tech and other interesting stuff
Ads-B-Gone I’ve been getting some quite obnoxious ads on my phone of late. In the past, I used Pi-hole, which blocks ads on the network level via DNS. By combining this with OpenVPN I had ad-blocking on my OnePlus 3. Things have moved on since then; the machine – a laptop ‘server’ – serving Pi-hole […]
Continue ReadingI set up a local Gitea server for some ‘local’ repositories- things like my accounts (in hledger format!) which I wouldn’t want on a server not under my own control. I considered doing this in Docker as that is a supported install method and I’ve enjoyed using Docker; but Gitea ties together a few services […]
Continue ReadingBlocks in blocks in blocks I recently installed Stackable’s “Ultimate Gutenberg Blocks” plugin for WordPress as I wanted a block that could be expanded for my series of OCR posts. I created one, an ‘expand’ block in a container which I made a reusable block. However, doing so gave the error: “This block has encountered […]
Continue ReadingLet me snapshot tl;dr: This can happen if you use a storage mechanism that doesn’t support snapshots (see here for more information). However, it seems it can *also* happen if you use external mountpoints. I ran into the issue when trying out a script that backs up proxmox to a borg repository. I checked that […]
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A TV needs a remote We’ve been putting together an HTPC using a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client PC. The OS, Arch Linux, has been installed along with media applications Kodi and Chromium (to give us Netflix). We also installed Openbox to provide a window manager. Now we need to do a bit of polishing […]
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Make it work more gracefully We’ve been transforming a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client PC into an HTPC using Arch Linux. Last time in Part 2, we got hardware acceleration working so that Kodi and Netflix would play smoothly. Now we want to add a layer of user-friendliness. Switching Media Players In part 2 we […]
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Now make it do stuff In our quest for an HTPC, we previously talked about installing Arch Linux on the Wyse 3040 back in Part 1. Now that we have a functional system that we can boot, we can proceed with making it actually play media. Hardware Video Acceleration First, it’s worthwhile enabling hardware acceleration […]
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Why isn’t it working it was working just before now it should be working tl;dr: If you’re using the pygrub loader, make sure /boot/grub/ exists! The Error I was updating some virtual servers (Xen DomUs); I shut one (hestia) down, then tried to bring it back up using xl create hestia.cfg. But it didn’t start. […]
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Yet another thing ffmpeg can do Streaming a camera to YouTube came up in chat the other day. It’s not something I’ve ever had cause to do, but it seemed interesting so I thought I’d try it out. Prerequisites Streaming to YouTube Live from a phone or tablet is possible from the YT app, but […]
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As a wyse mann ynce seide… I recently acquired a Dell Wyse 3040, a thin client PC intended to connect to virtual desktop[s] running remotely. The Wyse 3040 has a quad-core Intel processor, an Atom x5-Z8350 CPU @ 1.44GHz, which won’t win any benchmark tests (a PassMark score of 896!), and is backed by 2GB […]
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