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John Poelstra

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Borrowing a Garmin inReach Mini 1 and Getting It Working

This is a first draft. The important stuff is here. I may or may not come back and clean this up. Some key things to keep in mind and hopefully a short-cut guide if you are in my situation. I needed to be reachable for a week in an area without cell phone coverage and [ ]

Here Now Next

Here we areThrashingDog paddlingHereGoing nowhere What if there is no where to go?What s the hurry?What makes lack of any progress today failure? And so I stopHaving wasted the last 1.25 hours Am I procrastinating or starting?Are they the same?Could they be different without judgement? Coffee in handCandle litDesk space clean and clearSlowingDown EvenMore What is [ ]

Enabling SSH Server on Linux Lite

I m having fun with an old Lenovo X220 laptop. It s a great little machine except for the annoying fan that runs a lot and how hot the bottom gets. I ve been experimenting with light weight Linux distros. They put less load on the machine and thus, less fan running or heat. The distro I ve come [ ]

ffmpeg doesn’t work with Audacity on Mac Monterey

ffmpeg 7 doesn t work with Audacity 3.5 as I ve found out the hard way. If you are running brew on Mac Monterey and using it to install ffmpeg for Audacity, you must install ffmpeg 6. It can be installed along side ffmpeg 7 (which is the latest version at the time of this writing and [ ]

Asciidoc-pdf Theming

Here are more resources I ve found, but haven t sat down yet to put together. https://docs.asciidoctor.org/pdf-converter/latest/theme/apply-theme/ https://jekyll-one-org.github.io/pages/public/skeleton/documentation/200_themes/ https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf/tree/main/data/themes https://jekyll.one/pages/public/manuals/components/j1/plugins/asciidoctor/ (not really about theming,…

Asciidoc-pdf Theming

I love the cleanness of the default asciidoc html rendering and do not love the default pdf rendering.I expected that they would be exactly the same.For some reason they are not. Strangely there is very little I could find in the realm of a library of different asciidoc-pdf themes to choose from. Google turned up [ ]

Failed to start erase of disk due to error (-69810, 0)

I thought I was going through the very simple exercise of creating a bootable USB Mac OSX Catalina installer on a mac running High Sierra and then I got this message: Using the native Mac Disk Utility program I had named the USB stick jp and formatted it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I read [ ]

Encrypted External USB Raspberry Pi Partition

I attached a 1TB USB hard drive to my Raspberry Pi so that I could use it to store large files via Samba I wouldn t be sad to lose. Then I started storing more personal files that I also wouldn t be sad to lose and yet wouldn t want to widely share. And that got me [ ]

Live Raspberry Pi SD Card Backup

I was looking for a way to backup the SD card of my running Raspberry Pi without having to shut it down to make a copy of it. I found some surprisingly great options. So far I have had good luck with PiShrink-to-Crontab. I tested it out by creating an image and then writing it [ ]

Enabling Wifi Wireless IWL3495 on Inspiron 6400 Running Debian 11

One of my guilty pleasures is getting old laptops and hardware to run newer operating systems. I just inherited a Dell Inspiron 6400 from roughly the year 2006. I was able to install the i386 version of Debian 11 on it without any problems using the network install image and built in Ethernet adapter. To [ ]

Converting asciidoc to LibreOffice Writer

The best way I found was to convert asciidoc to Docbook and then convert to odt. Surprisingly (considering all that it can do!) Pandoc cannot take asciidoc as an input. $ asciidoctor -b docbook my.adoc$ pandoc --from docbook --to odt --output my.odt my.xml I m not totally satisfied with how it turned out. I had to [ ]

Setting Up Remote TimeMachine Backups

After listening to this fantastic podcast episode on Mac Power Users about data backups I learned one thing I d never known before that you can do TimeMachine backups to other Mac s on your local network. This simple guide has the steps. I ve had fuzzy plans for a while to create a TimeMachine backup server using my [ ]

Install & Configure Samba on Raspberry Pi

These are the steps I went through to set up a Samba share on my Raspberry Pi. I wanted it to have a central place I could store and retrieve large files between computers on my home network. The Raspberry Pi comes with limited read/writeable storage and needs external storage for unless you are running [ ]

Create Local Git Repo and Push to GitHub

I don t do this enough to remember the commands. This is a copy and paste from the instructions you get after creating a new repo at GitHub Create a new repository on the command line and add everything to it $ git init$ git add .$ git commit -m "first commit" Push to GitHub existing [ ]

Tech Waste–The Problem with Society

This is a guest post from Ethan Poelstra. Tech waste (also known as E-waste) is the world s fastest growing trash source. Though it currently accounts for only 2% of all trash in landfills, it accounts for over 70% of all toxic waste. Lots of technology that is thrown away each year could easily be used [ ]

Install GitHub CLI for easy authentication on Mac and Linux

Install brew if you haven t already $ brew install gh $ gh auth login Reference and more information https://flaviocopes.com/setup-github-credentials-macos/ And here are the instructions for Linux https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/trunk/docs/install_linux.md

Finding the Largest Installed Ubuntu Packages

I ve been playing around with light-weight Ubuntu distros to run on the old laptops we have for the community Minecraft night I support. Looking for as little overhead as possible and removing all the stuff we don t need. It s kind of a convoluted process on Ubuntu/Debian compared to Red Hat/Fedora.…

Add Google Chrome to Ubuntu

I ve been playing around with some of the really lightweight distros that don t have all the regular packages. https://www.howtogeek.com/731805/how-to-install-google-chrome-on-ubuntu-linux/

Installing Minecraft on Ubuntu

How to Install Minecraft on Ubuntu And troubleshooting if it doesn t work https://forum.linuxconfig.org/t/unable-to-launch-minecraft-on-ubuntu-20-04/5556

Removing and Cleaning Up Ubuntu Packages

I thought Red Hat and Fedora had too many ways to do things! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68635646/what-are-the-differences-between-apt-clean-remove-purge-etc-commands https://askubuntu.com/questions/1235929/how-to-remove-libreoffice-installed-with-lubuntu-20-04

Getting Started with Librivox

These are the steps I went through to create an account and submit a demo recording to Librivox so that I can be a recorded contributor. At first all the different links and places are overwhelming so I wanted to create a clean and simple list of steps to make it easier for people. These [ ]

Raspberry Pi Fresh Install

Get the latest image and save it locally. As of this writing it is Bullseye. I chose the 64 bit image for my Raspberry Pi 3B+ https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/ 2. Write the downloaded image to an SD card. The simplest way to do this is the Raspberry Pi Imager (found at the link below). It s a great [ ]

Where Crontab lives on OS X

I forgot to capture my crontab before doing a clean install. Here s where I figured out the file gets stored on High Sierra in a live system. so I can find it in a backup If you want to grab the files from a TimeMachine backup I found the files here: I found the to [ ]

Creating USB Installer for Monterey Mac OS X

I was on a mission to do a clean install of Monterey https://setapp.com/how-to/clean-install-macos-monterey and ran into some challenges. For some reason getting the installer via the Apple app store didn t work. This website has lots of awesome links for getting the full installer directly

Running Java 17 on High Sierra for Minecraft Spigot

Support for openjdk through Brew is getting sketchy on Mac OS X High Sierra (and understandably so). I have no reason to upgrade and so I found a way to easily run Java 17 to keep my Spigot Minecraft server running. Go to https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/ 2. Grab the tarball (not the dmg) 3. Create a directory [ ]