Tag: howto
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It doesn't seem that long ago that I put together a Pi-Top and started tricking it out to use as a backup system. It was problematic in some important ways (the keyboard's a bit wonky), but most of all the supported respin of Raspbian for use with the Pi-Top was really, really slow and a bit fragile. While Windbringer was busy doing a full backup last week I took my Pi-Top for a spin while out and about, and to be blunt it was too bloody slow to use. At first I figured that the microSD card I was using …
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Let's say that you have a bunch of servers that you admin en masse using Ansible. You have all of them listed and organized in your /etc/ansible/hosts file. Let's say that each server is running a system service (like my Systembot) running under systemd in --user mode. (Yes, I'm going to use my exocortex-halo/ repository for this, because I just worked out a good way to keep everything up to date and want to share the technique for everyone new to Ansible. Pay it forward, you know?) You want to use Ansible to update your copy of Systembot …
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Last weekend I was running short of stuff to hack around on and lamented this fact on the Fediverse. I was summarily challenged to find a way to archive posts to the Fediverse in an open, easy to understand data format that was easy to index, and did not use any third party services (like IFTTT or Zapier). I thought about it a bit and came up with a reasonably simple solution that uses three Huginn agents to collect, process, and write out posts as individual JSON documents to the same box I run that part of my exocortex on …
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EDIT - 20230422 - Fixed the command to increase the amount of space used on a new and bigger drive. Also updated some of the links because the official btrfs page has changed.
EDIT - 20230129 - Changed the btrfs replacement command a bit. Added a command block to force the SATA controller to rescan the devices available to it.
EDIT - 20211120 - Edited the page so that it makes more sense. The last couple of edits were out of sequence. Cleaned up a few things, too.
EDIT - 20211107 @ 1324 UTC-7 - Added how to monitor the drive replacement process.
EDIT - 20201206 @ 2216 UTC-7 - Added how …
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In September of 2019 a conference called Please Try This At Home was held in Pittsburgh, PA. One of the talks was given by Dr. Mixael Laufer on the topic of how to acquire pharmaceuticals such as mifepristone (local mirror) and misoprostol (local mirror) for emergency personal use. I spoke with Dr. Laufer and the person who made this recording, and they both agreed to let me post it for download and archival as long as I sent them the links to it. So, here it is.
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A common task that people using Huginn set up as their "Hello, world!" project is getting the daily weather report because it's practical, easy, and fairly well documented. However, the existing example is somewhat obsolete because it references the Weather Underground API that no longer exists, having been sunset at the end of 2018. Recently, the Weather Underground code in the Huginn Weather Agent was taken out because it's no longer usable. But, other options exist. The US National Weather Service has a free to use API that we can use with Huginn with a little extra work. Here's what …
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A couple of weeks ago, one of my co-workers mentioned in passing that he'd surprised himself by adding an SSD (solid state drive) to his file server at home. To recap a bit, Leandra, my primary server at home has a sizable RAID-5 array storing all of my data. However, one of the tradeoffs is that stuff recently written to the array is a little slow to be read back. It's really not noticeable unless you're logged in and running commands, and even then the lag is something like one or two seconds. Noticeable but not actually problematic. At any …
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UPDATED: 18 March 2019 - External display adapters that actually work with this model (and Arch Linux) added.
For various reasons, I found that I had a need to upgrade Windbringer's hardware very recently. This might be the first time that a catastrophic failure of some kind was not involved, so it's kind of a weird feeling to have two laptops side by side, one in process and one to do research as snags cropped up. This time around I bought a Dell XPS 15 Touch (9570) - I was expecting things to be substantially the same, but this did not seem …
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Here's the situation: You're using Ansible to configure a machine on your network, like a new Raspberry Pi. Ansible has done a bunch of things to the machine and needs to reboot it - for example, when you grow a Raspbian disk image so that it takes up the entire device, it has to be rebooted to notice the change. The question is, how do you reboot the machine, have Ansible pick up where it left off, and do it in one playbook only (instead of two or more)?
I spent the last couple of days searching for specifics and found …
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This took me a while to figure out, so here's a fix for an annoying problem:
Let's say that you have a media box running Kodi on your local area network. You have uPNP turned on so you can stream videos from your media box across your LAN. You want to use VLC to watch stuff across your LAN.
Problem: When you select your Kodi box in VLC and double-click on the server to open the directory of media to watch, VLC crashes with no error message (even in debug mode).
Explanation: VLC is configured to exit when the current …
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