Aaruni's Blog v 3.0

7.1 Headphones!

You just got an new headset. Its expensive and brilliant and it says 7.1 surround sound on the box, and you swear you can hear the difference. Unfortunately for you, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!

The numbers in the surround sound standards refer to the number of physical channels there are for the sound output. 7.1 means you have 7 channels for sound, and a subwoofer for base. The channels in this setup are Front-Left (1), Front-Center (2), Front-Center (3), Surround Left (4), Surround Right (5), Rear Left (6), Rear Right(7), and a low frequency subwoofer (.1). Your fancy new headphones, on the other hand, only have two physical channels: left and right. But what about the stark difference you swear you can hear v/s your previous set of cans? All of that is software magic.

Tail-what?

Tailscale is a project by Tailscale Inc which creates a mesh network of your devices. It allows all the devices on your tailscale network, the “tailnet”, to talk to each other direclty, in a peer to peer manner. It does not matter if your devices are separated by the internet, or a NAT, or even a CGNAT: tailscale can break through and create a functional tunnel between each of your devices. It works by employing Wireguard behind the scenes to create a tunnel from each device, to every other device in your tailnet. For 9 devices, that means 90 tunnels have to be created and maintained, and without tailscale, this operation would be MANUAL! The full breakdown of exactly how Tailscale works can be found here.

As part of my work, I’m heavily using ostree. Ostree is a git like content addressed store for filesystem trees. Its a really cool technology for distributing software, and is used by many major players in the industry : GnomeOS, rpm-ostree, flatpaks, and so on. While ostree has capability of deploying entire OS trees (hence the name), it can also be used in “user mode” (as opposed to “host mode”), where it manages only a target user repository, instead of the entire host. (Fun fact, ostree has the ability to juggle between different versions of the OS, or even different OSs!)

Pi-hole

Pi-hole is a network wide adblocker service for Linux systems. It works as a DNS blackhole, that is, it blocks resolving DNS queries for certain addresses. So, it is able to block ads by refusing to resolve the address from which an ad must be loaded! Contrary to what the name might suggest, Pi-hole can run on almost any Linux box on almost any platform, not just a Raspberry-Pi computer. More information about Pi-hole can be found at their official website.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them

Last summer, I decided to thrust upon my parents’ house the greatness of being a smart home. I gifted them a tasmota enabled bulb I bought from Athom, and an old laptop to act as a home server. The idea was simple : start with just a single smart device at home, and see if I can expand into the complete experience without my folks complaining too much. As a bonus, we realised the solar inverter installed at home also provides telemetry, which I promptly integrated into the smart home setup.