PC

For christmas this year I got a 14600k as a upgrade for my cpu. In order to install this new cpu i need to update my bios to gain support for 13th and 14th gen cpus. I began by planing to use the gigabyte app center on windows for the update however after seeing it hang and fail to connect to it servers I lost faith in the ability for it to update safely. So I pivoted to installing it in the bios using a usb drive. I copied the update file to the USB and ran the update in the bios. 5 very nervous minute later the PC booted… into windows? Ok so i go into my BIOS and there is no linux boot entry. OK slightly worried now i grab a arch usb and cryptsetup open my main partition after adding and mounting the lvms. After mounting my fat32 partition at /boot. I have a partition left over one check later and i see that p2 should be /boot and p1 is /boot/EFI. I then ran grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg after rebooting my boot entry showed up.

For a few days i had been noticing my PC randomly freezing this had been happening on and off. However I could see in htop that both RAM and CPU had plenty of head room. My thoughts then moved to storage the only big change i had made to storage was mounting a partition of my hdd. I didn’t understand how this could have been the cause as the only thing using the hdd was a steam library i was using to free up space on my nvme. However my suspicions were confirmed when my pc started freezing during a 170gb ark install. When i check df i was confused to see that the hdd had an extra 150gb of useage. This confirmed that steam was using the hdd for more than storing unused games. So as a temporary fix I have unmounted the hdd until i need it.

For some time I have been looking for an effective system wide search for linux. While windows search has been getting worse for years spotlight on mac has shown that an effective search is possible and can be very beneficial. I was also hoping to replace rofi as the launcher that was installed when i use the ml4w scripts to setup my first arch rice. In this search I found rofi a minimal yet customisation search. After instantly setting up dark mode i setup file indexing and added some custom searches such as my gitea instance. The only downside that I can think of is the setting window really does not like hyprland however since that should be a very rare occurrence I am overall very happy with Ulauncher.

I recently realized that I was missing a major security tool on my main desktop. Apparmor this is a utility that limits what apps can access and view. I found this simple guide to follow(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9EoEJXZIfk) and it all went well. I am looking forward to setting up profiles for all apps in the future.

So my plan when I started this was to move my linux mint install to my nvme ssd. The first thing I tried was shrinking my secondary windows partition but windows only let me do around 200gb when i needed at least 270gb I then moved to shrinking my linux mint install. However I quickly found out that you can’t do this while booted into linux mint. Luckily I still had my linux mint install usb so I booted from that and began a shrink. This took far longer than expected like 4-5 hours. ...

I recently decided to fully explore obsidian. I had installed it when I setup my arch linux install however I had never actually done anything more advanced that make a list of tasks. I began thinking how I could make use of obsidian I my mind went quite quickly to documentation of my homelab. I had been doing this with wordpress however I had been considering replacing that, so i began to look. One quick google search later and i found mkdocs. While this is currently not very astetic I hope to be able to fix that. The other thing I had to sort was syncing the files between the website, PC and phone. For the website I already knew I wanted to use gitea with a custom push action. However for the PC and phone I found that the Git plugin would work on my PC but not my phone. You may be able to get it working using ISH and the shortcut app however I could not so i resorted to a second plugin called Remotely save. This is still not ideal as it goes through both onedrive and obsidian to reach my server however that may be fixable with a s3 bucket on truenas and some more scripting.

After microsoft announced their new recall feature I felt this was the last straw. While I know my pc can’t run recall and some of the over new ai features. I just disslike the direction microsoft is heading in. I had pleanty of room on my hard drive so I just made a bootable linux mint usb and installed to a 1tb partition on my 2tb hdd. I installed most software with the only thing I couldn’t do being due to financial constraintes. This involves me having gamepass rather than buying the games on steam as well as not having minecraft on google play. ...

I have been using the default syncthing windows client for a while. However, the task sceudular setup had never worked properly and there for I had been forced to run it manually every now and then. Luckily I came across a reddit post that mentionted SyncTrayzor at first I thought it was a different software but then I found out it worked with my existing syncthing server. I downloaded the installer and ran it. It worked even better than expected as it managed to use my existing config with the only change needed was to add an allow newer config flag in the settings.

I already had a go at a wol system before but it never worked properly. So I had ended up just setting it to turn on at a set time of day when ever I was away but that had a load of issues. However with some luck I found a video with more information on server protocals with windows 11(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pZu35hTipo). I managed to set up gpt wol on a docker container and add my device. However the big help I got from this video was realising i needed to edit the group policys which can’t normally be done with windows home edition. So i downloaded a third party editor policy plus and it turned out this was the reason wake on lan had never worked.

I wanted to try and find a better way to backup my photos from my iPhone to my NAS. I had been using Nextcloud with the app on my phone to do this however is was slow and nextcloud pritiy much always ran so slow a page could take around 60 seconds to load. I had seen iCloudpd before as a application on TrueNAS and so wanted to try it out. I set up a docker compose and signed in. However I then started getting a message to create the .mounted file which I had already done. This prity much instantly told me that there was somthing wrong with my mount. However when I looked it all seemed fine so I was forced to ssh in and relook at the new mount I had made to my NAS. After some failed ideas I noticed that the mount only had empty folders in it. This finaly reminded me that my Photos folder was acutualy a dataset so I switched the nsf share to that and it started to run a backup. ...