Journal

Journal Linux & Open Source

Linux Post Install Clean-Up

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

So, now that I’ve returned to Linux again, I’ve come across several sort of, clean-up tasks that needed to be completed to get things working fully.  A lot of my activities are, by design, machine agnostic.  That is to say, they run off “the cloud”, either through a service or something I am hosting.

One big one I use is One Drive.  I don’t NEED one drive running locally, but it’s convenient and nice to have.  Aside from just syncing and backing up all my writing through it, I also use it to do things like, sync blog graphics files and screen shots.  I’ve found this One Drive Linux Client, which seems promising, I’ve gotten it set up easily enough, but I have not quite worked out how to get it fully working with a selective sync.  I don’t need everything off my One Drive, and don’t have the drive space for that anyway.  So this one is pending a bit.

That hasn’t really slowed me down, I already also use GitHub for a lot of my writing as a secondary place with versioning, etc.  I made sure everything was up to date in Windows, then did a pull from the three remote repositories I care about, my Journal, my Digital Notes library, and my Web Clips library.  I made a few updates and made sure I had the workflow down for keeping things synced.  This also prompted the creation of a simple script to push everything at once.

#!/bin/bash  
git add -A  
git commit -m "Updated via Simple CLI Push"  
git push

I thought about adding the option to add a custom commit message, but these are all private repositories so I don’t really care about what the commit messages are. I also added this to the shell so I can just run it with “gitpush” from anywhere.

This also meant properly setting up SSH keys in Github, so I could actually pull the libraries. I also realized I would need to set up my SSH Keypairs for my web server space, which wasn’t hard but was mildly inconvenient because account based SSH is disabled. The simple solution was to reenable it using the Digital Ocean console, add the keys, then disable it again.

Probably the biggest hassle I had was getting the two NTFS partitions, one on the old primary Windows Drive, and a second on the same physical secondary drive as the system. I mostly use this drive for “working files”. Ebooks to read, monthly file dumps off my phone, programming projects, etc.

It’s just files.

I could manually mount both drives when I started, but any reboot would unmount them. I went out and looked up the fstab settings to use, and had no luck. In fact, I had the opposite of luck because at one point, I couldn’t mount the secondary storage drive at all in Linux. Only in Windows. I tried many options in both OSes, and finally just, backed everything up and wiped the partition in favor of a native ext4 format.

Since I had all this space now anyway, I remapped my /home/ folder to it, which is kind of good practice anyway, then copied everything from the old working files drive into a folder in my own home folder.

This ended up being a weird hassle too, because at one point I had “pre copied” the working files, before the migration, only to discover they had vanished when the /home/ folder was moved. I think what was happening, was they were not part of the encrypted blob, so the system simply, ignored them. So I had to unmount everything, reboot, which failed because now there are no user settings, drop to a recovery console, move the files OUT of the personal home folder, remount it all, then copy the files, again, from inside the OS, so they would receive the proper encryption and show up properly.

What a hassle, but it’s done.

The only real missing element here is that my copy of Affinity Photo is only licensed for Windows, so I’ll need to buy the Linux version. I don’t mind, I have been meaning to upgrade to version 2 anyway. I think Version 2 even has a new sytle liscence that is OS agnostic.

Another last one I’d like to do is automount the network shares from my NAS and file server on boot, if present. I don’t always use the laptop at home though, which means this could be weird when it can’t access them. But I also have an Open VPN tunnel to get to my home network, so there is probably a way to set it up in a way that connects through that always.

Journal

On the Doing of the Things

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

Long time no post, or, sort of, I have been posting on Lameazoid as part of Blaugust, but even that has sort of fallen apart completely. I wasn’t planning to do the full 31 days, then it just started happening, but then it just… wasn’t.

I think mostly I have just still been in a weird funk lately and I was sort of shaking it for posting but not really. I have also been busy off and on with life stuff. My wife and daughter have rented a shop space. My daughter is opening a vintage shop in the front half, something she has wanted to do for a while, and they will be able to run all their online sales stuff from the back and be better organized and productive with it.

The shop isn’t open but there is a website full of links for the online stuff at RTThrift.com.

The shop itself has needed a bit of clean up and work to get set up, and though they have been doing a lot of that, I still get recruited to do things like, haul hundreds of totes from storage to the shop, and sand the entire upstairs with an upright floor sander. Let me tell you, using that thing was surprisingly fun. Highly recommended.

It’s heavy as fuck though, bring a friend to lift it into the car, even if you split it into two-pieces like we discovered in time for the return trip.

There has already been a lot of interest in it through the locals in town promoting it coming and people we talked to at one of our many garage sales.

For my various hobbies I write about here instead of there, There hasn’t been much exciting going on.i have not done any code or electronics projects recently, like blogging, this whole endless funk has me slacking on learning and other things. I have been listening to a ton of music, but nothing I had any impulse to write about.

The garden is going pretty meh, both my lemon and lime trees died, and I am barely getting any peppers or cherry tomatoes. And no regular tomatoes. My basil and oregano aren’t doing great. My mint is going pretty gangbusters but I don’t really know what to do with it. I mostly planted it as a pest deterrent.

I do have a fun Kickstarter device finally shipping that I will have to write about once I receive it and get a chance to play with it some.

I will also add that it’s not really writing that I am down on, just blogging. I have been writing personal journals to Joplin pretty regularly. It’s just not stuff I intend to share.

Journal

This Year’s Garden

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I meant to post when I planted but did not because, “reasons.” More specifically, a lack of motivation to do so. It’s not exactly anything impressive anyway, but that isn’t really supposed to matter anyway. My 2024 gardening is underway, and if it’s anything like the past several years, it will not be very fruitful.

At our old house, we had a pretty decent garden. I built a nice tiered raised bed pyramid thing, we grew plenty of peppers and tomatoes and the plants were super large and full. We had so many tomatoes we made a ton of salsa and I think I still have hot peppers frozen somewhere, though I doubt they are any good years later now.

The new house has been, not so successful. We get a lot more backyard animals here, and generally speaking, they eat all the fruits and vegetables. We have tried a few things to discourage it from keeping them up high on the back deck, to rubber snakes and other things.

I am trying again this year. I moved all of the plants (everything is is pots or buckets) down to the lower deck area, the pots still have the useless rubber snakes. I put my wind chimes down there as well, I am hoping the noise deters the animals a bit. In the past, we could not really use this lower area because we had our dog outside down there fairly often and she would get into things. She passed away a few years ago (like 20 years old, we thought she was immortal). So the lower area is available.

Anyway, also for deterrent, I have planted a bunch of garlic in the bottoms of all the pots, and a few mint plants in small pots nearby. Both are supposed to deter animals due to the smell, or so I hear.

As for what, it’s nothing super fancy, a tomato plant, a cherry tomato plant, a green pepper plant, a poblano pepper plant. I also have some oregano and basil. I also had a cilantro plant but something has already come along and snatched it up completely. Most of the plants I picked up from a sale at the local college agriculture building. They did not have any mint there though so I picked those up at the Kroger. They were conveniently on sale in the vegetable department later the same day I had gone to the college sale.

I also had my leftover plants from last year. Sadly, none of those had made it. We took them inside for the winter but they don’t seem to be coming back at all. Something took and ate my oregano and basil from last year anyway. I also had a Lemon and a Lime tree I had bought on clearance at the end of the summer last year. Both just seem to be dead sticks still.

I don’t have enough plants to make any huge batches of salsa or anything, but hopefully I can start getting some vegetables to eat occasionally.

Journal

Housekeeping Matters

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

It’s been a bit since I’ve last posted, I admit. Today I mostly wanted to address a few housekeeping matters.

I’ve moved the Letterboxd movie post syndication to Lameazoid.com. These posts were filtered from the home page and primarily serve the purpose of archiving what I post on Letterboxd. Frankly,. if you cared about these, I’d prefer a follow over there. They also now appear here on Lameazoid. They are still excluded from the main page. I post TV and movie content on Lameazoid, it’s just a “better fit” over there.

On the subject of “mostly for archival purposes”. I believe I have at least made the BlueSky archive posts slightly less ugly looking. Maybe not. I am not entirely sue how to use all fo the options on the RSS feed plug in and it’s not really important enough to care that much. It’s primarily for archival purposes, in case Blue Sky, or Letterboxed, etc close, I still have my posts. I want to add Threads as well at some point.

My wife is trying to get more serious with her online sales business. We’ve set up a website and Facebook page for it. The website collects the various sales pages mostly. Anyway, I’ve replaced the old “ebay” link with a link to the site. If you want to buy vintage (and some newer) clothing, that’s the primary things for sale over there.

Also notable, I updated the theme to something else. Mostly, I was bored with the old one.

I keep telling myself I should post and write more, I have ideas and thoughts to post on, but in the end, I just get in the way of myself and don’t. I even started writing in my own private journal a bit more just to sort of, try to get the juices flowing more. Which sort of works, but also not. Anyway, I just wanted to get these couple of housekeeping things mentioned.

Journal

Eclipse Adventure

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

In 2017, I took a trek with my parents down to Carbondale Illinois to view the total solar eclipse. While these are reasonably common occurrences, they are not super common in an area where it’s easy to go see them. At this point, I’ve been fortunate to have two of them come nearby within a few years. We had vague plans to go back to Carbondale again for the 2024 eclipse but instead opted to go to my aunt and uncle’s place in Indiana. With one big benefit being that it meant avoiding excessively pricey hotels. Last Eclipse, we stayed in my parent’s camper, but they don’t have the camper anymore so that wasn’t an option this round. It also meant it was much easier to stay an extra night and avoid the stress of the traffic leaving the area.

Aside from visiting my relative’s new house for the first time, my main draw is trying to take photos of the event. It’s also just, neat to be here. My pics from last Eclipse came out pretty well, and I wanted to give it another go. I also tried a little experiment this time using my laptop and a spare webcam I had to try to take a video of the while thing. This… sort of worked out, but it’s not exactly amazing footage. It was still a fun experiment though.

The actual eclipse photos themselves came out alright, though I am not sure why they have such a blue tint to them. It looks pretty cool though. I tried a variety of F-stop and shutter speeds to try to get some of the different layers based on some reading online but they all kind of just came out pretty similar. For these photos, I used my Pentax K-3 DSLR and a 300mm telephoto lens.

I really should look into a better lense at some point, this one is quite old I had a bit of trouble with it zooming out on it’s own while pointed upwards because the weight would cause it to collapse back into itself. I “fixed” it with a spot of tape on the barrel, but it’s been a bit of an issue off and on for a while. For a filter I reused the one I had from 2017. I’d kept it in good shape stored in a small plastic box.

I’ve also posted a full gallery here.