I'm trying something new.  Check out my new hobby site https://cutandassemble.com

I'm not sure how much tech stuff I'll put on there, but I'm always working on some project or other.  This looks like a more fun way to get it out there.

This blog used to appear in a frame on that page, I might move the posts over, I'll have to look into that.

WSUS Offline - Stuck in Recall

 If you use WSUS Offline (a truly amazing service/project), you may have experienced what I have recently.

WSUS has a feature called "recall", where it will automatically restart, log in, and continue installing updates. 

My issue was that after a complete update, recall was still engaged. So after any reboot, windows was giving WSUS prompts and not fully starting all the services that I had setup on the pc. 

Here's the solution, run the CleanupRecall.cmd script:

https://forums.wsusoffline.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1332

Netflix and Chili

2020 is so great.  It's amazing right?  Never want it to end.

Oh well, here's a chili recipe:

Serves 6-8

2 large onions, chopped
1 14-ounce can diced tomatoes
5-6 cloves garlic, minced
2 jalapeños, seeded and minced
2 green peppers, chopped
1 tablespoon cumin
2-3 pounds ground beef, cooked and drained
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 14-ounce cans red, black or white beans, rinsed and drained
½ cup beef broth

1. Add all ingredients to slow cooker.
2. Cover and cook on Low for 8-9 hours or on High for 4-5 hours.

Google Fit = Black Hole

The black hole of Google Fit.

The web version of Google Fit died earlier this year, along with any meaningful functionality.

Want to find out what your fastest mile was? Good luck with that. You have to BROWSE all activity and note down yourself when and where your runs (or bikes, or anything) and tally them up. There is no data export, search, or tabulation. You have to sift through thousands of "afternoon walks".

Fit now serves no purpose other than tracking users. There are zero user friendly features.
If the app did that in even the most basic way it would prove otherwise.

Thanks but no thanks Google. I'm going back to Nike for keeps, even though they killed connectivity on my perfectly good Nike Watch Sport. Jerks.

KeePass Auto-Type

For those of you who use KeePass for your passwords, auto-type is super nice, but it never seems to work for every website.

Until now.

Today I had an eureka, Aha, epiphany moment!

But it was also a RTFM moment.

According to the documentation, KeePass looks at the TITLE of the website. I'm putting that in all bold caps because it should be in the documentation.

So if you have a password saved for "Bank of Omaha", it won't auto-type if the bank's website has the title in the tab of "Welcome Valuable Customer". You have to change your KeePass entry for that item to be "Welcome Valuable Customer", and volia! Auto-type engaged! Maximum Overdrive!

So now you have to rely on the notes or URL to make the entry human searchable. Not great, but auto-type is more important, because now you don't have to search!!!

Superlux HD 668B Headphones

I have a pair of Superlux HD 668B headphones and they certainly are the best sub $50 headphones on the market.

As a note for disassembly that was not clear in other posts that I've read.

To remove the earphones from the band, first remove the logo cap. It's just a cap! Not a ring, no prying needed!

This can be pulled straight off with a sticky piece of tape, no knife needed. It's held on by two little plastic pins.

Also, the springy cussions are adjustable! I had no clue. They can pull out or push into the plastic bits on the sides, however it will take WAY more force than seems reasonably necessary to use. I noted that when I took everything apart.

Sneaky Subtitles

Some movies obviously require subtitles. Others are more sneaky, and you might not realize need them at first glance.

This is an incomplete list, purely from memory. I'll try to update it in the future.

Argo (2012)
Atomic Blonde (2017)
Babel (2006)
Baby Driver (2017)
Barry (2018)
Black Panther (2018)
Captain Phillips (2013)
Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
District 9 (2009)
The Incredibles (2004)
Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Isle of Dogs (2018)
Monuments Men (2014)

Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
Paris, je t'aime (2006)

Salt (2010)
The Shape of Water (2017)
Sicario (2015)
Sicario 2 (2018)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
Spectre (2015)
Widows (2019)
X-Men: First Class (2011)

Nextcloud, VirtualBox and Shared Folders

Update 10/1/2019 - Getting rc.local to work

I've had trouble getting rc.local to work on VMs with newer versions of ubuntu.  My best efforts are to install samaba, smbclient, run through this, then to actually execute rc.local (running rc.local seems to be critical to get it to run on startup).

Original Post -

This might not be how you're supposed to do it, but it's what worked for me.

Install ubuntu server

Install VirtualBox guest additions

Install Nextcloud

Setup your shared folder of choice in VirtualBox.  I'm not going to talk about doing that, it's pretty straight forward.  I checked automount, though that doesn't seem to help.

I made a directory within /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data/ called share.  You might have to sudo su to do it.

Mount your shared folder to that directory:

1. sudo mount -t vboxsf share /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data/share/

Auto mounting at startup

1. Edit /etc/rc.local

   sudo -H nano /etc/rc.local
   

2. Before exit 0 type:

   mount.vboxsf share /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data/share/ vboxsf

3. Save and exit, please and thank you.

If you restart your VM, that folder should now be mounted persistently.

If you want to see that folder in Nextcloud, you need to enable External Storage Support in Apps, then in settings, direct the path to the Local share directory you created above, /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data/share/ in my case.

Looks like the Nextcloud community knows that samba doesn't work with the snap installer, however I couldn't successfully install Nextcloud without snap.  It's discussed here, I'm not sure what the downside is to adding shares in your data directory other than accidentally writing files directly to /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data/share/ , instead of to your shared folder.  Maybe a security risk?  I'm not sure.

But I don't really want a huge VM taking up gigs of space, and I'd like to get to the shared files directly, without using the web UI sometimes.  AND I can leave a tiny VM running on my server's boot SSD, rather than having it on a spinning disk, that may or may not be spun up at any given point (would probably even stop it from spinning down).

I got SSL running with my own certs too, based on this.

I used SSL For Free and DNS verification to authenticate the subdomain I'm running this on.

I renamed the files to be: certificate.crt to cert.pem,   ca_bundle.crt to chain.pem, and  privkey.pem to privkey.pem.

I ran sudo nextcloud.enable-https custom -s cert.pem privkey.pem chain.pem and got an error, but it made a directory that I need.

Then I coppied my three files into /var/snap/nextcloud/current/certs/custom/

Than reran sudo nextcloud.enable-https custom -s cert.pem privkey.pem chain.pem

BINGO!!!

This is my next project, except hosted locally:

https://crosstalksolutions.com/15-minute-hosted-unifi-controller-setup/

and

https://crosstalksolutions.com/lets-encrypt-unifi/

Trek vs Wars

I just had a revelation about why it is less socially acceptable to publicly embrace Star Trek than Star Wars.

Star Wars is for kids. Star Trek is for adults.

Extended adolescence and nostalgia for childhood things is "cool".

Being a grown-up who enjoys and actively chooses to watch a TV show about aliens in space: not so cool.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Rotoscope, a process invented by Max Fleischer of animated superman fame. Who's son, Richard Fleischer, was a director for many films including Soylent Green (1973) and Fantastic Voyage (1966). Less notable for Million Dollar Mystery (1987) in which famous stunt man Dar Robinson died, and to whom Lethal Weapon(1987) is dedicated.

I just watched Lethal Weapon and A Scanner Darkly back to back and stumbled upon their connection.

Tasker and Secure Settings

I was having problems when introducing new %Variables passing between Tasker and Secure Settings.

I had to clear the cache on Tasker each time to get it to work. Keep in mind that if you have Tasker set as a device administrator, you'll have to disable Tasker being a device administrator before you can clear the cache. Then reapply administrator privileges.

More Tasker - Ping an IP

Ever have a server or PC go down that you're counting to have running?

Have Tasker tell you if it's down so you can get it running again.

Here's what you need:

Two android devices, one of which stays home.  I have this running on a tablet at home.
Tasker
Secure Settings
AutoRemoteLite

I'm guessing you already have Tasker running, that's no big deal.  Secure Settings also isn't hard, download and install.  AutoRemote is a bit different though.  It has to be installed on both devices.  Each device will have it's own unique URL and you can add each devices URL to the "devices" list to allow intercommunication.  I pretty much just lucked into it working after messing with it for a while, none of the instructions were too clear on that bit.  Classic tech instructions starting at step 7.

Super Important: In Tasker, go to Preferences > Misc > Enable External Access, or none of this will work.

Start a task and set it up like this one.  I'm a little overzealous about clearing variables, probably not necessary.



This is what your AutoRemote setup will look like, chose your own variables.  You can't have mine.  I changed the ping count to 5 to avoid false positives due to WiFi not firing up right away.



I added this to a profile so it pings every 30 minutes between 8:00 am and 10:30 pm.  If my PC goes down, it fires off a notification to my phone.  Pretty nifty.

Next step is to add a counter so if my machine is down I don't get notified continuously if I can't fire it back up for a couple days.

Scheduled Wake On LAN with Tasker

I've run a bunch of WOL setups, and this one works pretty well.

Ingredients:

• Android Phone with Tasker
• WOL app
• PC that you want to wake up
• MAC address of said PC
• IP address of same

I recommend having a static IP address for the computer that you're going to turn on, really the only way to go for this.

Set up your WOL:
In your new WOL app, press the "Add New" button to create a new WOL profile.
Name it something memorable and descriptive, and add the MAC and IP.  Leave everything else the same except for the "Send as Broadcast" check box.  Check that, it's given me the most success.  I recommend testing this bit to make sure you can WOL at all before you start messing with Tasker.

Then, in Tasker, create a new "Send Intent" task.  Here's the details:

• Action: com.benfinnigan.wol.widgetlaunch
• Cat: Launcher
• Extra: CPATH: /mnt/sdcard/WoLANWAN/YourWOLProfileNameHere.dat
• Target: Activity

Now you can add the task to whatever trigger you want, or just run it on demand.

Glad I've written this down now.  I had to resurrect my poor boot-looping Nexus 5 to get retrieve this info.

Mission Impossible: Replace existing router with Ubiquiti USG

I've been a home router hobbyist for a while now.  Probably goes back to my college days where I was pretty sure I was going to get a Cisco certification.  Careers took me a different direction.

I've run stock, tomato, wrt, pfsense, edge, and now I'm giving a USG a shot.

That USG sure wants to be set up fresh on a new network.  If you're like me, you already have a lot of in place gear and your own subnet setup that you don't want to mess with.  I was able to replace my existing non-Ubiquiti router without having to detach anything other than the router.

I have some Ubiquiti gear on my network, so I was already running the controller software on a desktop PC.  I'll tell you what, that USG sure didn't want to adopt.  This is what I did and it ended up being easy, just took a while to figure out.  In the end, I was as able to adopt all the hardware and not lose my existing Ubiquiti controller setup.

Materials:

• Desktop running existing controller
• Laptop running a fresh install of the controller software for windows (or your OS of choice)
• USG
• Network cable

I recommend updating the controller software to the latest version so you're running the save version on both computers.  The second computer doesn't have to be a laptop, but it makes it easier to keep track of the computers for descriptive purposes.

1. Don't take any gear apart yet, you're going to want internet for the following steps
2. Make a backup of the existing controller software on the desktop.  That can be found in Settings > Maintenance.
3. Copy that backup to the laptop
4. Turn off wireless on the laptop and disconnect all other network cables to the laptop
5. Restore the controller backup to the laptop (you might have to do some initial config beforehand)
6. Connect the laptop with the network cable to the LAN1 port on the USG
7. Setup the Settings > Networks so that it mirrors your existing network's DHCP config
8. Adopt the USG on the laptop
9. Backup the laptop controller config, name the file accordingly
10. Disconnect the laptop from the USG and put it back on the existing net
11. Transfer the new backup to the desktop and restore it
12. Swap out your old router for the USG
13. Give everything a restart for good measure

I was getting hung up on the fact that the USG REALLY wants to be 192.168.1.1.  You can't adopt a ubiquiti component that is on a different subnet.  By hooking up the laptop, it uses the USG's DHCP and the USG can be adopted.

This worked for me and I'm enjoying the USG so far.

Star Trek Paper Models

Some cool cut and assemble paper Star Trek models: http://heroesandiconstv.com/allstartrek/stories/heres-how-to-build-star-trek-ships-out-of-paper

Net Neutrality is Not Socialism

There is a lot of misinformation flying around out there about what net neutrality is and isn't.

I'll tell you what it isn't.  Net neutrality isn't socialism.  It's not a commie plot, and it's not a bad thing.

It isn't a Netflix subsidy.  It isn't a YouTube tax.  It just isn't.

One of the biggest problems with net neutrality is that there's no good analogy to make it relatable.

Ask yourself: "Am I a person?" If the answer is yes, then net neutrality is good for you.

The opposite of net neutrality is essentially extortion and censorship.

Do you like being able to go to any site on the Internet?  Then you like net neutrality.

Do you want your Internet service provider to determine what news you get, what videos you can watch and who you can communicate with? I doubt you do.

"But hey, Netflix is crushing those poor ISPs with the bandwidth subscribers use." Yes, Netflix is popular, but you know what, they're already paying for that bandwidth. And guess what else, Netflix subscribers are ALSO ALREADY PAYING FOR THAT BANDWIDTH.

Bandwidth is not consumed.  It is not finite.  We will not run out of 1s and 0s.  Once infrastructure is built, it only costs pennies to run.  Bandwidth is not water, gas, or some other consumable.  It's like running a fan.  "Hey, stop running the fan, you're going to run out of air!"

"But I get free video with my phone, this is awesome!" Not really, you only think you're getting something for free. Your ISPs is hitting content providers up for money.

What's wrong with that you ask? This is what.

Your ISP could stop you from going to competitors sites.  It could slow the data to a crawl and make competitors services unusable.

Competition is a good thing.  It promotes innovation and lower prices. Places without competition are guaranteed to have higher prices eventually.

So yes, you may get "free" video or music now, but you're going to pay a big cost down the line. The cost of your freedom, plus your bill will go up, I guarantee it will happen because there is no competition.

Also, it provides a mechanism for incumbent companies to stifle competitors.  They can just pay to shut out startups. That in no way is a good thing.

"But hey, I work for (or am invested in) an ISP, we make a ton of money, and want to keep making a ton of money. " Sure, that's awesome, making money is generally accepted as a good thing.  And you can continue to do it, just not at the expense of my freedom.

ISPs have already carved up territory so that they don't have to compete.  That's anti-competitive and hurts consumers (yes even you employee or investor) .  Now they want to make the content they serve anti-competitive.  And that's just not right.

Your ISP has complete control over your Internet experience.  You can block ads on websites, choose not to use a particular service.  But if your ISP starts messing with you THERE IS NO WAY AROUND IT.

ISPs have more power than you think and they're trying to flex their muscles and use that power. ISPs are a pipe, not a filter.

In closing, please try to understand net neutrality and why it's good for everyone.  Just because it came to the forefront with a Democrat in the white house doesn't mean it's bad.   Please don't spread misinformation about what it is and isn't.  I read comments on WSJ.com and weep because it's all misinformation and propaganda. Please try to understand net neutrality, it's important for our future.

Migrating Windows Media Center Scheduled Recordings

This is really tricky.  I've successfully done this twice though, and I didn't write it down the first time so I'm writing it down now.

I started with this as a guide: http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=119&sid=a81fc0052c8d1f074600a52dfe5dbe21&start=20

It's a starting point, complete with unresolved issues, wrong file paths and more!

What you really have to do is this:


Old system:

Save off this folder: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\

You need the files that are in mcepg2-0 or mcepg2-1, whichever that has the newest files in \backup\recordings.  mcepg2-0 had the newest for me, so that's what I'll refer to from this point on.

New system:

Setup Windows Media Center from scratch including live TV, but don't worry about the details too much.

Then, after setup is complete, copy these two directories from the saved-off old system to the new computer (same location):

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\mcepg2-0\backup\recordings
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\mcepg2-0\backup\subscriptions

Personally, I recommend renaming the existing folders so they aren't blown away, just in case something blows up and you need to revert to your freshly setup setup.

Then, at a command prompt run:
C:\Windows\eHome\loadmxf.exe -i C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\mcepg2-0\backup\recordings\FileName

!!Where FileName is the name of the newest file in \backup\recordings and \backup\subscriptions!!!

That crucial piece of information is omitted from the green button forum post.

So do that for both recordings and subscriptions, reload your program data and you should be in business!  Don't reload the listings, or you'll get double the channels and it'll be all messed up.

Not all there: The new Pixel and Pixel XL from Google

Google has taken android and the nexus program a direction different than I'd like to see.

Rather than affordable and fully equipped developer's devices, these are ultra premium iPhone lookalikes missing features that now are things of the past.

Introduced the Pixel and Pixel XL, featuring: Mono sound, and No Wireless Charging. Luckily, it has a headphone jack.

I don't get it, the phone costs nearly ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS (fully loaded).

At least these phones' USB type C ports support USB 3.0, unlike the also overpriced Nexus 6P and 5X. The 6P is STILL starts at $500 for the base model.

The pre-event leaks were true, and unfortunately these are no longer developer devices, they're budget busters.

Lumia 640 XL Qi Wireless Charging

The Lumia 640 XL has contacts for a wireless charging case back.  However, due to reasons unknown, one has never been sold.

I wish Microsoft wasn't a publicly traded company so they could share more information without risking that precious, precious stock price.

So, I took matters into my own hands and followed the details posted by Yang Hu on Windows Central.

I used a charging pad from a Lumia 920 case back.  The charging didn't work very well with my nexus wireless charger, but it does work with this one.  I went back in and shortened up the wires so they're neater than shown in the picture.  That was a test to see if it actually worked.

The standard case backs fit after you take off the little rubber stickers

Cheaper and more fun than a 950 XL.

Windows Mobile 10

I like messing with stuff, it's fun. So lately I've been messing with Windows Mobile 10.

I've had a couple Windows Phones in the past. Going way back, I had a hand-me-down HTC Shadow running Windows Mobile 6.0. Then more recently I got a Lumia 630 when I switched phone carriers. It was passable. I did a craigslist switcheroo and got a 635 instead so I could have LTE. Then I sold that as it clearly wasn't going to be my telephonic future.

I stayed windowless for a bit and snagged a Lumia 640 for $30 on black friday. Now that's a bargain! I liked it well enough to get a 640 XL on www.swappa.com. It's also pretty decent. Though I think my 640 is a bit snappier.

Anyway, long story short, I'm trying to park my trusty Nexus 5 and try out Windows for a bit, again.

Problem is, Windows likes to play by the rules and I don't. I like connecting to non-enterprise VPNs, using chrome remote desktop, accessing files on my home network while I'm on the road, tethering! and other such nonsense.

Windows mobile... not so much. My PPTP VPN worked for a bit, then stopped. Chrome remote desktop will never happen and tethering is blocked. No fun. Also, Edge chokes on half my localhost IPs. Lame.

So the jury is out. Can I adapt? Maybe. Will I? Ehhh.

I can't geofence my wifi to turn on and off like I could in 8.1. I'm pretty sure there were some other gripes I had.  The OS is getting better with each build, but I just don't like the restrictions. My Nexus 5 lets me run free and I definitely miss that... 4 hours in.

Conclusion: Windows Mobile 10 is cute. It's fun. It's personable and personal. I want to like it. But it's killing me with the superuser lockdown bs.