the limitations of tiny CPU and 64MB RAM become…

I’ll often joke that Windows is just an advertising platform that plays games. It’s simply too lacking to be used productively. I haven’t had Windows on my personal desktop PC since around 2003, and I’ve typically just gamed on consoles. I currently have an XBox, and for the last few years it has enabled me…

A full text search (FTS) will greatly improve the speed IMAP search commands. In particular, the Android GMail client will be able to search your inbox with lightning speed. This solution is lightweight and easy enough to set up. I’m assuming you have a working dovecot install at this point. First, install the dovecot-lucene plugin.…

Here’s my current homelab. It’s a basically comms cabinet with a 24-port unmanaged PoE switch and a single 4-core server with two 5400RPM data drives and an NVMe OS drive. This post is a timeline of its build, and an explanation of all the little tidbits it has attached to it. Harnessing the house I…

The NBN connection that was scheduled to arrive on my street in 2013 finally arrived last week. IPv4 worked straight out of the box, but IPv6 took considerably longer to get working. This is mostly caused by shortcomings in netplan (Ubuntu’s new network config renderer introduced in 18.04) and ISC DHCP Server when combined with…

I’ve spent a little time in the kitchen as of late. I’ve been pulling recipes from old and new cookbooks, and of course from the internet. One thing I’ve come to realise is that precisely nobody in the industry uses the metric system correctly.

[UPDATE June 2016]: Netflix have blocked all HE IPv6 tunnels. Deploying IPv6 via HE’s tunnel mechanism will actually now break even the most legitimate of configurations from any country. There’s been a lot of talk (and action) as of late as Netflix starts crumbling under the irrational demands of the content owners. It seems it’s…

Many people these days would categorise a government/economy as one of four types: Capitalist, Socialist, Communist or Fascist. These are well known to be completely different and assumed by many to be incompatible with one another, and conclude that any particular nation would fall into one, and only one of these categories. Some people choose…

I had the misfortune of purchasing two of these PCIe TV tuners (as per lsusb): Bus 004 Device 002: ID 1f4d:a803 G-Tek Electronics Group Bus 003 Device 002: ID 1f4d:a803 G-Tek Electronics Group I’d assumed that the RTL2832U was a common chipset, and would detect on a stock kernel. How wrong I was. Not only…