A while ago we bought new Pulse 15 laptops from Tuxedo Computers.
Installed Ubuntu on them, and for a while the sleep mode was nagging me, it does not really work. Today I found time to investigate this issue.
A while ago we bought new Pulse 15 laptops from Tuxedo Computers.
Installed Ubuntu on them, and for a while the sleep mode was nagging me, it does not really work. Today I found time to investigate this issue.
Sometimes I have to extract Exif information from images, mostly the GPS coordinates. The coordinates coming raw from the images are not very helpful. Let’s look at a picture I took today:
From time to time our laptops receive firmware updates, by using the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (short: fwupd). This worked fine for a long time, until it didn’t. One day I was facing the following error message:
If you use GitHub Actions to run Workflows and tests, you might have spotted this warning recently:
If you use GitHub Actions to run Workflows and tests, you might have spotted this warning recently:
It was time to update my laptop, and I already knew that the update will bring Snap, and installs the Snap Firefox version. Along with many known problems. Previously the laptop was on 20.04 LTS, but this version is about to loose support.
I ran through the upgrade, and then added an Ansible Playbook to handle the Firefox installation, remove the Snap version and install the PPA version. Most of my laptop configuration is handled using Ansible Playbooks.
Had a somewhat curious situation: need to run a task in Ansible in different user accounts, but I don’t have sudo or su access, only ssh access for every account. Took me a moment to figure out how to do that.
One of the things I do in our network is public drives. Every Linux system has a public incoming which is mapped to the primary user of the device (if there is one, like for a laptop). And this incoming shared drive can be accessed without password.
This makes it really convenient to copy files around from one laptop/user to another, or from mobile devices to laptops and vice versa, or use the printer/scanner to send the scan job directly to the laptop of the user’s device. All in all, the users like this, and use it a lot. There is also minimal protection built-in, it will only work in our home network, access is blocked when the laptop is connected to a different network. But the folders are mostly empty anyway. For sharing files over the Internet we also have a Syncthing instance running, but that’s a different story, and not as easy to use.
One thing which I was annoyed about is that by default a Mac will try to connect as a registered user. There is an option Connect as Guest, but it’s not pre-selected. Therefore every time I wanted to share something between Linux and Mac, I had to start Finder, to to Go and then Connect to Server, then click on the server from the list of last entries, and then also click on Guest. The built-in help is also not useful, as it only talks about “click on Guest”.
The Huginn software is not only good for monitoring Twitter feeds, it can also be used to monitor websites for changes.
openHAB can integrate Google Calendars. The functionality is kind of limited, it can only see the current and the next calendar event, but in my case that is enough. More about the use case in another blog post.