Category: technology-and-computing

I bought a Framework 13, heres my early thoughts

Framework 13 laptop with lid closed

As part of my redudancy I needed rethink my computer setup at home. For the longest time I have used my work laptop as mine. It fits with the blur of work and personal life. Although I did run Ubuntu on the Dell XPS 13 and had pretty much complete admin control to it.

Ultimately I needed to give it back and wipe it clean using Dban of course, meaning I needed to pick a personal laptop. As Dell has dropped the XPS 13 range, now was a good time to switch to Framework.

There has been a few times when I considered one. Once when my laptop bag strap broke as I was crossing the road and squashed the cornder. It didn’t smash the screen or damage the USB C port luckily. Anyway I clearly remember a conversation with Cory Doctorow who I was hosting for his new book at the time, he showed me how cheap and easy it was to replace the audiojack, USB C’s and just being able to replace every aspect of it.

I was pretty much sold but it wasn’t till about a 18 months later when the reality set in that I should actually buy one. I did a ton of research and asked peoples views including Andy Piper and found the only disadvantage is advance configurations and the firmware doesn’t get updated as quickly as other laptops. Nothing major.

Framework DIY edition screen bezel in a box

With that I opted for the Framework 13 DIY Edition (Intel Core Ultra Series 1). I bought the most amount of memory (1x 32gig DIMM) and storage (4tb) my budget would take on Amazon then put it all together. It wasn’t difficult but I was very careful as I didn’t want to cause any problems for myself. I’d say it was easier than building PCs in the past but more fiddly.

I choose Intel, mainly because I had problems with AMD and Linux in the past. Maybe this was a legacy mistake but its done now.

Once it was put togther, I installed Ubuntu on it giving the silly amount of storage I have 100gig of swap (mainly for when I do get another 32gig Dimm)

Its been a few days and honestly its a great machine.I have had problems mainly with Ubuntu and moving things between the Dell and Framwork. Ubuntu defaulted to Wayland and Unity cruff. I couldn’t get Appimages to work and moving mainly to Flatpaks required a lot of permission tweaking.

The laptop its self is good but large compared to the XPS 13, it only just fits into my laptop bag. The keys are taller than what I’m use to but the trackpad feels great. I think Ideally I would have a black graphine body rather than the silver. It reminds me of the Mac books.

Weirdly the fan does come on sometimes (like old mac books) and its a bit noisy but I’ll get to the bottom of it in time.

Framework laptop with ubuntu with my background

I really like the expansion ports which there are 4 of. I thought the audio jack was also on an expansion port but its built in. The screen suporised me as I have very good eye sight and opted for the 2.5k screen with a max resolution of 2880px x 1920px at 120hz! I have mine set to 60hz to save on battery. Talking of which its been great at about 8-9 hours with the battary limited to 80% in the bios. To be fair replacing the battery isn’t a problem with the Framework laptop, when it gets low after lots of use.

This is a good buy and glad I went this route, although maybe I bought too soon… the 12 inch looks good but would I replace my Raspberry Pi 5 desktop for the desktop framework unlikely.

Proton wallet beta testing

Proton Wallet beta

I have been slowly moving towards Proton for many thing, with that I saw they were experimenting with a new crypto wallet and decided to sign up.

Yesterday I got a email inviting me on to the beta.

Since launch, Proton Wallet has seen unprecedented demand and we have been busy adding capacity. You now have exclusive early access to Proton Wallet, our self-custodial, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted Bitcoin wallet. We’ve designed Proton Wallet to be a safer way to hold bitcoin (BTC) and easy to use so everyone can take control of their financial privacy and freedom.

With Proton Wallet, as long as you have your wallet seed phrase, your BTC will always belong to you, even if Proton disappears. And our unique Bitcoin via Email feature makes it simple to securely send BTC to other Proton Wallet users.

Proton Wallet is currently still in Early Access, and only a limited number of people can use it. As a Proton supporter, you have five invites you can use to give your friends and family early access. While it is not prohibited, please do not sell invites for money.

Yes that means I do have a few invites, although I am thinking it was highly trusting (or silly) of me to move my bitcoin to a beta project.

My thoughts so far is I do feel its better than where it was previously, I did mean to go coldstorage but never found the time. I do wish Ethereum and other crypto was supported (especially Chia). I’m sure that will come in time.

Another good service by Proton, Andy Yen and team are well worth backing.

Downloading podcasts on a QNAP nas, the hard way

QNAP NasFor a long time I have had this quite unique way to download podcasts on my home network. It’s served me very well but since getting the NAS it’s been an endless fight to find a good way to do the same with minimal effort. Up till recently I have been running another machine on my network with Ubuntu, to download the podcasts using the tiny tiny rss source.

I would sync the podcasts over the network to my NAS mainly for connivance but I like the idea of the NAS being the place to access everything.

So after many years I finally come to a solution which might be useful to others too, as I couldn’t find a good solution in one place. To be fair I stopped running Tiny Tiny RSS (TTRSS) in favour of FreshRSS but regardless.

These are all for informational purposes and aimed at technical people who understand their way around a the terminal, have sudo and SSH access and can use alternative app repos.

  1. Install CrontabUI and Entware-std on your QNAP using the linked repo.
  2. I tried using CastGet which you can install via OPKG store but couldn’t get to grips with it, as it didn’t support what Podget did.
  3. I downloaded and unzipped Podget then ran it from the terminal. It worked once I found the user directory /share/homes/{username}
  4. Then I started moving the download directory and where the config files sat by modifying the permissions.
  5. Once it was working, I created a shell script which would pull the downloads and have all the parameters set. Remembering to make it executable checked it can work under a admin user
  6. Then started on the Qnap cron, which is a pain and needs attention. This is also where CrontabUI can save you a lot of time. I did do it manually but found it tiresome and there was little feedback.
  7. In CrontabUI, I tried a number of different options and would check they would run, looking at the timestamps of files. In the end what work ed for me was, /sbin/download-podcasts.sh. I tried many times to get it working but found it wouldn’t actually run outside of /sbin even with the right execute permissions.
  8. Now it works but may reconsider switching to Castget now I stopped using TTRSS and I have found I need to use Podget 0.6 as it throws a lot of errors from missing libraries and out of date fgrep commands.

Hopefully this might be useful to others? There might be an update if I switch back to Castget.

Growing up in the age of the search

Gnome shell search

This has been massively shared on the internet but I did find it interesting as something to look at how I organise myself.

Generally I use folders of hierarchy on most of my systems including my Android devices. I find the linux operating system encourages you put files in certain locations, especially when you are using different applications and different app systems. For example using snap, flatpak, apt and appimage. Its quite a diverse (sometimes complex) ecosystem compared to OSx and Windows I found.

I do use symbolic links (shortcuts) a lot on my systems and find it useful to link things within remote locations like my NAS or online storage.

Gnome shell has search built in from the super key (windows key on most laptops). I don’t tend to use the search for files or folders, which in hindsight is a bit silly because its much quicker. I guess it just wasn’t as good & quick as it is now, and so never got use to using it. Even now I still would put the files in a certain folder to be clear where it is for my mind.

I use dropbox, which kind of forces you to use a folder hierarchy. There is most of my files on there and that includes personal, work, app, etc. I have my Google drive mounted as a folder inside of Linux, so I also manage that in a similar way.

Now I’m looking at the list of Gnome shell search extensions and thinking about using it much more. Heck I can search my email, files, music, etc from Gnome shell (no Joplin however) time to start using it more.

Paypal goes crypto

Use Paypal to buy Crypto We all knew it was coming but it feels so strange seeing Paypal supporting Crypto. Especially certain ones over others.

Confirming crypto in Paypal

At least there is more terms and conditions before you can actually buy.

Buying etherum in PaypalActually buying some Ethereum is pretty straight forward. You can pick anything linked to Paypal including your credit and debit cards (which is slightly troubling).

Having bought a little bit, it seems to be stuck in Paypal. I couldn’t find any wallet address or a way to send the bought funds to other own crypto wallets. Maybe that might come but I doubt it.

 

Update your Chrome browser now

The amount of times I have been on zoom during work, someone shares their own screen and you can see there Chrome browser almost begging the user to hit update.

Most people put these updates off and I have really hard time understanding why, especially because the most updates are done in seconds and you are back to where you left off. Maybe its different on Windows and Mac but on Linux very few updates require a reboot. If a browser required a reboot I would be shocked.

The chrome updates recently have become critical with a number of zero-day exploits running wild.

I found this post explaining the colour differences in Chrome updates.

Get a Chrome update when available

Normally updates happen in the background when you close and reopen your computer’s browser. But if you haven’t closed your browser in a while, you might see a pending update:

  1. On your computer, open Chrome.
  2. At the top right, look at More More.
  3. If an update is pending, the icon will be coloured:
    • Green: An update was released less than 2 days ago.
    • Orange: An update was released about 4 days ago.
    • Red: An update was released at least a week ago.

The amount of the people I have seen with the Red update is incredible. Of course if you are not sure how to update Chrome…

To update Google Chrome:

  1. On your computer, open Chrome.
  2. At the top right, click More More.
  3. Click Update Google Chrome.
    • Important: If you can’t find this button, you’re on the latest version.
  4. Click Relaunch.

The browser saves your opened tabs and windows and reopens them automatically when it restarts. Your incognito windows won’t reopen when Chrome restarts. If you’d prefer not to restart straight away, click Not now. The next time you restart your browser, the update will be applied.

Its that easy…

QNAP ransomware attack

Its the first time I have owned a NAS when a big ransomware attack is underway. Its clear QNAP haven’t done enough and learned about this a 5 days ago via bleeping computer.

I am very aware of ransomware attacks on standard computers and keep the firmware and software up to date when I see the updates. Its clear the notification of updates could be more viable, as its not that often I’m logged into the NAS. I have email and push on but I’d like to see more options on this front.

Bleeping computer has the full details of what you need to look out for and what you should do if you are being attacked.

A slightly better solution

xps13 camera cover
My Dell XPS 13 with the little microdot

A while ago I mentioned how the super tiny bevels on my new Dell XPS13 and Acer Chromebook make a camera cover look so silly. Some people mentioned to me about using duck tape, which I gather doesn’t leave as much stickyness after use.

chromebook camera cover
My chromebook with the microdot camera cover

But I also was pointed to little micro-dots which use the same glue as duck tape but are a lot more discreet than a slice of duck tape. The sheet I got has a number of them in different sizes.

lens covers

Its a lot better than what I had before but lets see how long they stick around with general use.

Presentation problems with Ubuntu, think I might have found the problem?

I have no idea why or what happen, but this is likely the 4 or 5th time my Ubuntu machine has become unstable while presenting live on zoom.

Tonight I gave a presentation for the Mozilla Festival about adaptive podcasting. I did some tests because I wanted to see if I could switch the audio from my headset mic to the Android phone running the app. Things were not working, so I decided to use the audio captures instead. Everything was fine, presentation in Google Chrome using google slides and Miro in Firefox for the workshop portion later. Zoom for video sharing.

Everything was smooth then I started Chrome in presentation mode but remember I need to turn on auto-generated subtitles. I switch to Zoom on my second screen try and turn it on but everything refreshes and freezes except my mouse cursor. The camera light is still on and sound is working (both mic and audio). I am forced to run the whole hour long workshop with no access to my slides, zoom or anything else. So I freestyle it.

I remembered a few times before something similar things happening while giving a presentation at Agile Manchester, UCD gathering, Immersive Arts Lab 8 and last week at the publicspaces conference. However the difference has been the laptop had paused for a short while (couple of minutes) before returning to normal state. This time I ended up rebooting the whole laptop.

Thinking about the circumstances of the other times, I suspected it might be Zoom but then its happened with Hopin too. It can’t be the laptop because I now I have a brand new laptop and although they are both Ubuntu the first three were Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS. While I was running Ubuntu 20.4.2 LTS for the publicspaces conference and Mozilla festival. This leads me to the other common element which is Google chrome, which I use because its google slides (I tend to only sign into my google account with chrome).

Then I found problems with Chrome and fullscreen.

Even if its not quite right, I’ll be testing running Google slides from Firefox instead.

One upside of todays presentation is the amazing response I got from people on the call who really enjoyed the pure storytelling. Although I am glad for my co-host, having shared the slides and miro whiteboard right at the start.

Big thanks to everyone and the lovely words people have shared with me.