Why we drive to Florida.

Leave a comment

I get a lot of questions when it comes to family vacation, so I thought I would take a few moments and explain why we drive.

My inlaws own property in Florida, and for the past 17 years my wife and I have gone down once or twice a year. We have taken different routes, driven at different times of the day, and we have varied the number of days of driving. We’ve gone down and spent a week, as well as stayed for an extended period of time after #3 was born so that the kids could relax, and I could work from the condo an join the family here and there for pool time together.

Over the years we’ve discovered that it’s a relatively cheap vacation for us…if we drive. This seems to be the one thing that people get caught up on…so let me demo some numbers for you.

If I were to fly and score the deal of the century on flights…$99 a seat. It would cost me $500 to fly down, probably $100 in luggage fee’s, car rental (van) in florida is almost $1000 a week. So that’s $2500 in just transportation costs, and 2/3 of that cost will be in US dollars too.

Driving down costs us $200 in gas, and I can stay at hotels using points that I’ve earned with business trips, hockey & cheer tournaments. Adding in hotel and food along the way we’re usually in the $500 range to get down, and another $500 to get back.

Before we go I will take the van into Honda and have them give it the once over. I explain what we’re doing and ask for the “what needs to be done for a safe 5000km drive”.

If we run into issues, yes…it could be a hassle, but car parts are also significantly cheaper in the US than they are here…and many services are also much cheaper to perform. I’ve actually done scheduled maintenance on the van in the US and saved hundreds of dollars in one trip (transmission fluid service).

We’ve done many things over the years to entertain the kids on the drive. The smartest was to provide each kid an ipad, and use offlline Netflix and Disney+ for the drive. We used to have a plex server that I would use on a laptop, and had wifi setup in the car so that the kids could watch movies and play Minecraft…I may setup wifi in the car permanently…but the Plex server is now outdated and complex enough that it’s actually a hassle to use now…so for the kids…Netflix and Disney are perfect.

It’s not ever easy, but it’s a beautiful drive and we’ve learned to take our time and deal with the slowdowns as they come. That’s really what you want to do on a vacation anyways, right?

Raspberry Pi – Mounting an NFS @ boot

Leave a comment

I have an “every 3rd night backup” script that’s been crashing out, and it’s because as soon as I log off the system drops the file share…so the system forgets where to store backups.

So using the logic of the following crontab that works I’ve made my own slightly customized version…

@reboot sleep 30 && python /path/to/your/script.py &

Reverse engineering the code, the secret sauce is actually in the sleep 30, which is basically telling the system to wait for a few ticks before running the following command…which ironically waits just long enough for the network stack to be fully up and running and then mount.

@reboot sleep 30 && sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.8:/volume1/pi /media/SYNOLOGY

Raspberry Pi – MOTD

Leave a comment

For those not in the loop, the MOTD is the message of the day that is shown after you login to the Pi.

After some running through the motions on a few things, I was able to customize it to show information that I would like to know when I access the device…

After sitting and coding things out (mostly remembering things like grep, sed and cut…my default motd now looks like this.

Raspberry Pi – Getting Started with a Headless Pi

Leave a comment

So in order to keep life somewhat simple at the moment, I’m not planning to immediately connect the Pi to the network via cable / monitor / keyboard or mouse…that means it’s gonna be headless.

Step 1 download the latest Rasbian LITE image

Step 2 extract the .img file from the file that was downloaded

Step 3 connect the sd card to the computer and use Etcher to flash the sd card to the latest raspian image

Step 4 enable ssh functionality by connecting to /Volumes/boot followed by touch ssh (this created a blank file called ssh)

Step 5 enable wireless functionality by editing /Volumes/wpa_supplicant.conf to reflect the following changes, when complete save the changes and eject the sd card

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
network={
    ssid="YOUR_SSID"
    psk="YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

Step 6 connect your pi to power and turn it on

Step 7 ping raspberrypi.local to determine your ip

Step 8 ssh raspberrypi.local -l pi with a password of raspberry

Step 9 perform the following tasks

a) sudo raspi-config

b) sudo apt-get update

c) sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

d) sudo reboot

Raspberry Pi

Leave a comment

So in my never ending quest for knowledge, and making life better for long car rides…I’ve begun a personal project that I am calling Project Odyssey.

Stage 1 will be to gather a basic understanding of the Raspberry Pi device, and it’s strengths and weaknesses.

Stage 2 will be a prototype, with Stage 3 being a working product that my children may be able to use.

Today my Pi arrived, and in the past 30 minutes I have been able to set it up, get it fired up, and it is presently updating it’s distribution version.

So far, I have to say that I’ve been super impressed.