Jan 24, 2026

Unbricking the NanoPi R6S

TL;DR - Run upgrade_tool UL MiniLoaderAll.bin in Maskrom mode. I recently obtained a NanoPi R6S with the intention of turning it into a router powered by OpenWrt. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly well until I tried to expand the SquashFS OpenWrt partition on the internal eMMC storage, and that seemed to brick the device. Every time it was turned on, the red SYS light would stay solid instead of blinking after a bit - that meant it was stuck in the bootloader phase.

Tags:  R6S

Aug 9, 2025

Sandisk Industrial SLC MicroSD Card Review

This is a straightforward, possibly barebones review of the 32 GB Sandisk Industrial Grade Extended Temperature IX QD334 microSD card (SDSDQED-032G-XI). I have had several high endurance (and max endurance, whatever that means) microSD cards fail on me over years of use in Raspberry Pis and dashcams, so I decided to splurge the cash and get an SLC microSD card with an industrial-grade controller that’ll probably last me a lifetime.

Tags:  microSD ,  Sandisk

Jan 10, 2023

Traffic Advice configuration for Nginx

If you have been seeing 404s for /.well-known/traffic-advice in your access logs from the Chrome Privacy Preserving Prefetch Proxy bot, you’re not alone. It’s Google Chrome’s private prefetch proxy intended to decrease the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) performance metric for faster perceived page loads. There are a few guides (including the first answer on the Stack Overflow question I linked earlier) to have your web server respond correctly to these requests.

Jul 6, 2022

Deploy to Cloudflare Pages with Gitlab CI

Cloudflare Pages is an amazing service to host your SSG and static HTML websites on edge locations and serve pages with low latency around the world. However the product is still new and isn’t as full-featured as I’d want it to be. One of the deficiencies is the lack of deployment options - only GitHub and GitLab.com hosted repositories are supported seamlessly - for anything else, we need to use Wrangler or directly upload a folder or a Zip file through the Cloudflare dashboard GUI.

Jun 13, 2022

Hugo Subscript and Superscript Shortcodes

In its current avatar, there’s no way to get superscript or subscript text in your Hugo content without directly embedding <sup> or <sub> tags in your posts and setting unsafe: true in the Goldmark renderer settings in config.yaml. A cleaner alternative is to use shortcodes to embed these tags in the content. This keeps us from having to enable HTML tags in all posts, and we can have our Markdown content files looking mostly clean.

Apr 9, 2022

Add a Canonical URL tag to your Hugo site

While working with a barebone Hugo theme, I noticed that it doesn’t have a canonical URL meta tag. I have a publicly accessible development site because of the inticracies of my deployment procedure, and it is quite important that it is not picked up and indexed by search engines. Canonical URLs become really important in this context. Well, thankfully it was really easy to add. I needed to override the template file that defined the <head> section of our pages.

Feb 26, 2019

Written by Ellimist

Monitoring a process for high memory consumption using Monit

I run Pi-hole on an old PogoPlug E02 with a custom compiled dnsmasq (or pihole-FTL, as they now call their customised version of it). Lately I have been noticing my DNS queries becoming slow erratically, and upon further investigation it looked like pihole-FTL has a memory balloon, and it consumes all of the 256 MBs of memory available and starts swapping, bringing everything to an almost standstill. In comes Monit, a highly configurable process supervisor.

Dec 18, 2018

Written by Ellimist

Using parted’s resizepart non-interactively on a busy partition

I had a situation where I needed to spin up a virtual machine from a template, and if the new virtual machine’s disk was larger, I needed to resize the partition and then ‘grow’ the filesystem. Well, as with any thing, that you need to do for more than once, I tried to script it using Ansible and incorporate it into our existing VM provisioning scripts. First step was to figure out command we need to run.

Dec 18, 2018

Written by Ellimist

Saving state information between GitLab CI runs

I had a unique scenario where I had to find out if certain files (in a specific directory) changed in between GitLab CI job runs. One of my original ideas was to run jobs on changes to certain files using only:changes (link). This had two problems – first of all, this would run on every commit regardless of which files were changed/added (even with only:changes, the job would be initiated, but would not run any tasks), and that’s a waste of resources.

Oct 12, 2010

Written by Ellimist

Resolving “‘unknown’: unknown terminal type.” error

Last day, after updating the repositories and installing the updated packages on my Debian Lenny, I found that I could no longer run top or use nano or vi to open a file. It threw up this nasty error: 'unknown': unknown terminal type. After a bit of sleuthing, I came to the conclusion that my default console terminal type was defined as ‘unknown’, which, obviously, isn’t correct. To display your default terminal type, use this :

Tags:  terminal-type