Introduction As part of my effort to reduce my dependency on the tech giants I am starting to host my own data as much as possible. Whilst this gives me the added privacy it also means I have to take care of my data a lot more and have my own means to backing up where as when I used a cloud provider this is generally done for me. This is a guide on how to set up a raid 1 on the Turris Omnia with logical volumes to be used by the OS like physical partitions. Continue reading...

I’m in Portugal after going to the Creative Commons Summit and I’ve parked a hire car about an hour south of Lisbon, waled sown a river and ended up in a beautiful deserted beach. I have full reception on 4G and decided to see how remote working on a beach would be. Sitting on a rick with another rock to my back the gentle lapping of the waves sooth me as I type. Continue reading...

I’m on my way to Devon for a wedding and I’ve been driving for a few hours so my girlfriend has taken over the last hour or so of the journey. Sitting in the passenger seat I have my laptop out and I’m tethered to my Android phone. I have another phone, a Nexus 5, in my bag that I’ve got to test out different operating systems. I decided to install UBports - Ubuntu Touch and just because it was so straight forward I wrote this a blog post on my Hugo gen site in Emacs whilst I did it. Continue reading...

I recently discovered Hacker Public Radio and I really like listening to the podcasts people have made. One podcast was just a bloke talking about what he wanted from a laptop. It struck me I had gone through I similar exercise lately so I decided to leave a comment. The podcast I was responding to The comments system wouldn’t accept my comment - it gave me a 412 Precondition not met (which wasn’t great) so I’m pasting my comment here as it took me a bit of time to write (though you wouldn’t believe it when you read it)… There’s a word limit in the comments field on that site and I kept reaching it and having to re-write it, of course I had a lot more to say but this is what I ended up with: Continue reading...

I’ve installed emacs 26 on Ubuntu 18.10 with the following config and dependencies: We need the gnutls library so that packages can be installed in emacs of https. To do this I seached for the latest libgnutls-dev package in my ubuntu distro apt repos $ apt-cache search 'libgnutls.*-dev' libgnutls28-dev - GNU TLS library - development files $ sudo apt-get install libgnutls28-dev I also installed other dependencies $ sudo apt install build-essential libncurses-dev Get the download of the latest emacs from https://www. Continue reading...

Introduction We’re going to install Docker CE (community edition) on Ubuntu Cosmic 18.10. This is ideal for startups and smaller applications that don’t require enterprise production environments, in the community version we get the container engine, built in orchestration networking and security. For more advanced features the Enterprise Edition is required. CU will update on different specified release branches which are: stable (latest general release), test (a pre-release version) or Nightly (bleeding edge progress for next major release). Continue reading...

I have a Thinkpad T430 and I’ve upgraded the stock i5 dual core processor with an i7 quad core all bought off eBay at a ridiculously low price considering these high wattage 3rd gen CPUs are provide better performance and processing capability than the modern 8th gen low power quad core cpus. The i5 was actually a 35W CPU whereas the quad i7 is 45W, of course the power is disipated into heat resulting in the fan needing to be on more to cool down the CPU. Continue reading...

I have a drawing tablet (wacom intuos4) which I use on my laptop, when I’m at my desk I plug into a 24" monitor and extend the desktop (Kubuntu/Plasma) to the right. When I use my drawing tablet the drawing boundaries are aligned to the entire desktop stretched over two screens. I want to be able to restrict the tablet drawing area to just a single screen, the monitor. I’m using linux (Kubuntu) so I shall map a device to a screen. Continue reading...

Outcomes We are going to set up remote access to the raspberry pi with an SSH tunnel and optional VNC so that we can use the pi without it being connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. We will use wifi to connect remotely to the pi. We’ll use ssh which is a secure shell allowing direct command line access on the pi. We can do most things from this command line but to make it more visual we will install and configure VNC which will give us remote access to a desktop environment. Continue reading...

This is an update of my selecting an open source laptop. Previously I noted that System76 might be a good option, however they’re based in the US and the return to base warrenty might not be of much use to me due to cost of shipping etc. I mentioned that there were no UK retailers but I was wrong, there are - and there’s something interesting in that they mostly sell the same machine as the System76. Continue reading...