I recently bought a used ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 on eBay. One of the risks of buying a used machine is that one never knows in what state the battery will be. And, on this machine, while it was not dreadful - it had about 75% of its capacity - it was not ideal either. But, it is a ThinkPad, so replacing the battery is easy. Fortunately, when I fitted the skin, I made sure that the screws remained accessible. I would have preferred to have bought a replacement battery from iFixit, but they were...| Neil's blog
I thought that it might be a good idea to have a local (well, on my local network) copy of Wikipedia, and some other bits. The go-to tool for this seems to be kiwix, and that’s what I used, running on a Raspberry Pi. The gist was: add a fresh 1TB SSD to the Raspberry Pi add some content for kiwix install kiwix and create a library file put an nginx proxy in front of it (for TLS termination) Adding a 1TB SSD to the Raspberry Pi I created a mount point: mkdir -p /media/1TB Using lsblk -f to g...| Neil's blog
A couple of years ago, I wrote about using NetworkManager’s dispatcher.| neilzone.co.uk
Do you have a phone, tablet, or laptop (or, well, any device…) which will only take a physical SIM, but with which you’d like to use eSIMs?| neilzone.co.uk
(This one is a reminder for me!) vidir is in Debian’s moreutils package: sudo apt install moreutils -y Add the following to ~/.bashrc: export VISUAL=vim export EDITOR="$VISUAL" Then re-source .bashrc: source ~/.bashrc| Neil's blog
I am sad that RadioFreeFedi has gone away. I loved it. So when Andy Piper mentioned the existence of The Indie Beat Radio FM (run by MizKirsten), as another fedi, independent, streaming radio project, I was keen to give it a try. It currently has an impressive 1058 tracks, and four streams (ambient, electronic, jazz, and everything). I am sure that this will grow further in time. The website too is nice: clear, simple, and uncluttered. Personally, I prefer to listen to radio either through mp...| Neil's blog
For $reasons, I needed to run VirtualBox on my laptop, to make some changes to a .vdi disk image. I installed VirtualBox but, when I tried to run it, I got an error message saying Cannot operate in vmx boot mode Or something like that. (I couldn’t find a way of copying the error message to the clipboard.) To make this go away, I edited my grub config (/etc/default/grub) to add kvm.enable_virt_at_load=0: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet kvm.enable_virt_at_load=0" I then ran sudo update-grub...| Neil's blog
Sandra has an iPhone, and I wanted to back up the photos on it to an external drive. I was expecting this to be a bit of a nightmare but it turned out to be very easy. I used a laptop running Debian testing with GNOME. Sandra’s iPhone is running whatever the latest version of iOS is - 18.something, I think. It is not “jailbreaked”/“jailbroken” / “rooted” or anything like that. It went like this: I plugged Sandra’s unlocked phone into my computer. The phone prompted me to “Tr...| Neil's blog
For a while now, I’ve used nautilus-image-converter for doing simple operations on images. In particular, for scaling images down to 25%, mostly so I can post them to the fediverse. I haven’t managed to get it working from Debian’s apt repository for testing (dependency issues), and I didn’t fancy building it. Plus, it was only a GUI for imagemagick anyway. So an obvious replacement was to use a nautilus script to call magick directly. Something like this: #!/bin/bash SELECTEDFILES="$...| Neil's blog
Something I haven’t had to do before arising from my new-to-me laptop. Most of the time, I use my laptop plugged into two large external displays, via USB-C dock. In this case, I don’t care too much about the laptop display. I have it working, and if I want to keep an occasional eye on a piece of software, I might put it there, but my main focus is on the external displays. But sometimes, I will also use the laptop on its own, when obviously the laptop display is important to me. I’m st...| Neil's blog
I was pretty happy with my X1 Yoga Gen 2, but then I stumbled across a secondhand Gen 6 - four years newer, with a 4K screen and 32G of RAM - going for a very reasonable price. So I took the plunge. These are some notes for me. I doubt that there’s anything unduly interesting or novel in here; after all, this machine has been around for a couple of years now (or longer). It’s fast (by my standards) This is, by some way, the fastest machine that I have ever had. I haven’t done any benchm...| Neil's blog
One of the things I didn’t get around to sorting out during my experiment in using a terminal-only computer was a way of interacting with my calendar (caldav) and contacts (carddav) accounts on my Nextcloud server. I got vdirsyncer working fine, but interacting with the downloaded .ics/.vcf file was providing tricky with calcure and one other package I tried (I can’t remember the name). I did want to get it working, mostly out of stubbornness than because I think I will use it much, and, ...| Neil's blog
Over the weekend, I set up the Lyrion Music Server, which existed originally to serve music to the Squeezebox hardware.| neilzone.co.uk
I use Jellyfin for media streaming, and also an arrangement based around mpd and ncmpcpp for my office.| neilzone.co.uk
I’ve written before about my media player setup, including Jellyfin (as the media server), and yt-dlp for downloading from YouTube.| neilzone.co.uk
Chris Stokel-Walker asked on Twitter: Do you still buy or watch DVDs or Blu-Ray discs?| neilzone.co.uk
Fed up with YouTube’s constant adverts and, on some platforms, the inability to do picture-in-picture easily?| neilzone.co.uk
I am using mpd, running on an Intel NUC, connected to some old speakers, for playing music in my office, controlled by ncmpcpp on my laptop, or an app on my phone.| neilzone.co.uk