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

  • Is Linux the superior gaming platform in 2023?

    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 […]

  • Adding Full Text Search (FTS) to Dovecot on Ubuntu 20.04

    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. […]

  • Building a HomeLab into your House Build

    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 […]

  • Configuring a Dual-Stacked Ubuntu Router on Aussie Broadband NBN

    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 […]

  • Metric Cooking: So Far off the Mark

    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.

  • Bypass Netflix Geoblocks with IPv6 [Defunct 06/16]

    [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 […]

  • A Political/Economic Rant: Why Holding an Absolute Position is Absolutely Wrong

    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 […]

  • Hacking the Realtek DVB RTL2832U into Linux by hand

    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 […]

  • Insulating a Car on the Cheap

    Here’s a one-day, $30 mod you can do to your car if it has interior rattles, road noise, or if the car is too loud and buzzy from outside once the subwoofers kick in. Mine exhibited all of these problems.

  • Let’s Encrypt is in Beta

    It appears that Let’s Encrypt has started its closed beta as of 29th October 2015. I’ve managed to get in on it, and Ubermotive is running on a brand new SSL certificate signed by the Let’s Encrypt CA. I’ve gone through the site and replaced most HTTP links with HTTPS ones and also forced HTTPS […]