For privacy reasons, I’m not going to talk a lot about the background here. So I’ll just state that there are two Chromebooks (Dell 11 3189) in my household and that it turned out the local school system had acquired one of them – not physically, but functionally. I learned a lot about Chromebooks, ChromeOS, “Managed” devices and “Owned” devices that I wanted to document for myself and for anyone else that might benefit.
[ continue reading »» ]Category: Technology
Setting Up Minecraft Server on Ubuntu
I wanted to set up a Minecraft server (there’s not as much activity this summer due to the pandemic) but I know very little about it. So I did some quick research, found some guides that seemed to look like they would work, and dove right in. Mostly this post is for me to remember which guides I followed. There were lots of possible ways to do it but the ones listed here happen to be the ones I followed.
[ continue reading »» ]Moving Recordings to Videos in MythTV
My MythTV setup has been humming along for years now. It still beats what you can get from cable companies primarily because of the commercial skip capabilities. But there’s also other good stuff like being able to archive a recording. I have previously moved copies of recorded TV to an SD card for portable viewing, for example. For years, I’ve wanted an easy way to make a recorded TV show leave the ephemeral recordings section and move to the video library for permanent storage. Today, I finally got that to happen.
[ continue reading »» ]Installing an iPhone Dock in a Volvo XC90, Second Try
While my first try at putting a doc for my iPhone in my Volvo XC90 was, strictly speaking, successful, it wasn’t as good as I wanted. I had thought it would be cool to have the dock out of sight when the phone was unplugged so as not to mar the beautiful interior with an unsightly growth. So I figured out how to get it in the front bin of the console. However, I realized pretty quickly that the phone just wasn’t visible there which makes it only slightly better than the factory version of connecting it in the main console bin. I eventually accepted that I would need to get a mount for the dashboard and that it would be permanently visible. But I still wanted to keep things as clean as possible. Here’s what I did.
Updating MythTV Channel Lineup
Updating the MythTV channel lineup shouldn’t need to be so confusing but based on some misinformation on the Internet, I wasted a lot of time heading down wrong paths. The upshot is mythfilldatabase does do the right thing but it may not be clear initially. And if you don’t care about channel numbers at all, and you have only one source, then just run “mythfilldatabase –do-channel-updates” and you are done. If you do care about channel numbers (which can be useful when watching live TV switching between sports programs on neighboring channels, for example) or you have more than one source, read on.
Restore a Prior Firefox Session
I had a set of Firefox windows and tabs open on my Windows 7 laptop. I was in the middle of one thing when I started an unrelated effort to rebuilt a secondary disk to allow the laptop to boot MacOs and Ubuntu. I knew I wanted to preserve the session of Firefox windows for my other effort so I was using Chrome to keep the two projects separate. Somewhere in there, I installed new software which automatically opened Firefox and then I rebooted effectively killing off my ability to use Restore Previous Session from the Firefox menu. But I wasn’t ready to be done with those tabs! So I dug around in the Firefox folders and figured out how to restore the session I wanted. Here’s what to do if it happens to you in the latest version of Firefox.
Shrinking a USB Disk Image and Burning to Disc
I successfully installed MacOS on my Dell Latitude E6430. With that complete, I wanted to make an DVD archive of the USB drive I used as the installer. I have DVD archives of my past hacintosh installations and to keep up the library and to keep the permanent backup, I wanted one for this install too. This task proved to be impossible and impractical and good golly I wasted a lot of time on it. But since I learned a lot on the way, I needed to write it up. I’ll forget it if I don’t and some of the lessons learned can be useful for the future. Primarily for me, but perhaps for somebody else too.
Triple Boot E6430, Sort Of
I’ve got my Dell Latitude E6430 booting Windows 7, Ubuntu 14, and MacOS 10.11. I’ve done this before with this computer but it wasn’t ever really stable and I didn’t document it because I hadn’t gotten it the way I wanted. I’ve also done it before with earlier versions of these OSes on my previous computer, the Dell Latitude E6410. But it wasn’t until today that I got a set up with the E6430 working the way I wanted. And although it cheats a little by using two disks, I do get all three OS on a GPT disk booting using UEFI. Sort of.
Resurrecting a B&O Turntable
My Bang & Olufsen turntable had been stowed away for years. It always lived prominently on top of my A-V rack. Of course, a turntable needs to go on top so the lid can open all the way. When I got my first plasma TV, the TV was so wide, it chewed up space not only on the center rack but on both side racks too and that meant nothing else could go on top. But I wasn’t listening to vinyl anyway, so the turntable was packed away.
But vinyl is hip now and I had now “archived” other components such that there was now room on a lower shelf for the turntable. No, the lid can’t open all the way. But it opens enough to get a vinyl record in safely. I put the turntable there a year ago but didn’t plug it in. I didn’t have time to futz with that stuff at the time. Last year for Christmas I got a record (original “Boston” album on picture vinyl) and I put getting the turntable working again on the to-do list. Now, nearly a year later, it finally got to the top of the to-do list. Time to dust it off and plug it in.
Migrating Windows XP To SSD
One of my family members is still using Windows XP on an older computer and they got a “no boot device found” error. Apparently the hard drive had finally given up. But the computer does what they need it to do and they don’t want to buy a new one and of course, there’s stuff on the hard drive that they didn’t want to lose. Here’s what I did to get the system disk switched to an SSD and get them back to where they were before the hard drive failure.