#linux

I run Tailscale on my laptops, phone and NAS, and wanted to add an exit node so I could route traffic through my own connection when I’m out and about. The obvious place to put it was the NAS, since it’s already always on, but the NAS also holds everything I’d least like exposed if something went wrong. Making it double up as an exit node, with every device’s outbound traffic flowing through it, didn’t sit right. What I wanted instead was a disposable, isolated VM living on the same machine doing that job, leaving the NAS untouched.

I’ve been having a bit of a think about data I’ve left entirely in someone else’s hands. Specifically Google Photos, which has photos going back to 2011 and no local copy anywhere. I’m not going anywhere dramatic with it, but having a backup I actually control felt overdue.

I’ve had a SNUNMU GK3 mini-PC kicking about since early-2023, barely used. An impulse buy that ended up on a shelf, alongside a drawer full of old drives from various machines and NAS attempts that never quite came together. Picking up a 5-bay USB enclosure finally gave me a reason to use all of it. It’s not polished and it’s not redundant, but it’s simple, flexible, and entirely under my control.

I tend to work on this blog from multiple machines in my home. These include a desktop PC running Windows, a MacBook Pro running macOS, and a Chromebook with the Linux environment enabled. Across all of these machines I primarily use Visual Studio Code.

I helped crowdfund the DevTerm from ClockworkPi back in November 2020 and it arrived in January 2022. It’s a nice device, but it’s not perfect. Here’s some of the mods I’ve made to improve my DevTerm.

I’ve been gradually adding internal speakers to each of my Pocket CHIPs lately and found it cumbersome to have to either open alsamixer or use the volume control page in the Pocket CHIP launcher to control volume.

This page is a changing document. I’ll probably add more notes to it in the future. These are just some notes that I’ve put together in the past about flashing and upgrading the CHIP (and Pocket CHIP) computer.

This post is about using the ORCA livecoding playground on the Pocket CHIP From the ORCA wiki: Orca is a two-dimensional esoteric programming language in which every letter of the alphabet is an operator, where lowercase letters operate on bang, uppercase letters operate each frame. This livecoding language is designed to procedurally generate MIDI, UDP or OSC messages.

This MacbookPro8,2 has been through a lot. I did some small upgrades back in 2012, then in 2014 it experienced some issues with the dedicated GPU that many Macbook’s of this model experienced. For a while I managed to keep it running my forcefully disabling the dedicated GPU with some EFI trickery, and running some form of Linux for a while (I think I kept it going with Elementary OS). In 2016 (or there abouts) I took the drastic measure of baking the mainboard in the oven to fix the dedicated GPU issue (by reflowing/reballing the solder), reinstalled macOS and then (besides a short stint as my wife’s computer) the MacBookPro8,2 ended up back on a shelf. until today! out of boredom I’ve decided to revisit this old beast. Installing Ubuntu on my old early-2011 MacBookPro8,2 Install rEFInd - https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ Create a Ubuntu USB (I used Rufus on my Windows PC, with the Ubuntu 18.04.2 iso) Boot the iso (hold alt key to get the rEFInd menu, select the USB) And this is where the first headache is. To make Ubuntu play nicely, you need to edit the boot commands so that certain chipset features are poked and enabled. At the Ubuntu boot menu, select the option you want (e.g. Live installer) and press e, which will bring you to the editor. First disable the AMD graphics card by adding the following lines after set gfxpayload=keep outb 0x728 1 outb 0x710 2 outb 0x740 2 outb 0x750 0 Next add the following after quiet splash on the boot command: i915.lvds_channel_mode=2 i915.modeset=1 i915.lvds_use_ssc=0 Then press F10 to boot, and you should successfully boot to the Ubuntu installer. From here you can install Ubuntu. You can delete the macOS partitions if you like, just make sure you keep the ~200mb EFI partition, and create your Ubuntu partitions after that. You’ll need to do this again for your first boot after you’ve got Ubuntu installed, and then you can edit your Grub file permenantly using grub-customizer or something.

The more time that I spend using Arch Linux on my HP Chromebook 11, the more things I find to tweak and tinker with. The latest thing I’ve addressed is making suspend work when the lid is closed. After speaking to my resident Arch guru about it, he pointed me to a blog post that he wrote on the subject, before actually showing me how to make it work.

I arrived at this solution recently when looking to compress a massive print-quality PDF for the web. If you search for “compressing pdf files on mac” you’ll get lots of bad results. There are lots of paid applications out there that claim to be able to do this, but they’re (obviously) not free.

Just to follow up from my earlier post about Installing Arch Linux on the HP Chromebook 11, I’ve put together a video of the process to show how simple it really is.

I concluded in my previous post about the HP Chromebook 11 that it’s a good device for casually browsing the internet, but it’s no replacement for a regular laptop or desktop for getting stuff done. Since that post I’ve not used the Chromebook very much, so with a vacant weekend I’ve decided to blow the dust off of the Chromebook and try to squeeze some more functionality out of it.

Last week, a Ubuntu native installer for the Nexus 7 was released, along with instructions on how to install Ubuntu on the Nexus 7. The plan is that the Nexus 7 will be the ‘core’ device that Canonical will build their tablet version of Ubuntu around. Right now, it’s quite experimental – the interface sees no tweaks for the tablet interface, beyond having an onscreen keyboard available.

so, i’ve just reinstalled windows xp, and did a complete format of my hard drive.. it’s at time like this im glad i bought my creative zen xtra 30gb mp3 player, the mp3 player is so cool..

i have the next two weeks off of school, its easter break.. rejoice. im running linux on my pc now, redhat 9 infact.. its something good to start out with, and eventually i plan on changing to debian or gentoo linux im gonna start messing with the site now, so if you stumble across it, and it looks like it was created by a 12 year old AOLer .. thats why.