Oh boy oh boy it arrived. And what a friendly seller 👌 Kinda a shame that they gave up this hobby. Sold everything for an apple and an egg. It’s a loosely based on a F-16. Nothing of this is functional though. Yet.

Winter may come!

Man… the _feel_ of those lovely switches and dials alone ❤️

I totally missed the memo but apparently there is a Linux version of for a while now: https://support.gameglass.gg/en/articles/9351904-installing-gameglass-hub-on-linux

* Ubuntu 22.04+
* Linux Mint 21.2+
* Fedora 39+

Not a fan of GameGlass (I prefer my switches and dials, as you may know) but it’s probably of interest for other builders.

It has been a while that I tried . With the new Tracker plugin (AI haha) for we get head tracking without annoying IR LEDs or reflecting stripes just by reading the webcam video feed. This is apparently fast enough to try without a dedicated nowadays. And all that on a PC. Took some fiddling but the concept still works. What a time to be alive.

Demo: https://makertube.net/w/groS1wpAhP8XYE75vJwX32

HowTo: https://simpit.dev/systems/opentrack/

AAXtoMP3[1] fails to split up AAXC files to chapters. The reason for this is due to an error in the RegEx Find command to pick up the extra cover image in better quality. Audible-cli dumped two jpg files for the cover: One 500×500 pixels ($bookname_(500).jpg) and the other 1215×1215 pixels ($bookname_(1215).jpg). The find command picks up _both_, which introduces a linebreak resulting in a stat error breaking the script. Creating the chapters comes after this step and while the resulting MP3 is fine in itself I really do prefer chapter files over one huge blob.

Since the AAXtoMP3 project is archived I can’t report any bugs to it but this is my dirty fix adding tail to the mix to only get the last result:


diff --git AAXtoMP3 AAXtoMP3
index 0a6c2e0..98a30ce 100755
--- AAXtoMP3
+++ AAXtoMP3
@@ -467,7 +467,8 @@ validate_extra_files() {

# Cover
extra_dirname="$(dirname "${extra_media_file}")"
- extra_find_command='$FIND "${extra_dirname}" -maxdepth 1 -regex ".*/${extra_title##*/}_([0-9]+)\.jpg"'
+ extra_find_command='$FIND "${extra_dirname}" -maxdepth 1 -regex ".*/${extra_title##*/}_([0-9]+)\.jpg" | tail -n1'
+
# We want the output of the find command, we will turn errexit on later
set +e errexit
extra_cover_file="$(eval ${extra_find_command})"

Happy backing up your audio books 👏

[1] The purpose of this software is to create a method for you to download and store your books just in case Audible fails for some reason.

I’m flabbergasted how good this tracker-neuralnet plugin for works. It does the with just a webcam without any clips, reflectors or LED stripes. I kinda expected this to not work really well in a dark room, that I prefer for gaming, but I was wrong. Even with a tiny light in one corner of the room only it kept tracking flawless.

…can even scratch my nose and it keeps tracking.

To get this neuralnet tracker input in the first place I had to download the ONNX runtime package onnxruntime-linux-x64-1.18.1.tgz from https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/releases/tag/v1.18.1 (My Fedora offered 1.15.1 from it’s repo but this was at the time of writing not sufficient and having it installed resulted in failure due to an API mismatch). I didn’t even install it somewhere, just unpacked it in my Downloads folder.

Back in my OpenTracks folder I run cmake the way I’ve done it before several times but this time I added the unpacked onnxruntime folder to the config.

Configure did it’s magic (note how it picked up module tracker-neuralnet once the ONNXRuntime_DIR was set) and here we are one make later. This is rather impressive 🤓

YMMV

Telegram worries by Jan-Lukas ElseJan-Lukas Else (jlelse.blog)
Telegram was always my favorite messenger, as it provided a fast and user-friendly experience on multiple devices. But one and a half years ago, I already started doubting my decision to rely on Telegram. Now I question it even more. With the latest release, Telegram introduces an in-app browser, wh...

The direction Telegram is going is unsettling to me too. I always preferred this over any others because it was simple and just worked™ on all of my devices. Including my Linux PC. I wish I could name an alternative but what? The usual suspects, Threema and Signal suffer from the same problem: Centralized services.

And Matrix? OMG. I wish I could recommend that but the on-boarding experience – even for tech savy people working in this industry – is the worst. And sadly that’s not even a question of the client used. Each requires a high suffering tolerance from their users. It feels like it has all the right ideas in the most complicated way possible and while I didn’t host any Matrix serves myself I hear they have a very heavy footprint.

I’ve a private mailserver with a web interface behind a proxy at home. It’s that proxy that obtains certs from LetsEncrypt every few months.

I’m using the same certs for the mail gateways (smtpd, ical and so on) behind the scenes and it’s annoying to keep the certs in sync so my Evolution (mail client) would greet me once every few months with an obsolete cert warning.

No more! Why repeat these steps manually again and again if I can just utilize the power of systemctl --host and scp?

#!/bin/bash
scp /etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.example.com/* 192.0.2.152:/etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.example.com/
for i in {postfix,mail-gateway,mail-ical}; do systemctl --host 192.0.2.152 restart ${i}; done

This may run as a hook script for the certbot or simply via cron once a week 🤷

(Yes yes, we can argue all day why this box can log in to another via ssh as root with just a key to this single virtual machine on my internal network. This is a homelab set-up and gaining access to the proxy would be a disaster already since this one terminates HTTPS already *and* has the cert keys.)