I wish I could unsee this.  Not because it’s a violent war movie – I appreciate movies that portray the gruesome realities of war, even if that makes them hard to watch – but because it’s so unclear what the morality is supposed to be.  “War is bad and everyone in it are monsters”, I guess – if I’m being charitable.

It’s basically about a monstrous group of Americans, with no redeeming qualities, that murder & rape their way across Germany.  It manages to make the Nazi’s look good in comparison.  Frankly I’m baffled.

Amazon rejected it, saying it contained:

• Profanity
• Harassment
• Hate speech
• Sexual content
• Illegal activity
• Private information

It of course contains none of that. The only one of those that’s even vaguely related is ‘Hate speech’, and only if they deliberately misinterpreted my review in the exact opposite way it was written. Or maybe they consider merely mentioning rape as ‘Sexual Content’? In any case, they certainly have no problem selling the actual movie, Fury, which does actually contain horrific, graphic portrayals of those.

Sigh.

Now, another of my reviews has been rejected, again for no valid reason, for a Lumisys dehumidifer (since delisted from Amazon). In this case I happen to have the review text saved:

It is in the process of dying – it’s freezing up, faster and faster each day, and making loud cracking noises from thermal expansion.  It is almost certainly leaking refrigerant.  The rate at which it’s removing water from the air has rapidly deteriorated (although as I write it hasn’t technically stopped working entirely – probably just another couple of days, though).

It has lasted about nine months of sporadic use.

Even when it was new and working fine, it wasn’t very effective.  I bought it specifically because it was the highest-rated portable unit available in the U.S. according to https://www.energystar.gov/, but it clearly was both less effective and less efficient than other dehumidifiers I’ve used.

Regarding the dying unit, I tried to contact Lumisys through Amazon and was told by Amazon that they are no longer in operation (despite the fact that Amazon continues to sell their products).

I tried contacting them through their website, for which there is nothing but a web form, and received no response.

By all appearances the company is other defunct or dodging warranty claims.  Either way, this is clearly not a company you should buy from.

This was rejected because, according to Amazon, it is / contains:

• Spam
• Promotions
• Reviews given in exchange for cash, discounts
• Links to other sites
• Attempts to manipulate helpful votes
• Plagiarism
• Infringement
• Impersonation

This is even more blatantly false and an overtly fabricated excuse than the previous case. At best you could point to “Links to other sites”, since I did reference the EPA’s EnergyStar website, but I find it hard to believe that’s considered unacceptable content.

It seems increasingly clear to me that Amazon is contriving to reject any reviews which are critical of the product under review.

I’ve long suspected that Amazon’s review system is biased towards positive reviews – they perpetually have a systemic problem with obviously fake reviews, for one thing – but this is even stronger evidence that they are not merely incompetent regarding review quality and authenticity, but malicious.

For a couple of little home projects I need an always-on computer. In an ideal world, perhaps, this would be something like a Mac Mini. Powerful [enough], easy to install & maintain, runs anything & everything (including anything Linux through Docker or at worst a straight VM). Unfortunately, Mac Minis are surprisingly expensive – even nine year old models are a couple of hundred dollars at a minimum.

So, I decided to instead explore this Raspberry Pi thing.

I very quickly started wishing I hadn’t.

The whole process thus far has just been a series of absurd errors & frustration.

Acquiring a Raspberry Pi

Step zero, of merely buying a Raspberry Pi, is stupidly difficult. Virtually all the retailers officially listed on raspberrypi.org did not actually have the Raspberry Pi 4 in stock. Later I discovered that some of these same retailers, that list no stock on their own websites, are actively selling the Pi on Amazon. So I bought one through there, which is fine, but why doesn’t raspberrypi.org just say to use Amazon, if that’s really the only way to get them?

Next up was all the peripherals – the Pi by default doesn’t even come with a power supply, so it’s useless out of the box. A cursory internet search reveals a huge amount of FUD about power supplies for the Pi. I have no idea if it’s accurate or not, but given some relevant, egregious design flaws in the Raspberry Pi 4, it seems plausible.

Plus you need at a minimum some stand-offs, if not a full case, to prevent the Pi damaging the surface it’s placed on, or damaging itself through shorts.

And addressing those bootstrapping problems ended up sending me down a rabbit hole trying to find a cooling solution too, since it turns out the Raspberry Pi 4 is infamous for overheating and suffering severe performance – and presumably reliability – problems as a result.

In the end, I spent several hours just figuring out how & what to buy, and what is nominally “the $35 computer” cost over $100. Still without a case, even.

Sidenote: the Pimoroni Fan Shim for Raspberry Pi, while a little fiddly to assemble, does seem to work very well, and is quite quiet.

Booting a Raspberry Pi

This is the one part of the process thus far that’s actually worked mostly as it should. I downloaded the full Raspbian Buster image, following the installation guide, and using balenaEtcher to plop the image onto an SD card. It all worked, even with the Etcher app being a tad dodgy (e.g. it lets you select non-removable volumes, which you cannot possibly intend to flash Raspbian onto, which is unnecessarily dangerous). The Raspberry Pi 4 booted first time.

I tried to discern whether booting it headless from its birth would work. Officially it does not, but I found that baffling and dug further, reading countless online guides (e.g.), which seemed to suggest it is possible.

I learnt that there exists the raspi-config tool for headless setup, but it was unclear if it would really work, fully. Though I did the GUI set up process to be conservative, I’ve since used raspi-config quite a bit. Turns out, it not only does work just fine, but it’s actually necessary because the GUI install doesn’t do some important things (like resize the root file system to fill the SD card).

One thing which nearly blew the whole enterprise was when it came to join a wifi network. I have multiple wifi networks, all with [different] emoji for names. The GUI set up tool can’t handle emoji, rendering them as octal escape sequences. I don’t happen to have memorised the four-character byte codes of each emoji, so it was a tedious game of trial-and-error in which I tried every permutation of unreadable SSID & password.

Worse, it took multiple attempts, too, before it finally worked – I have no idea why it failed to join the network the first time or two, despite using the right password. To this day it still arbitrarily fails to join one of the networks, yet joins the other just fine – both are in the same frequency bands from the exact same router.

Aside: Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop computer

Since my intended use is as a headless, touchless server, I played only briefly with it in the GUI, using a makeshift setup involving my TV (the only HDMI viewing device I’ve ever owned – lucky I had that at least!). It’s fine, but very sluggish – it was immediately apparent that nobody with any other options would ever try to actually use a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop machine. Just [cold] launching the web browser, before you even navigate to a website, takes up to a minute. And everything is uncomfortably small, with no apparent system configuration options available to adjust render scaling. Clearly Raspbian is not really intended to be operated at UHD resolutions.

Enabling Remote Access

Though I ultimately intended to use only SSH to interact with the Pi, I did want to have VNC available as an option in case I ran into anything which required using the GUI (again, based on the heavy bias in all the official documentation, and the uncertainty created by that as to whether GUI interaction is required or merely an option).

Turns out, VNC doesn’t work out of the box on a Raspberry Pi, unless you buy commercial, proprietary VNC software. A baffling collusion on the part of the Raspberry Pi / Raspbian people. You have to do additional work to make it actually work – work that’s completely undocumented in any official Raspberry Pi / Raspbian documentation. (at best you’ll find the interwebs littered with accounts & instructions on installing a non-proprietary VNC server in replacement, which presumably also works to solve this problem)

Installing Homebridge

It wasn’t actually my purpose in buying the Raspberry Pi, but I decided that – before I go down the meat grinder that is presumably getting Swift to work on the Pi, since the Pi sadly lacks support for Swift out of the box – I figured I’d just real quickly install Homebridge, since I do have a couple of devices I’ve long wished would work with HomeKit.

Ugh.

What a fucking dumpster fire.

You can install Homebridge raw, but since it’s written in Node.js, I didn’t want it going into my real, bare system – infecting it with npn and JavaScript and all that horror.

This would be a perfect opportunity for Docker, and as one might expect there are many guides on how to install Homebridge via Docker.

Installing Homebridge Docker

Sadly – and frankly bizarrely – running Homebridge through Docker isn’t officially supported.

This 3rd party guide appeared to be the best, based on this third party project to support Homebridge in Docker. Step zero, of course, is to install Docker itself. Surely that’s trivial. It’s Docker. What doesn’t run Docker these days? Hell, macOS runs Docker and it doesn’t even support containers. I was baffled that Raspbian didn’t include Docker pre-installed.

Many, many hours later, it still wasn’t working. One would think that Docker, of all things, would be a seamless thing to sudo apt install, but far from it. For example, the official Docker apt repo for Raspbian tries to install some ‘aufs-kdms’ as a dependency, even though – turns out – it’s not a real dependency and doesn’t even compile on Raspbian. WTF?!

So that wasted hours, in figuring that out – predominately consumed in trawling the interwebs for a solution. After many hours and reading through dozens if not hundreds of StackOverflow, blog, and similar sources quoting similar issues and offering bogus remedies, I finally found a thread that’s actually helpful.

The worst was yet to come.

At some point in this process something also screwed with my Pi’s boot settings to force the root directory to be mounted – at boot – as an overlay with writes going to tmpfs (i.e. nowhere). That wasted yet more hours as I painstakingly root-caused why my Raspberry Pi suddenly had alzheimers (and lost a lot of progress otherwise on installing Homebridge, too).

The web utterly failed in this case, as I couldn’t even find how to disable overlayfs. All I got, mockingly, was endless articles explaining how to enable it and voluntarily ruin your day.

Even just figuring out that it was overlayfs that was screwing me took quite some time, since the first failure symptom was a baffling error message when trying to start dockerd:

failed to start daemon: rename /var/lib/docker/runtimes /var/lib/docker/runtimes-old: invalid cross-device link

With love and fuck you, dockerd

Ultimately I found a fix, in part thanks to this forum post which had enough transparency on enabling this bullshit situation that I could deduce how to disable it – long story short you need to mount the SD card on another, working computer and remove ‘boot=overlay‘ from /boot/cmdline.txt and ‘initramfs initrd.img-4.19.75-v7l+-overlay‘ from /boot/config.txt.

How that ever got enabled I have no idea. Absolutely no commands I ran had anything to do with that at all. Evidently something buried inside Docker installation and/or execution performs this system lobotomy. Even then, I’ve since reviewed every single command I ran, and nothing seems even remotely like it could nor should have caused that.

Despite ultimately defeating all this failure, I was greeted by merely another fatal failure, just as inscrutable as the last:

$ docker-compose up -d
ERROR: Couldn't connect to Docker daemon at http+docker://localhost - is it running?

If it's at a non-standard location, specify the URL with the DOCKER_HOST environment variable.
$ ps auxww | grep docker
root       427  0.6  1.4 966720 58856 ?        Ssl  15:42   0:01 /usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock
pi        1942  0.0  0.0   7348   472 pts/0    S+   15:46   0:00 grep --color=auto docker

Turns out this was because my user (‘pi’, the default) wasn’t a member of the ‘docker’ group. I’d added it previously, but it must have been under the tyrannical overlayfs regime, and all memory of that event purged. Adding it again (then logging out & back in) fixed it (sudo usermod -aG docker pi btw).

This is why Linux can’t have nice things

In summary, Linux in general, and certainly Raspbian specifically, continues to be the same giant clusterfuck it’s always been. I’m no Linux novice – I’ve been writing software for Linux for over a decade as my day job. I’ve just had the luxury of teams of dozens if not hundreds of other engineers to insulate me from the bare wiring that is installing, configuring, & maintaining a Linux installation.

At this point I’m two days in and have only just gotten Docker working. For all the time I’ve wasted I’ve completely blown the price savings between a Raspberry Pi and even a brand new, $800 Mac Mini.

And I still haven’t even started installing Swift, let-alone actually running my Swift app on the Raspberry Pi, which – contrary to where all my time has gone on this project – is the actual purpose of this whole sad enterprise.

Sorry, we are unable to accept reviews for this product. This product has limitations on submitting reviews. There can be a number of reasons for this, including unusual reviewing activity.

Hmmm… curious.  I tried revising my star rating from 2 to 5 to see if it were so blatantly influenced by that, but it did not make a difference.

Anyway, FWIW here’s my review:

First up, the Blink XT cameras do not work with normal batteries – you have to buy quite expensive Lithium batteries.  Use of any other types of AAs will result in the camera not triggering reliably, failing to record full videos (or at all), etc.  So factor in about $20 extra per camera for a pair of such batteries.  Also, the two year quoted battery life appears to be a joke – I had to replace the first set of batteries after only a month or so.

Second, the video quality is not great.  They’re ostensibly 1080p but it looks both upscaled (probably from 720p) and it appears the video is recorded on the sync dongle, not the camera itself, so it’s subject to any radio interference issues that might exist, which will result in noticeably degraded video quality – or recording corrupting or cutting out entirely.  Overall the video quality, even in the best case, is like that of a very cheap smartphone (as of 2018), or say a 2010 iPhone.

Third, the only way to remotely control the cameras, and view recorded videos, is via mobile apps.  No desktop apps, no website, nothing.  So it’s very tedious to view the recordings, manage them, etc.

Fourth, the mobile app for iOS is not great.  It’s very slow – Cloud-saved videos are never loaded in advance, only on demand, and can take up to a minute to start playing.  It’s also a bit buggy.  e.g. a lot of the time it’ll fail to do whatever you asked, responding instead with a long delay ended with an error message along the lines of “the camera is busy”.

Fifth, wireless range is limited – I have one camera only about ten metres from both my wireless router & the sync module, through one exterior wall, and the video quality is noticeably degraded sometimes.  I tried placing one camera with line of sight about 30 metres away, and it worked (barely) for an hour or two and then never again, until I moved it much closer.

Sixth, motion triggering is inconsistent and lacks important configuration options (like zoning to denote areas to ignore or conversely to focus on).  e.g. for one video looking out the front of my place, it unavoidably has the street in view, which means that even on minimal sensitivity, we get a video & notification every single time a car goes by on the street.  Yet it still won’t reliably trigger when a human walks up to the front door, until they’re right in front of the camera.  Yet it’s nonetheless sometimes triggered by squirrels up to 10 metres away.

So, solidly not recommended.  Not the worst thing ever – the system does function in a very minimal sense, and I’ve managed to get some utility out of it, but it’s definitely disappointing – and many of these errors could surely be easily fixed by better software, firmware, or hardware design (e.g. support for normal batteries).