Weird rocketry

If you’re a coffee fan like me, it’s inevitable that at some point in your coffee-making experience you’ll find yourself in a desperate need of burr grinder. The problem with burr grinders is that the majority of them are too expensive for an average home coffee-maker and are targeted towards restaurants and professional baristas.

Hence, you’ll start exploring more cheap alternatives — and the first pretty affordable models will be blade-based.
These type of grinders suck as they do not provide you with a decent quality ground coffee –resulting bean particles are not evenly sized and this will highly affect espresso taste.

As you’ll discover later, there are not many burr-based grinders priced less than 50$. Surprisingly, they will produce almost the same quality of ground coffee as expensive monsters with prices over 300$. In this article, we’ll review one of those cheap coffee grinders and tune it to produce high quality ground coffee.

The goal of this article is to install latest OpenWRT firmware on a very popular DIR-320 Wi-Fi router (BRCM47XX based). The reason why you might do this is to be able to connect modern hardware(modems) to this pretty old legacy device.

Official firmware 3G modem support list is pretty limited and uses old kernel. On the other hand, there is an alternative DD-WRT firwmare with linux kernel 2.6.x which is pretty old also. Therefore, the only viable option is installing OpenWRT which ships the latest linux kernels 3.18.xx.

As a bonus sub-topic we’ll consider setting up an external CDMA(EVDO) modem and using it to access internet.

Sometimes you need to run legacy php code on ARM processors. Since php 5.2 was released 2 November 2006 at the time there were not a lot of powerful ARM solutions capable of running full-fledged websites. However, right now there is a possibility to run pretty heavy code on modern ARM platforms and a lot of linux distros support ARM architecture. There is even dedicated ARM cloud hosting.

In this post we’re going to fix the inability to run PHP in the FPM(Fast Process Manager) mode which is an absolute requirement if you want to run production websites.

In this post we’re going to investigate how to create custom metrics for the AWS CloudWatch service. In some cases it’s not enough to have default set of AWS metrics which are already defined for you in dashboard. Let’s say you want to monitor the number of active customers on your website, or you would like to know the number of failed requests to your API backend.

Whatever it is, CloudWatch will allow you to record any time-based data using AWS APIs.

Dune company has given us a miryad of excellent media players, especially by producing high quality software. In this article I’ll give you step-by-step instructions on how to convert your media player into full-fledged NAS with ability to download torrents and perform any task a generic linux box could do.