Station P1 - desktop usage

I have been using the Station P1 mini-computer for a while now and as already stated occasionally I am pretty happy with it. For the last couple of weeks it’s been used on daily basis. Fun fact: I am writing this article on it right now.
The main reason for that is its electric efficiency. While my main workstation wastes lots of power for mostly being idle all the time the Station P1 barely exceeds 20 watts of consumed power while being very busy. For comparison the graphics card in my desktop computer consumes twice the amount while being idle(!).

Each time I think about this NicoD comes to my mind for his description for desktop PCs as “giant space heaters”. There is a bit of truth in these words.

Not the same procedure...

… as last year 🤔
Noticeable quieter.

Not your average New Year’s Eve ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway happy New Year to all of you around the globe!

Armbian - using CREATE_PATCHES

The Armbian build script has a built-in method to automatically create patch files from changes you do within the sources.
The official documentation writes about this:

prompt right before the compilation starts to make changes to the source code, separate for U-Boot and kernel, and will create patch files out of this. If you want these patches are included in the normal run, you need to copy them to their appropriate directories.

While this basically puts stuff in a nutshell for beginners this could be a bit confusing. In this post I will show you step by step how this works in a practical example.

• What is needed to start this process?
• Where are the sources to edit?
• Where are the created patches?
• How to apply them next time you build?

Zuckerbude 3.0

The whole website has been reworked. Why? Because I can. After a very long time it is now time to say goodbye to Wordpress and say hello to Hugo.

What is Hugo?

Hugo is “The world’s fastest framework for building websites”. You can learn more here.

Simplified it takes your input files, which are formatted using the Markdown syntax, and a template and creates a ready to upload website from that.

There is no web interface or fancy WYSIWYG-editor thing. You can use any text editor, preferably one with syntax highlight or even a small IDE like VScode.

After editing the changes can be previewed locally by using

hugo server --disableFastRender --ignoreCache

which will provide a http server that serves the website on localhost. Once satisfied the output of the public folder is pushed to the webserver and the changes are live immediately.

VeraCrypt and Panfrost compile vs 1GB memory

Recently I needed to build mesa on my OrangePi One Plus to get the most out of the current Panfrost support. However the building always failed because the board locked itself up. Some research showed that it most likely ran out of memory.

A bit later I tried building VeraCrypt on a NanoPi Neo3 and after a while run into the same issue.

Armbian does ship zram with each board to get help get around the memory lacking a bit. However in these cases it simply was not enough.