Author: Matthew Heick

Disk Usage: 100% to 76%

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Around October of 2021 I was running out of disk space on my 6TB hard drive that I had acquired back on November 2015, so I decided to upgrade to the newest and greatest storage solutions of all time: 14TB of block storage! I went ahead and purchased a WD Elements 14TB USB 3.0 external hard drive, proceeded to format it down and get it ready for storing all my useful content.

From October 2021 to July 2025 I completely filled that volume up, and just recently hit the 100% usage. What to do? By the looks of the graph I figured that out without having to delete any files…

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Updating MariaDB on 4.* and 5.* kernels…

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A minor adventure, yet one worth documenting. I’ve been wanting to get MariaDB updated on my VPS for the longest of time but do it in a way with precompiled binaries so I have some control over what I run and, if needed, some flexibility with versions without having to dnf/yum/apt-get things in and out.

To note I tested this on my test machine running 4.18.0-348 and it wasn’t quite happy with getting 11.8.2 rolled out onto it. I realized that the home test machine is a bit old so I had to defer to 10.11.13. Once that was all done I fired up a virtual Rocky9 host running 5.14.0-* and, with the same instructions with the test machine successfully got 11.8.2 slammed on that with no data loss.

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Home-ish DVR with RTSP, ffmpeg, and D-Link DCS-8526LH

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Another “Today I Learned”, except I was more “doing” than learning. Back in 2024 I was happy to find that the camera I invested in to monitor my kids doing homework back in the COVID days supported RTSP. I made a note to see if I can take it a bit farther, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the DCS-8526LH was eating Micro-SD cards and I was losing valuable information I wouldn’t be where I’m at now.

Enter the “Home DVR”…

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Re-optimizing Video: 2021 Honda Odyssey

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Previously on Optimizing Video: 2021 Honda Odyssey RES I had a beautiful ffmpeg 1-liner to convert videos to “space-saving-letterbox-loving-USB-sized” videos to be played on my Vehicles Entertainment System. Unfortunately, some of the videos continued to fail to play to the point where the system would reset and would need me to cycle the vehicles power to cold reboot the entertainment system.

Suffice to write it’s led to much trial-and-error, with much more excitement on success.

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10 Year Letters: 10 years (and 6 months) later

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I had read a story awhile back about a 12-year young lady that wrote a letter to her future self 10 years later (today.com). Her name was Taylor Smith and she ended up making headlines not only for the novel idea of the letter but for unfortunately passing away from pneumonia.

Do not open until 2023 – Deceased girl’s letter to her future self goes viralDownload

That Christmas in 2014 I decided to start this as a family tradition, getting the kids down at the dinner table, telling them this story and informing them that they would love to hear about today much farther down the line from them.

It’s been 10 years and last night I read my letter. Suffice to say I’m proud of myself.

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