Fixing a broken snap build

I thought I’d “live blog” (not live) my way through fixing a snap which I noticed was broken this morning. How did I notice? I happened to look at the build page for it. Maybe my spidey sense was tingling, because I wouldn’t ordinarily have zoned in on this particular snap.

I could have some kind of alert that lets me know when this happens, but I currently don’t. I might use my new-found love of GitHub Actions, but that sounds like a future blog post!

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Multi-presenter podcast transcription

For the last six months, I’ve been a presenter on Linux Matters. Prior to that, I spent thirteen years presenting the now-defunct Ubuntu Podcast. Both shows have/had multiple presenters,

We record every other week, and send our individual audio files to Joe. He does all the magic post-recording production including editing, audio processing and mastering. That file is then uploaded and eventually makes its way into the Patreon “all episodes” ad-free feed, then to our feed a day or so later.

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Recovering my NextCloud Box

NextCloud Box

I just stumbled on an old NextCloud Box in my loft. It’s a quiet Sunday in the house, so I thought I’d see if it still works, and if there’s any data on it. I’m pretty sure I did use it for a while, so there must be something on it.

Here’s my NextCloud Box in a cardboard box labelled “NextCloud Box”.

NextCloud Box Box

Here’s what the NextCloud box looks like once installed.

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RetroDECK > EmuDeck

Goodbye EmuDeck

I’ve had my GabeGear Steam Deck for over a year now, and I love it. When it first arrived, I considered using it to play retro games - via emulators. But a terribad experience with EmuDeck soured my opinon of retro gaming on the deck.

The whole EmuDeck installation and configuration was less than straightforward, indeed somewhat cumbersome. I found it to be a loosely connected, and poorly integrated bag of spanners. Surprising for a project seemingly awash with community supporters and funding!

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Where's my hard drive?

This is the fourth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me.

Scene setting

Today’s story is another belter from my stint on the helpdesk for a large accounting & consulting organisation in central London. It’s around 1995 and I’m a happy-go-lucky, young, free and single tech support operative. Always happy to help, and generally enjoying the work. That can change though.

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tfts 

There is still no Linux app store

Lies

Neither of these are “App Stores” in the way average people know them. You can neither buy or sell products in these so-called ‘stores’…

Flathub

Snapcraft

…yet.

The wording on those two screenshots above is both hilarious and sad. It’s very reminiscent of People’s Front of Judea or Slim Shady.

Anyway, here follows a bit of a moan about all this (the app stores, not Monty Python or Eminem).

Background

I have previously lamented on the following subject as a stream of tweets. The topic has been on mind mind again recently though. So I thought I’d revisit and expand my thoughts.

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Publishing Hugo site via GitHub Actions

My blog at blog.popey.com was hosted on a Bitfolk VPS, built from the Hugo source code in a public GitHub repo.

My workflow for publishing a post goes like this:

  • 💻 Use whatever machine I’m sat at
  • 🔽 Clone the repo
  • 🗒 Add a new page, edit until ready
  • 🤠 Push directly to the main branch

Early on in my use of Hugo, I was manually using hugo and rsync over SSH directly on the VPS. Given I was publishing a post very infrequently, this process wasn’t tremendously onerous. I typically have a terminal open nearby anyway, and it’s only a couple of commands.

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CAPS LOCK BEHAVIOUR DISABLED IN GNOME

SOMETIMES I PRESS THE CAPS LOCK KEY BY ACCIDENT, USUALLY WHILE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME. I THEN FIND MYSELF UNABLE TO TYPE A PASSWORD OR I AM ACCUSED OF SHOUTING ONLINE.

OVER COFFEE, MY FRIEND MARTIN EXPLAINED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO DISABLE THE CAPS LOCK KEY COMPLETELY IN LINUX. I’D NEVER CONSIDERED DOING THIS, MISTAKENLY THINKING THE ONLY OPTIONS WERE TO REMAP IT TO SOMETHING ELSE.

IT TURNS OUT GNOME TWEAKS HAS AN OPTION. IN ‘KEYBOARD & MOUSE’, CLICK THE ‘ADDITIONAL LAYOUT OPTIONS’, THEN CHOOSE ‘CAPS LOCK BEHAVIOUR’.

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AMD GPU blob crashing

My work computer is a ThinkPad Z13. It’s on most of the time, including overnight and during the weekend. I’m one of those horrible people who like to just wiggle their mouse, unlock, and get working. I often leave a ton of windows open, so I quite like to sit down and start working without having to wait for boot up, and subsequent app launch.

Uprecords

So when I arrive at my desk on a Monday and discover my GPU has crashed, that’s a poor start to the week. The GPU crashing doesn’t completely kill the machine, just my desktop session and all the applications that were open. 😭

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Waking up a sleeping Minecraft server

Today I dusted off a Minecraft server backup to see if it would still work, to explore and remind myself what was there.

tl;dr The world still works in Minecraft, and I can even generate a nicely rendered map from it. There’s not a tremendous amount to actually see on the map. A lot of work went on underground. There’s also little nostalgia value other than for the sixty people who played on it back then. But it was fun getting it working.

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