Mark Johnson's Blog of Tech, Ubuntu and Stuff
A few years ago , I was ripping a large collection of DVDs, but I found the standard open source tool, Handbrake, to be very fiddly especially when ripping multiple episodes from the same disc or set of discs. To make my life a bit easier, I wrote AutoHandbrake , a script which attempts to identify whether a disk contains a single long title (likely a movie) or several similar-length titles…
I recently recieved my Steam Deck, and I have realised an odd quirk when installing some of my games. I’ve doing all my PC gaming on Linux for a long time, so when I installed Pillars of Eternity to carry on my current playthrough, I was a bit surprised to find that none of my save games were showing up. I checked that Steam Cloud was working, and it told me that it was in-sync. I checked on the…
I recently decided to rebuild my HP Microserver, replacing the NAS appliance I use with extra disks in the microserver configured as a RAID 5. There are various guides online for the commands to set this up manually with mdadm, but as part of the rebuild I upgraded the Ubuntu OS to version 20.04, which presented a much nicer option. Following the upgrade, the login prompt included a message…
I’ve recently found myself guilty of doomscrolling . When I have a spare moment, I’ll pick up my phone and mindlessly scroll through Twitter, or a news website, and read or re-read about the most horrible things that are happening in world today. I caught myself doing it, and I wondered how much of my time I’m wasting on things other people want me to read, rather than choosing to read things I’m…
I’ve been using password store to manage my passwords for several years. I really like its simplicity, it’s just a shell script that relies on gpg and git to handle the encryption and synchronisation. However, the apps and browser extensions are all third-party, so are of varying quality. Also, using it across devices requires you to manage your gpg keys across those devices, something I’ve never…
In an effort to write more often and more legibly, I recently bought myself a Rocketbook Core, an erasable pen-and- not quite-paper notebook with a companion app. The app will scan your notes and send a cloud service of your choice. For work, OneNote is supported which suits me fine. However, at home I use the Nextcloud Notes app to keep my notes on my own server, which stores notes in .txt files…
I have been playing Hades a lot recently on my Switch. I’ve had the switch for a couple of years ago, but the long sessions of Hades are the first time I have been dissatisfied with the Joy-cons. The Pro Controller is highly reccommended by Switch fans, but I don’t have £55 to spend on a new controller right now, so I started wondering if I can use my current favourite controller, the Steam…
In my first job out of university, I had the task of developing a tool to calculate “minimum target grades” for FE students based on GCSE scores and regression statistics. These grades would be used by teachers as a basis for setting target grades for their students. I’m no statistican. When I did my maths A-level I chose Decisions for my applied units. However, looking at the regression…
It’s been a long time since I first wrote about self hosting “cloud” services to avoid reliance on third party companies that harvest your data. Things have moved on a lot since then, so I thought it was about time to write about my current set-up. Hardware I’m still running the same HP Proliant Microserver that I have for years. I’ve upgraded the RAM and added an extra gigabit ethernet interface.…
For about 10 years, I’ve had my website hosted by Surpass Hosting , and served my blog variously with Drupal , Wordpress and manually crafted static pages. Unfortunately, Surpass no longer offer the package that I originally signed up with, and the cheapest package the offered me was double the cost I have been paying. On top of that, they were charging me over $20 to renew my domain name. Given…