reminder, software is phat

TIL: i still have some old shit in production

it was time to update the base OS on the raspberry pi running my ADSB receiver to something post-pandemic. this has been sitting in the corner of my office keeping my flightradar24 business subscription alive for the last … 8 years?

i totally forgot how anemic the RAM size on the raspberry pi-3a+ is. (512MB - total). this resulted in me periodically blowing things up when i ran out of RAM.

note to self, the following things don’t need to be in my system bootstrap playbooks and should be trimmed.

  • my custom neovim install
  • installation of language servers. especially gopls
  • i probably don’t need to install the latest version of golang wherever i go …

other learnings:

the state of SDR dongles doesn’t seem to have improved a whole heckuva lot in the past few years.

for future me - hopefully we’ve moved beyond needing this in a couple of years. but i suspect that with the plethora of knock-off dongles, this will be a thing.

adding swapfiles can make your life better on smol things.

# bless the file
sudo fallocate -l 2G /swap.img
sudo chmod 0600 /swap.img
sudo mkswap /swap.img
sudo swapon /swap.img
# verify swap is active
sudo swapon -s
# append this to /etc/fstab
/swap.img swap swap defaults 0 0