Month: August 2025

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Wake On LAN

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to send a “magic packet” from my laptop to my desktop in order to power on my desktop machine remotely. Unfortunately my old ass motherboard didn’t support it which was always a source of frustration.

my old ass dusty motherboard

Then I bought a new Raspberry Pi 5 because they released a new version which had 16G RAM which I desperately needed to build some software. When I bought the Pi I also bought an NVME HAT and a new 1TB NVME. Unfortunately something wasn’t working but I wasn’t sure what was causing the error. So I went ahead and bought a new NVME from Crucial via Amazon and it worked first time. So I knew the NVME was at fault and returned it to Pimoroni expecting a refund. I didn’t get a refund, I got a replacement.

My old ass motherboard had an NVME slot so I thought “oooh, I don’t really need a 4th drive in this desktop machine but I’ll plug it in anyway”. So I took it apart, plugged in the NVME drive, put it all back together and booted it up. Nothing, except for the dreaded BIOS beeps of death. 5 of them – which means something is wrong with the motherboard or the processor. Expensive. “No worries” thought I – I’ll just take out the NVME drive again. Took it apart, removed the NVME, put it all back together. 5 beeps. Damnit.

This desktop machine has been my workhorse for about a decade. When I first got it I absolutely maxed it out. It was beautiful. Silent. Fast. Compiled code in seconds. However, it seems taking a ten year old motherboard and plugging in a cutting edge NVME drive wasn’t a great idea.

I did some research and went for a reasonable Ryzen motherboard with a new AMD processor. £200 for the pair and my existing DDR4 RAM was compatible. The MoBo arrived and I ripped the entire machine apart. Came to put my RAM in and realised the new board only had 2 DDR4 slots – whereas I had 4 8G DDR4 modules.

So I fired it up with 16G RAM. Tried to do a build whilst some background processes were running and ran out of memory. This would not do. I quizzed Oli about his machine and he had 32G made up of 2 * 16G modules. So we swapped. It was a win win. I got 32G again and Oli got 32G but the RAM I gave him was faster than the RAM he had. Since he’s a gamer he’ll benefit from faster RAM – about 50% faster. To me the speed of RAM didn’t really matter so much.

Get to the point Darren!

After a few weeks of my new AMD Ryzen motherboard I once again remembered my goal of being able to do a WOL [ Wake On Lan ] – I did a quick check on the motherboard and it indeed supported Wake-On LAN.

So…..I set up a systemd job to enable Wake-On LAN each time it boots and I can now finally fire up my laptop and run a script which basically does:

wakeonlan <MAC ADDRESS>

and as if by magic my desktop starts up and gets on with doing it’s thing whilst I eat breakfast.

So I now have a slightly faster, slightly quieter desktop again and I haven’t quite got around to testing if the replacement NVME drive works anywhere.

Clouds, silver linings and all that.

But hey kids, in general if your machine is working fine and you don’t need another 1TB of storage then just leave it alone. Put the NVME in the spares cupboard and get on with life. But WOL is cool 🙂

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Trampoline Moving

Many many years ago when my kids were little they decided they wanted a trampoline. Being the doting father I am I bought them one, and then built it. A few years later it was getting a bit small and knackered but they still played on it all the time so we bought a bigger one.

I didn’t have a photo of the original so this is a screen grab from a video showing the OG trampoline in the background and the new one in the foreground.

After a few years the “new” one started showing signs of wear and tear and then a storm came in.

2017

I got Uncle Chris to do a bit of welding and did some work to bring it all to a working state but I’d be constantly repairing it and was getting pretty annoyed with the whole situation.

2020

Eventually I decided it was a bit of an embarrassment and decided it had to go. Getting fed up with buying new trampolines, building them and disassembling the old one I decided the next trampoline was gonna be a keeper. Plus I was earning good money at the time thanks to Sky so I basically bought the best outdoor trampoline on the market

A thing of beauty, weighs a tonne.

This trampoline was then secured to the ground with ground anchors and ratchet straps and survived many many storms without incident.

Fast forward to 2025 and the underneath of the trampoline was looking a proper mess since I couldn’t fit the ride-on mower beneath to keep the ground looking good. Every now and then I’d get the strimmer and fly-mo out but it was a PITA to do that and eventually it all just got overgrown.

I assembled the Droylesden Avengers, stocked up on beer and wine and invited them along for a trampoline moving party. Which involved 10 minutes of trampoline moving and 5 hours of drinking beer and wine.

four “burly” men moved it and then I ran the ride-on over the mess that was left behind. It’ll green up soon enough and the untrained eye will never know.

A side-quest to this whole adventure was to get rid of the random beers left over from Oliver’s after party party.

As we can see Deej turned out to be a superstar and take a Fosters for the team. Charlie and James likewise helped to get rid of some bottles of Madri. Then we got stuck into far too much wine. We drank the whole recent delivery from Naked Wines, drank my two bottles of wine that I’d brought back from the winery in Greece and generally just emptied the wine fridge. Still, it was worth it.

Mission accomplished. I suspect the next trampoline moving day will be August 2026.