I have, for a long time, been looking for a better alternative to Google Photos. Although Google Photos does exactly what I want, and isn’t that expensive, I do often consider the fact that all of my photos are in Google’s hands. I did move to Synology Photos a few years ago. The move itself was straight forward enough, but the user experience leaves quite a lot to be desired. Read more...

It is the time of year again where I decide to update my local computer configuration, as well as any remote linux server(s) that I am maintaining. I really appreciate having a familiar prompt and alias setup whenever I login to any of my servers/workstations. As per usual, I cannot remember which specific packages and plugins I use; so I’ve am using this post for future me to discover how I actually configured my environments. Read more...

When running a powershell script, I often find I need to run the script in an elevated prompt. The nature of my job is that often these scripts will be run by people that don’t really know what Powershell is. I have found it quite useful to first create a bash script that the user executes, which in turn calls the actual Powershell script as an elevated user. To keep this handy, I’m posting it here for future me. Read more...

More and more I find myself quickly spinning up a new Windows VM on my unraid server. It is always a ‘temporary’ VM which, after setting up exactly how I like, I invariably then wish I’d set a much larger virtual disk size. The standard VM disk size is 30G and that always seems to be enough. Fast forward an hour or two and I really wish I had set something more realistic. Read more...

When accessing remote servers that I am responsible for, I always initiate a tmux session along with the SSH session. This means I am always in a tmux session and I will never forget to start a tmux session manually. There is something particurly frustrating about starting a process on a remote server only to realise that you I forgot to start a tmux session and the process is going to take > 1 hour. Read more...

I finally had chance to get a dedicated server at Hetzner for my own projects and use. No client requirements, no deadlines and no specification requirements. Seems like a simple thing but just about every ‘proper’ server I have ever worked on has been for a client or work project. Now that I had access to my own server, it was time to configure it exactly how I wanted. As usual, I decided to use Ubuntu - I’m familiar with it and I really don’t mind the bloat that could be avoided with the likes of CentOS or Arch. Read more...

The latest version of Ubuntu has recently been released (20.04 LTS) and along with it comes the latest version of tmux. Tmux is now at release 3.0a and this version is pre-installed with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The problem is, when you want to import a tmux configuration file from tmux 2.9 or below, you get many errors. The fix for me was simple… tmux kill-server Once I killed all old sessions and stopped the tmux server the new tmux version loaded the existing configuration file without any issue or errors. Read more...

I recently purchased another Raspberry Pi 4 but this time I wanted to use Ubuntu 20.04 and I wanted to use a USB 3 1TB external hard drive as the boot disk. The reason for using a large boot disk is mainly to avoid SD card corruptions in future as all read/writes (once booted) will be on the external USB drive not on the SD card. The first step is install Ubuntu 20. Read more...

I recently noted in a blog post that I use a short snippet to either connect to an existing tmux session when I start a new SSH connection, or create a new tmux session if an existing one doesn’t exist. The problem is, I have been using Termius more often than not recently and using the snippet feature as mentioned in the previous blog post. I needed to make this work within a normal terminal today and thought I would add the snippet as a blog post so I don’t forget for next time. Read more...

I have been using Teckin smart plugs around the house for quite some time now. They’re really handy as they integrate with Google Home via the Smart Life app ecosystem. This means that each night we can tell Google to “turn everything off” and our lamps all switch off at the wall socket. What I have wanted to do for some time, after seeing my friend do it with great success, was to flash the Teckin firmware to esphome so that I can control the sockets via Home Assistant and also get realtime values for the socket’s watt, amps and voltage loads. Read more...