Tag: geek

How I set up my smart lights with Home Assistant

May 18, 2025
valeblog
0 Comment

I’ve been playing around with smart lights for a while now. I have four Edison Smart filament bulbs, two Philips Hue white bulbs and some Switchbot bulb. I had a terrible experience with Switchbot bulbs (which is why I got the Hues in the first place), disconnecting and needing to be re-paired all the time, suddenly factory resetting themselves to max brightness in the middle of the night and such. So the one I kept is just a reading light now with a manual switch on my bedside table.

For the others though, I’ve wanted to have some manual switches for them too in addition to being able to control them through my smartphone. When I get home it’s still quicker to tap a physical switch than to whip up my phone, wait until the respective proprietary app connects to the bulbs and then I get some light.

What I ended up with: a Home Assistant Green with the external USB Zigbee dongle, three IKEA RODRET switches and this blog post. I got those Home Assistant devices because that’s what I could get shipping to Japan, but I believe the Yellow version has Zigbee built in, which should make it a little less clumsy.

Read More

Podman containers can’t talk to each other

February 8, 2025
valeblog
0 Comment

The other day I decided to update my server-side rendering example, and I ran into a strange problem. While my compose.yaml hasn’t changed, my containers could not talk to each other. This was most apparent with the nginx container, which immediately crashed out with [emerg] 1#1: host not found in upstream. What gives?

After a quick debugging including on a different computer, it became clear that my compose.yaml should be fine: it worked without issues on the computer that used Docker, but didn’t work with Podman. The issue with Podman was soon clear too: looking at podman network inspect the "dns_enabled": false was an obvious culprit. That’s where things got interesting.

Read More

Upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04

April 26, 2024
valeblog
0 Comment

Didn’t go smoothly. I was on 22.04 I believe and I decided to upgrade without waiting for 24.04.1. It was a mistake. I started the upgrade with do-release-upgrade -d, but way too soon I ran into a very nasty crash screen telling me “Oh no! Something has gone wrong and the system can’t recover”.

Aside. I personally hate these “friendly” additions like “Oh no!” Fuck off? My system just crashed, I’m pissed and the last thing I need now is some linux dev who thinks they know how to be friendly rubbing it in.

The way to fix it for me was: first reboot and choose recovery mode in the Grub menu. Once recovery mode is on, enable network then drop into a root terminal. Run dpkg --configure -a to fix whatever was interrupted. After reboot it should boot all right (at least the GUI would work).

However the network was still broken. I could ping 1.1.1.1 so the connection itself was alive, but nothing could be resolved. Turns out the installation removed the resolve component of systemd. Luckily for me sudo apt-get install systemd-resolved could install it back and that solved the connection issue.

At this point the system seems to be functioning properly (nothing is obviously broken other than Thunderbird for some reason getting removed from my dash), but I don’t know if the interrupted install broke anything nor how to check if anything is broken or in an uexpected state.

Bye Seafile

August 8, 2023
valeblog
0 Comment

Operating Seafile was a very frustrating experience. In the first place, setting it up on my Kubernetes (k3s) cluster was quite a ride. It didn’t have a Helm chart or any manifests ready to spin it up, so I had to build my own. This turned out to be pretty difficult because it was clear that the software was not designed with containers in mind and it took significant amount of hacking to even just get it to work. But once it did, then you’d need to manually run garbage collection every few months, because that was a Paid Feature™. I put up with it because of the sunk cost fallacy and because other than that five minutes every 3 months or so, it was working okay. Until it wasn’t.

Read More

Convenience

June 11, 2023
valeblog
0 Comment

I’ve been trying to use linux for pretty much as long as I’ve had a computer. I’d kept running into blocks though: at first I was using my computer mostly for gaming, and that’s still not a strong suite for linux 20 years later. Then my workflows were dependent on tools that only worked on Windows (like Office’s Publisher, or Dreamweaver and Fireworks—hell I still miss the productivity I had with Fireworks). Then I had a laptop half of whose hardware wasn’t supported by any linux distro at that point. Then gradually those issues went away and I’ve been an Ubuntu main for over ten years now. Some linux elitists will look at my desktop and hiss that it’s not just a terminal or a tiled window manager that looks like it’s still 1995.

Read More

Configuring MPV

December 19, 2022
valeblog
0 Comment

I used VLC for a very long time. No longer. The other day I was watching something and I noticed how dull the colors were. It did fit the theme of the video though so I just assumed that it was a thing, except then I ran into a very colorful screenshot from the same video. What gives? In 2011, when fansubbing was huge, 10bit was the “new big thing.” It encodes colors into 10 bits into the standard 8, which results in much better colors. At least it should, as it seems VLC wasn’t able to handle that.

Example of 10bit difference
Read More

A way to extract an image from Firefox

December 13, 2022
valeblog
0 Comment

The problem I faced: I was scrolling through a hashtag‘s timeline in Tweetdeck, when I spotted a nice image. I wanted to retweet it, but that failed: turns out the tweet was deleted in the meanwhile. This usually means that either the artist themselves deleted the tweet for some reason, or it was stolen in the first place and (by some miracle) it was moderated.

In this case it seems to have been the latter, so finding the image through the author’s profile was not an option. As Tweetdeck displays images as CSS backgrounds in the timeline, right-click “Open image in new tab” was not an option. Since the tweet was deleted, its URL was invalidated too, so I couldn’t give that to Saucenao or similar to find matches either.

However, while digging through the Firefox Dev Tools, I noticed that the context menu when right clicking the URL of the background-image had an item “Copy image data URL”. This turned out to be just what I needed.

Pasting the copied (data blob) URL to the address bar I got the image that I could magnify so that I could decipher the artist’s signature on it. (It turned out to have been a partial image so Saucenao couldn’t help either.) After a few tries I found the artist’s profile and there the original post. Yay.

キーボードの感想文です

December 8, 2022
valeblog
0 Comment

いろいろと秋田。飽きた。ここ2年はlogicoolのG613をキーボードとして使っていたが、今年のブラックフライデーをきっかけに買い換えようと決めた。最大の理由はやっぱりキーの不調。キーが反応しなかったり、多重に反応したりして、タイポが多発していた。またスタート？スーパー？キーは爆死していて一切反応しなかった。前者はまだbackspaceという神機能でなんとかなったけど、スタートキーはUbuntuだとActivitiesを起動させるショートカットで重宝なのでないと困る（Windowsだとalt-tabみたいなものかな？）

さて買い換えるのもまた簡単じゃない。まず日本語配列であーる。英語で打つことも少なくないないが、日常の業務などでは日本語入力が当たり前でレイアウトに慣れている（変換・無変換キーとか）。また、同時に最低限2端末に接続ができること。仕事用のPCにはBluetoothで、私用PCにはBluetoothもしくは直に指すUSBで。3端末同時に行けると助かる。最後に、とんでもない金額ではないこと。キーボードに出す金は1.5万で上限、それもかなりかけた気分になる。

この条件のキーボード見つけるまではかなり苦戦した。その最大の理由はAmazonの検索はゴミである点にはあるが、検索の過程はキーボード自体に関係ないので省略する。最終的に落ち着いたのはまたlogi製ではあるが、K855という製品だ。

Read More

スマート電球の第一印象

December 7, 2022
valeblog
0 Comment

スマート電球っていいね… と思っちゃった。わざわざベッドから起きなくても消せるし、スマホから操作もできるし、遠距離で点けたり消したりできるし、明度も調整できるし、強いでしょう？とか思いながらも結局金出すほどやりたいことでもなかった。そして今年の夏、ようつべでルームツアーやインテリア動画にハマった時期に紹介の動画を見たら結局衝動買いしちゃった。なぜかというとその辺飲みに行った店の内観がめっちゃササって、それっぽくできるじゃない？と思ったから。

Read More

Dual screen workspaces in Ubuntu 17.10

November 11, 2017
valeblog
2 Comments

I expected the aardvark to break a couple of things. They switched back from Unity to Gnome, so even more than usual, I feared the system might not even start.

Compared to that, things went quite smoothly. One problem I ran into is how Gnome devs apparently never used a dual screen setup, and thought it would be a good idea to only switch workspaces on the main screen, and keep the other screen static. Needless to say, that’s not how workspaces are supposed to work.

Read More