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Linux, Personal

uConsole Custom Designs

Made some mods to my hardware. The forums are a great resource over at clockworkPi.

As i am awaiting my hackergadgets kit for the new adapters meant for CM5, i made some hardware mods to accomodate the potential increase in heat. At the same time, also designed some casing improvements to my unit.

  1. Screen cover: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7206323 – ClockWorkPi Forum Post
  2. Back Plate and cover: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7197472 – ClockWorkPi Forum Post

Do note that i used PLA only to prototype. i have found that the heat deflection temperature of 58 degrees to be insufficient. So i ultimately printed at JCL3DP.com as it allowed me to pick materials such as Nylon which had a deflection temp of 158 degrees.

Printing the screen cover in transparent resin is also very cool. i can now peek at my screen without exposing my unit to dust.

Some pictures here to share.

Linux, Personal

uConsole + Ubuntu 24.04 + Geary

Bought a uConsole from ClockworkPi and have been enjoying it. I have made some post into the forums there and thought that perhaps i should post here as well.

Copying the post that i made there.

FWIW. I have been using @Rex’s wonderful image for Ubuntu 24.04 on my uconsole. and its been working great. However, when using the Geary (v44) email client, it doesn’t seem to leverage the 3 panel view that i get when using Greay on a larger monitor.

As such, i have rebuild a git build of Geary (v46), which supports 3 panel view on small screens, and tweaked the UI a little to provide a better proportion of the panels for uConsole. I have packaged this into a deb file which can be installed along side the Stock Ubuntu Geary build. i don’t have a repo for it (yet?), but happy to share the deb file to anyone who is interested.

Clearly, at this point, i have not made a repo for it. i am not sure if i am capable for maintaining a package long term. But this deb file is really to solve an issue i was facing with Geary and small screens and wanting the latest v46 which solves the issue.

So i’m uploading the file here so folks can just download it. Simply just do

sudo apt install ./geary-custom……

This will then install geary-development into /usr/local and run along side the stock install of geary, just in case you still want that. The resulting interface will be the familiar 3 panel which i have grown to love.

geary-custom_46.0-0git20251120.746efdc41_arm64Download

Hope someone enjoys this too!

Linux

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS issues with apparmor, bwrap and an intermediate solution

Upgraded to 24.04 on a whimp, but realized that it caused multiple issues with applications not launching. Could have been patient and waited for updates, but the deal breaker was that my email client Geary, Chrome and Microsoft-edge wouldn’t launch. Not to mention my self compiled gnome-calendar and a host of other apps.

This effectively meant that i couldn’t do any work. It seems that something changed and bwrap, together with apparmor was causing issues – (you can see this in the syslog). It was just too many things to fix and i needed to get my system back on quick.

This is the snipped that got everything working again. put it into the sysctl.conf file to make it persistent. Not ideal, but it works until Ubuntu gets it act together to update its hardening policies without breaking every application out there.

sudo sysctl kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns=0

Until there is a proper fix… get back out there and start working…..

General, Linux, Personal

My strategy to backing up my media

This is not a post on how to choose a NAS box. This is also not a post to provide a step-by-step guide on how to configure one. This is also not a post on how to do enterprise backups, while some concepts apply, i’d say that this is mainly for personal backups.

This is a post to share the choices that i made to create a back up plan for my media such that i minimize the risk of losing the media that has been accumulated throughout my PERSONAL life. Some of these are irreplaceable memories of phases, experiences that are usually nostalgic and you definitely don’t want to lose them.

[This post was inspired by a conversation that i had with a retiring colleague/friend who just ventured to purchase a Synology NAS, with the goal of backing up his photos from his upcoming travels and perhaps to catalog them. As we chatted, i realized that i am repeating the comments, recommendations that was provided, to many people, many times over the years.

My choices has served me well all this while and has been running the same way for almost 10 years. I have not had major issues and failures, even though some outages has induced panic for a while, it has always been recoverable.

I hope that by sharing my backup strategies and rationale here, it will help someone in the future.]

Continue reading My strategy to backing up my media →