Month: January 2024

Running a Mastodon instance entirely free forever

My single-user Mastodon instance has been ticking away at phocks.eu.org for a while now, over a year at least. All up, I’ve paid zero dollars to keep it running. I’ve had a few people ask me to write up something about it, so here it is.

If you’re comfortable logging into a Linux server via SSH and running commands you shouldn’t have any major troubles setting it up, but it will take a few hours of work. Enjoy!

Source: Running a Mastodon instance entirely free forever | Josh’s Cool Dev Blog

Bash Operators & Shell Tricks: Level Up Your Scripting

Learn about logical operators and shell expansions, in the second article in this multi-part series on programming with Bash. Author’s note: The articles in this series first appeared at Opensource.com. The original articles consisted of two series and the rest were published as stand-alone articles. These have all been merged into a single series with updates and modifications for that purpose.

Source: Bash Operators & Shell Tricks: Level Up Your Scripting – OpenSource.net

A handy tip for entering long and/or complicated commands at the Linux command prompt (when using the bash shell) from a Mastodon user

Saw this tip on Mastodon from user Stephan (@durchaus@mastodon.social) and thought it worth passing along:

When you are about to write a long and complicated command in bash, then hit CTRL+x CTRL+e to enter an editor window in which you can write the command with your default editor. The command will be executed immediately after the file is saved and the editor is closed.

(Link to post)

I never knew you could do this. And it was only a year or two ago that I found about about CTRL+r which lets you do a text search for commands in your history (so you don’t need to keep pressing the up arrow). Then again I am not a big command line user, but when I do need to use it, tips like these can be quite helpful IF I can remember them when I need them!

Thanks to Stephan for sharing this tip!

Reducing Raspberry Pi 5’s power consumption by 140x

Sorry to clickbait with that title… but it’s actually true. I can help you improve power use by 140x—for power off power consumption, at least.

By default, the Raspberry Pi 5 (like the Pi 4 before it) leaves the SoC powered up (just in a shutdown state) when you shut down the Pi.

Because of this, a Pi 5 will still sit there consuming 1.2-1.6W when completely shut down, even without anything plugged in except power.

Source: Reducing Raspberry Pi 5’s power consumption by 140x | Jeff Geerling

GPS Raspberry Pi NTP Server

This post details how to create a stratum-1 NTP Server using a Raspberry Pi utilizing GPS and PPS, and get time within 100 nanoseconds of real time, directly from the atomic clocks located in the GPS satellites above your head. The best part about this guide is that this will work with no internet. After initial setup, you could disconnect it from the internet and they would work. All of the other guides out there that I have found do not include the configuration necessary for this.

Source: GPS Raspberry Pi NTP Server (NetworkProfile.org)