Serial port redirection from Windows to Linux with socat

My work computer is a Windows machine running several virtual machines with Linux and FreeBSD via VirtualBox. A part of my work requires developing software that interacts with hardware. Most of the time I have successfully used VirtualBox USB filtering to redirect USB devices to the virtual machines, but recently I got a USB device (CDC-ACM class) that refused to be forwarded to the VM.
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Gentoo on Banana Pi

I like to use Gentoo for most of my tasks (except the smallest systems that run OpenWrt). I also wanted to have it on the Banana Pi. I did not find any specific manual for Gentoo and the Banana, so I followed the standard, two-step installation manual for any architecture:

  1. Extract a stage 3 tarball to the medium that will be the rootfs
  2. Try booting the kernel into it

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RRDtool – quick tutorial

rrdtool-3dlogo

RRDtool is both a database and a graphing tool that is well-suited to visualize time-varying data like temperature, pressure and all kinds of telemetry.

There are many tutorials available, but they dig too much into the details (like the official one). Since I use RRDtool only for storing and graphing telemetry data I will explain how to do it the easy way.

I use RRDtool for graphing many sources of data, like my small solar system:
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