Software

A screenshot of the new Mirror homepage.

Mirror

I have continued to work on Mirror as we begin to pass on the project to younger students.

Telescope (WIP)

Yet another resource and health monitor for small datacenters. Meant to be easily deployed in a setting like COSI. My hope is to use it to track drive health and temperatures for servers like Mirror and Elephant.

Maintenance

Maintainer directory

A central directory for maintainers and their SSH public keys.

Lab direction handbook (WIP)

A section of Book that describes common lab administration and maintenance tasks. For students that are interested in becoming a maintainer or a lab director.

* Lab Ethernet fixed

A misconfigured switch resulted in the Ethernet ports near the whiteboard not working properly. I replaced the switch, and am looking for a group of motivated students to help me break into the old one so we can set it up again.

Talks

Getting Started With Linux (workshop)

A hands-on experience installing Linux on a computer, getting acquainted with the desktop environment and common utilities, and trying out some command line tools.

Overclocking a RPi 5

An overview of overclocking the Raspberry Pi 5, as well as my personal experience trying it out.

North Pi

3D print files for a mini Fractal Design North computer case for Raspberry Pis.

GParted Live

A live Debian Linux environment with GParted and many other utilities for working with partitions and filesystems.

How to build a Python package

A step-by-step introduction of building a Python wheel (.whl) that you can install using Pip. Includes tests, a Makefile, and a couple other goodies.

tldr

Short guides for common use cases of many command line tools. It's the step between passing --help and looking at the man page.

Missing Semester

MIT's "The Missing Semester of your CS Education" covers a lot of good topics that make everything from system administration to programming a lot easier.

* Singletons, @classmethods, and @staticmethods, oh my!

Handy Python patterns and decorators that help make your code readable and resusable.

Unions are your friend!

Using unions in C to implement generic data structures in a less cursed way, with a lot less void pointers flying around.

* Thunderbird

A FOSS email client with built-in support for GPG, among many other goodies.

* Using Ansible to edit config files

Did you know you can use Ansible to make and roll back precise changes to config files on a bunch of computers?
Now you do! In this talk I show how you can do it.

* Using an SSH jump server

A repeat of a popular talk. A live demo of jumping through COSI's jump server to access a server in our private network.

Around the Labs

Career Fair + Kickoff

Anthony, Cary, and I represented COSI at the career fair kickoff. I also talked to several employers about COSI at the career fair.

Reorganization

I helped with the Great Reorganization, mostly with setting up workstations and laptop workspaces w/ docks. I also did some grunt work moving furniture.

HP Workstation

I set up the donated HP workstation by the window. It is set up for general use and to run VMs.

* Accepted students days

I helped represent COSI with Anthony and Cary at this semester's accepted students days.

* (Former) lab direction

I have passed on my role as lab director to Luke. I am glad to see that the future of COSI is in good hands with the new generation of students.