Introduction

My daughter wanted to take photos at camp this summer, which incorporated a multi-day portaging/canoe trip, and no phones allowed. I picked up a cheap action camera on Amazon, an Akaso EK7000: Amazon link, Akaso link. When she got back, she dumped all her photos from its MicroSD card, and then it was available for me to play with!

It has a wi-fi mode, and sets itself up as a wi-fi hot spot - it is designed such that you connect to it with your phone, and control it with the “Akaso Go” app. Connecting to it with my laptop, I could guess some basic controls (192.72.1.1 is its IP, /index.html reveals some basic information). But I can’t see or guess any useful controls. Ultimately, I want to download photos and view live video on my laptop - like I can with the phone app.

I built a simple Meshtastic Discord Bridge bot, which enables sending and receiving Meshtastic messages through Discord.

I keep my Meshtastic node on all the time at home. This bot his allows me to exchange messages with the mesh in my neighbourhood using my home node through Discord wherever I am. Never again will I miss a “Can you see this?” message. It’s in a “just got it working” state - pretty primitive, missing message delivery confirmation, but I’ve been using it for a few days and it works as designed.

Are you a Meshtastic user in North Toronto? Reach out and I will invite you to a local Meshtastic Discord group.

Background

A mesh network is a network where all participants can communicate with each other, with each participant cooperating with the transmission of information.

I love the idea of mesh networks, where anyone who wants to take part can just jump in, and there’s no dependency on a communications provider for service. In 2016, I attempted to build out a mesh built with wifi technology in my neighbourhood but I was unable to generate interest.

I have Ubuntu Livepatch running on one of my PCs, and I was getting the following error:

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*** System restart required. Kernel SRU period has ended ***

It was clear that I needed to update the kernel to continue to receive patches, but an apt-get upgrade wasn’t installing a new one. It wasn’t clear to me how to identify and update to the latest supported kernel, and it took some searching around.

On October 18th 2023, I migrated this website from WordPress hosted on an AWS EC2 VM, to a static website built with Hugo, now hosted on AWS S3. And this morning (October 21st), I just shut down the VM. I spun up the first version of this VM on February 5th, 2014 - so this setup has served me well for 9 years. It was rebuilt 3 times, starting with Ubuntu 13.04, ending with 20.04. The featured image is a capture of the last time it served up a page.

I work on a web based product which supports hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Our servers were first built out in 2014, before I joined the team. By 2018, our environments were starting to look dated, with some components approaching end of life. I submitted an intake request with our shared-services infrastructure team to modernize it, and assess a move to Azure, but as everything was still supported, and as we had no new requirements, we were unable to make a case, as other lines of business had much more pressing concerns.