Tech-Reader.blog

Insight: A Beginner's Guide to the Linux traceroute Command on Ubuntu Welcome, fellow Ubuntu explorers! Ever wondered about the invisible pathways your internet traffic takes to reach its destination? Or perhaps you've encountered a frustrating "website not loading" message and wished you could peek behind the curtain to see where things went wrong? Well, you're in the right place! Today, we're diving into a powerful yet surprisingly simple command-line tool that can help you unravel these network mysteries: the traceroute command. Think of  traceroute  as a digital detective for your network connection. It meticulously tracks the journey of your data packets as they hop from one server (router) to another across the vast internet. For Ubuntu newbies, this command might seem a little intimidating at first glance, but trust me, it's a valuable skill to add to your Linux toolkit. Installing traceroute on Ubuntu On m...

New Article on LinkedIn: Ghosting in Business Ghosting isn’t just a dating term anymore — it’s now part of doing business in 2025. But what if we could approach it without frustration? Without blame? Without letting it slow us down? In this article I’m sharing a deeper look at why ghosting happens across interviews, projects, and partnerships — and how a calm, focused mindset can turn silence into momentum. The title is Ghosting in Business: Navigating the Silent Spaces of Instant Messaging. Read the full LinkedIn article here . Written by Aaron Rose, software engineer and technology writer at Tech-Reader.blog.

Build: PocketAWS— A Simple, Friendly Way to Parse AWS ARNs Table of Contents Introduction Setup and Usage Troubleshooting Closing Thoughts Introduction If you've worked in AWS for any length of time, you've run across ARNs (Amazon Resource Names). They seem to be everywhere—popping up in logs, templates, resource screens, and permissions policies. But even though ARNs are essential, they aren't always easy to understand at a glance. That's why we built the PocketAWS ARN Parser: a lightweight, human-friendly tool that helps you break down any AWS ARN into its key parts. Whether you're troubleshooting, documenting, or just learning, this tool makes the invisible structure of ARNs visible, quickly and cleanly. AWS offers plenty of ...

Solve: How a Toothbrush and Alcohol Saved a Raspberry Pi 4 The Pi That Wouldn’t Behave Phil had been battling a stubborn case of Raspberry Pi OS corruption. No matter how carefully he installed, updated, or rebooted, his used Pi 4 would eventually crash and burn. It was maddening. Swapping cables, upgrading the power supply, even re-flashing the SD card—it didn’t matter. Every fix was temporary. Every reboot felt like playing roulette with his file system. Frustrated but determined, he picked up another used Pi 4 from a reputable seller. Brand new OS image. Brand new power brick. Everything should have worked. And yet—almost immediately—he found himself facing similar symptoms. System instability. Boot hangs. Crashes. It didn’t make sense. That’s when Phil did something that almost nobody talks about. He turned back to an old electronics repair trick: he cleaned the board. Born in a Clean Room, Raised in the Wild Raspberry Pi boards are born under the sterile lights of a clean room, bu...

Build: PocketAWS—Instantly Check If an IP Belongs to AWS (and Why It Matters) Introduction You’re knee-deep in log analysis. You spot an unfamiliar IP address. Is it from AWS? Some random bot? Something worse? You need an answer — fast — but the last thing you want is to download a 600MB SDK or trudge through documentation. That’s why we built the PocketAWS IP Checker, a lightweight Python tool that does one thing and does it well. How It Works The IP Checker grabs the official AWS IP ranges (published in JSON) and caches them locally. When you check an IP, it instantly tells you if it matches any AWS block, and if so, what region and service it belongs to. About Backups When you update the AWS IP list ( --update ), PocketAWS automatically creates a backup of your current IP list before downloading the latest version. The backup is saved in the same folder with a timestamped name like:  Bash ~/.cache/aws-ip-checker/ip-ranges-20250426-143512.json Why? Beca...

Solve: The Raspberry Pi, the SSD, and the Splash Screen of Doom There’s a special kind of heartbreak in the Raspberry Pi world: the kind that boots once, teases you with success, then leaves you staring at a frozen Kodi logo while your coffee goes cold. Our friend Phil ran into this exact trap when he upgraded from a trusty 16GB USB 2.0 stick to a 120GB SSD on a shiny USB 3.0 adapter. First boot went great. Kodi launched. No resize. He rebooted. It never came back. We’ve all been there. At first glance, this felt like a LibreELEC quirk. The OS should resize its root filesystem on first boot to take advantage of all that extra SSD space. But when that doesn’t happen—and when rebooting turns success into splash screen purgatory—it’s often a sign of deeper trouble. Partition confusion. Power issues. Or, in Phil’s case, maybe a dongle that only behaves when it...

Insight: The Raspberry Pi's Fatal Flaw—Still No Power Button in 2025 You can build a weather station. A media server. A retro arcade cabinet. A security cam, drone brain, or Kubernetes cluster. But you still can’t turn the thing off. In 2025, the Raspberry Pi—despite its legendary versatility and community support—still lacks one essential feature: a safe, reliable, built-in shutdown mechanism. No power button. No battery circuit. No firmware-managed shutdown. Just unplug it and hope the SD card gods are smiling. For new users and seasoned tinkerers alike, this is a recurring nightmare. A Pi boots fine once. Then a crash. Then a splash screen hang. Then service failures. Then nothing. Ask around and the culprit is often the same: a corrupted filesystem from an improper shutdown. Whether it’s LibreELEC, RetroPie, or Raspberry Pi OS, all bets are off once you pull the plug mid-write—even if you didn’t mean to. What Do We Expect in 2025? In the smartphone era, users are conditioned to...