Category: Uncategorised

Building the Debian Handbook

What follows is instructions for creating a local HTML copy of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook (which is a very useful source of information for anyone working with any Debian derivative including Ubuntu and Raspian). All work related to this project was done on a Raspberry Pi Zero running Raspian, so I suspect it will work on anything running any Debian derivative (although Ubuntu 16.04 is the only other system I’ve tested this on so far).

Open up a terminal, and issue the following commands to get hold of the source code:

sudo apt install git
sudo git clone
git://anonscm.debian.org/debian-handbook/debian-handbook.git

Install the packages required for building:

sudo apt install publican publican-debian

Build the html files:

cd debian-handbook/
sudo ./build/build-html

It might take a while to build, especially on the sort of hardware I’ve been using. This might be the point to make a cup of tea.

Copy the HTML files into the root of your web server:

sudo cp -R publish/en-US/Debian/8/html/debian-handbook/ /var/www/html/

At this point you should be able to browse to the home page of the directory by navigating to the hostname or IP address of your web server.

2017 plans

It’s 2017. It’s been 2017 for a while, but as I was ill for most of the Christmas holidays, today is the first time I’ve really thought about the fact that it’s a new year, and that I’m back at work tomorrow.

I don’t really make resolutions, but I think I may be kicking off some new projects in 2017.

Towards the end of December we bought year-long Cineworld unlimited cards, which means we need to see two films per month (at least), or something like 22 or 23 over the year. We have seen three so far (in three days). Seeing films as they come out gives me something new to blog about, so I’ll likely be writing about some of them, especially if I feel I’ve got something to add that I’ve not read elsewhere.

I started using my iPad more (and my computer less) a couple of months ago, and I’m finding that to be sufficiently liberating that I might want to blog about it. I feel slightly less enthusiastic about the Surface Pro 4 I use for work now, but I may also find that there are Windows 10/Surface Pro specific things I want to blog about as well.

I plan on buying a lot less music this year, and using Spotify for pretty much everything to do with discovering and playing new music. I have my existing collection available on all my devices anyway, but this year I want Spotify to be the default way I consume music (unless it’s vinyl of course). I don’t plan on buying much more than what I get with my Rough Trade subscription (11 records, plus whatever freebies I get), although I will be putting things I really like on my wish list around birthday and Christmas time (so June and December). My hope is that I’ll spend a lot less on music, and will also get to spend more time with things I do buy. As a. result of this I won’t be posting monthly lists of things I’ve listened to, but might start writing about specific things in more depth. Today I bought a new perspex box that will fit around 20 records in it, and that should be all my music-related storage needs sorted for this year (which is just as well as I’m running out of space).

I didn’t do a great deal of socialising for most of 2016, for a variety of reasons. I don’t really have a plan to fix this, although starting a new job a month ago has already shaken things up a little in that respect and it’s quite possible that it will sort itself out organically. If nothing else, I’m going to be going to the cinema a lot more this year, which is a step in the right direction.

I might of course do none of these things and do something else instead, but I thought it was worth a statement of intent at the start of the year.

New Music – December 2016

In December I seem to have split my time between starting a new job and being ill. Neither of these are conducive to discovering new music. I did manage to stumble upon a few things though.

Childish Gambino – “Awaken My Love”
J. Cole – 4 Your Eyez Only
Run the Jewels – Run The Jewels 3
Brian Eno – Reflection

This will be my last monthly roundup for a while. I’ve not quite finalised what my blogging in 2017 will look like, although I expect it will involve albums of the month, a lot more writing about films I’ve seen, and perhaps more about using an iPad for the vast majority of my online life.

New Music – November 2016

I have discovered lots of interesting music in November, including the long lost Sea Nymphs album that was recorded in 1991 but only released this year (and which can be bought from the Cardiacs store. There was also a surprising electronic Lambchop record and an equally surprisingly angry Moby record.

The Sea Nymphs – On The Dry Land
Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions – Until The Hunter
Sleaford Mods – TCR
Marie Davidson – Adieux Au Dancefloor
Lambchop – Flotus
Moby and the Void Pacific Choir – These Systems Are Failing
The Sweet Release of Death – The Sweet Release of Death.
Emily Reo – Spell 10″

New job, new biographies

I start a new job on Thursday. I’ll still be working for the University, but for a different department and on a different project. I’m currently at home using up the holiday I carried over from last year, and I’ve set aside today to update all publicly available biographies and blurbs to reflect this change, and also to try and ensure that Linkedin and Facebook represent my updated professional and personal networks.

As part of this I’ve updated the about me section of this blog, plus the pages I maintain on what I’m currently working on and what hardware and software I’m using. I suspect all of these will see further revision once I’ve started, but they are at least more accurate than they were.

Using an iPad as a primary computer

There’s been a lot of talk on the internet over the last couple of weeks from people who were planning on buying a new Macbook Pro who have instead decided to move most (or all) of their workflow over to some sort of tablet (usually an iPad Pro). While I’m not quite there yet, I do find myself using my computer less and my iPad more, and I thought it was worth exploring exactly what it is that would stop me making this sort of switch.

As far as I can work out, the things I still need a computer for are downloading and managing music, ripping/converting CDs/DVDs, converting markdown into .docx (and possibly some other formats, although I have solutions for html and pdf now), and web development/Wordpress work.

Of these, the first one requires macOS/Windows because of the integration with iOS (and only because of that). I don’t want to stop using my iPhone/iPad though, and I buy new music very regularly, and want to be able to listen to it on the move.

The second one can be done on any computer that can be connected to a USB CD drive (which I already own), will run handbrake and that has enough storage space. I probably wouldn’t try this on a Raspberry Pi, but anything else would work.

The third one I can do on anything that can run Pandoc, so any computer that can handle the first two tasks will handle the third.

The fourth one I can do on any Mac/Linux computer. I already have a Linux solution working, and could even use a Raspberry Pi at a push (I’ve already set up a basic environment on a Pi II).

That’s actually not a lot. All my writing, blogging and social media works fine (in some cases better) on my iPad, and Microsoft Office also works well (and integrates nicely with both Sharepoint and Dropbox).

Right now my two most utilised computers are the iPad and the Pi that I use for watching TV shows. Nothing else comes close, and my desktop computers only really get any sort of serious use during weekends/holidays. Maybe there is more milage in this than I thought.

Back to the 80s

Yesterday appeared to be 1980s day. I created a playlist the day before called rediscoveries and listened to it for most of the day (with a brief break to listen to Hope Sandoval’s new record on vinyl). I can’t remember the last time I listened to Tears for Fears, OMD, Ultravox, Japan, Simple Minds, Furniture and The Associates, but it’s the sort of music that takes me back to childhood the moment I hear it. Other things from this era have stuck with me in the years that followed, but there is quite a lot about the 1980s that I very much left in the 1980s, as I left home, moved to a new city, and reinvented myself in the way people do when they go to University. Maybe in a few years time I’ll be ready to revisit the 1990s through a filter of nostalgia, but for now I’m content with enjoying music that sounded dated 20 years ago but that now sounds surprisingly contemporary.

Getting up and running with a CHIP

Tonight I finally received two CHIP boards (sort of a cross between a Raspberry Pi and a Pi Zero). I’d kickstarted these about a year ago and totally forgotten about it, so it was a nice surprise. Whenever I get my hands on something like this the first challenge is to power it up, boot an operating system, and see what it will do.

What follows is one way to get one of these devices powered up, connected to a wifi network, and with access to a graphical desktop. These instructions will work on macOS and Linux, for Windows there may be a need to consult the manual to get the relevant type of terminal access.

The only thing you’ll need (apart from the CHIP itself) is a microUSB cable. As an avid Raspberry Pi enthusiast I have quite a few of these lying about so there was no additional expense. Plug the small end of the cable into the relevant slot on the CHIP and the other end into a spare USB port on your computer. You’ll then need to see what device name your computer has assigned your CHIP by issuing the following command in a terminal window:

ls /dev/tty*

Find the output that looks something like /dev/tty.usbmodemFD1223 and make a note of it. Then issue the following command (replacing my device name with whatever yours is):

screen /dev/tty.usbmodemFD1223 115200

At that point you should get a login prompt. Log in as user chip with password chip (yes, I know). At that point you should find yourself logged into a fairly minimal Debian installation.

As yet there is no network, but as the CHIP has wifi then we can set this up fairly easily. In the logged in terminal session enter the following:

sudo nmcli device wifi connect '(your wifi network name/SSID)' password '(your wifi password)' ifname wlan0

The output should be something like:

Connection with UUID 'e9e45ce8-9961-4116-a7eb-d526e60af3ee' created and activated on device 'wlan0'

At this point you should have a network connection. Test it by doing some software updates:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

When you’re done (it might take a while) install xrdp to allow you to initiate remote desktop connections to the CHIP:

sudo apt-get install xrdp

Once that is done, create a new RDP connection using your client of choice. Find out the IP address using ifconfig or just use the name chip.local, enter the username and password, and you should see a graphical desktop with an application menu and a fair few applications.

I’ve also had some success plugging an ethernet adaptor into the CHIP’s USB port and connecting via ssh, but on most occasions the device powered down before I could do anything useful with it. This is the same setup I use with my Raspberry Pi Zero, so I know it theoretically works, but I need to investigate how much power the adaptor is drawing as it looks like the device is struggling to power it.

New Music – October 2016

Music I’ve discovered in October includes:

Kate Tempest – Let Them Eat Chaos
Conor Oberst – Ruminations
D.D Dumbo – Utopia Defeated
R.M Hubbert – Telling The Trees
Lady Gaga – Joanne
Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker
SURVIVE – RR7347
Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition
Banks – The Alter
Amanda Palmer – Piano is Evil
Goat – Requiem
Mac Miller – The Divine Feminine

I blame American Horror Story for my love of the Lady Gaga album, and Stranger Things for the discovery of SURVIVE. In fact, there is a lot of overlap between the music I’ve listened to and what I’ve watched on TV this month, with Kate Tempest and Danny Brown being a good soundtrack to Luke Cage and the new Goat album complementing American Horror Story quite nicely.

Musings on hardware

My next work machine will be a Surface Pro. I could have gone with a very nice looking Acer, but as I’m keeping my old Macbook Pro for a little while I thought portability should win out. I’m also spending a lot of time using my iPad, and I’m finding myself missing a touch screen interface when I don’t have one, and I’ll need to use enough Windows-only software in my new job to make using anything else an exercise in frustration.

The way I use computers is certainly changing. I’ll get the Surface Pro 4 in a few weeks, and whilst I love the look of the new Macbook Pro I don’t think I can justify buying one right now, which suggests I’ll not be using a Mac for most of my day-to-day computing for the first time since 2010. What I really need to go with the Surface and the iPad is some sort of desktop to manage all my music and do any non-work tasks that require heavy lifting. I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t announce anything in their recent broadcast, but I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on the refurb store to see if anything looks affordable (which of course they don’t right now because all the prices have gone up). My Mac Mini will do for now, but it’s 5 years old and everything else I use feels snappier, despite the Mac having 16Gb of Ram and a fairly new SSD.

I’ve written this blog post on my iPad using a full sized bluetooth keyboard (which I used as my main keyboard for a number of years). It’s even easier than using the tiny keyboard I carry around everywhere, and I think that with this keyboard and my iPad (or maybe the larger iPad Pro) then I could easily do the vast majority of my work-away-from-work without access to another computer. I’m typing this whilst sitting at my coffee table, so my posture isn’t great, but I think that once I’ve cleaned the keyboard up a little then I’ll look at trying this combo out at a proper desk as it’s certainly worth further exploration as my main writing device.

Whatever happens next, I’m already using a lot of different kit than I was a year ago, and I think I’m only half way through a fairly major change in the way I work. I start my new job on 1st December and I’m sure that will bring even more change.