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Installing OpenBSD on Linveo KVM VPS 2024-10-21 I recently came across an amazing deal for a VPS on Linveo. For just $15 a year they provide: AMD KVM 1GB 1024 MB RAM 1 CPU Core 25 GB NVMe SSD 2000 GB Bandwidth It’s a pretty great deal and I suggest you look more into it if you’re interested! But this post is more focused on setting up OpenBSD via the custom ISO option in the KVM dashboard. Linveo already provides several Linux OS options, along with FreeBSD by default (which is great!). Since there is no OpenBSD template we need to do things manually. Getting Started Once you have your initial VPS up and running, login to the main dashboard and navigate to the Media tab. Under CD/DVD-ROM you’ll want to click “Custom CD/DVD” and enter the direct link to the install76.iso: https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.6/amd64/install76.iso The "Media" tab of the Linveo Dashboard. Use the official ISO link and set the Boot Order to CD/DVD. Select “Insert”, then set your Boot Order to CD/DVD and click “Apply”. Once complete, Restart your server. Installing via VNC With the server rebooting, jump over to Options and click on “Browser VNC” to launch the web-based VNC client. From here we will boot into the OpenBSD installer and get things going! Follow the installer as you normally would when installing OpenBSD (if you’re unsure, I have a step-by-step walkthrough) until you reach the IPv4 selection. At this point you will want to input your servers IPv4 and IPv6 IPs found under your Network section of your dashboard. Next you will want to set the IPv6 route to first default listed option (not “none”). After that is complete, choose cd0 for your install media (don’t worry about http yet). Continue with the rest of the install (make users if desired, etc) until it tells you to reboot the machine. Go back to the Linveo Dashboard, switch your Boot Order back to “Harddrive” and reboot the machine directly. Booting into OpenBSD Load into the VNC client again. If you did everything correctly you should be greeted with the OpenBSD login prompt. There are a few tweaks we still need to make, so login as the root user. Remember how we installed our sets directly from the cd0? We’ll want to change that. Since we are running OpenBSD “virtually” through KVM, our target network interface will be vio0. Edit the /etc/hostname.vio0 file and add the following: dhcp !route add default <your_gateway_ip> The <your_gateway_ip> can be found under the Network tab of your dashboard. The next file we need to tweak is /etc/resolv.conf. Add the following to it: nameserver 8.8.8.8 nameserver 1.1.1.1 These nameservers are based on your selected IPs under the Resolvers section of Network in the Linveo dashboard. Change these as you see fit, so long as they match what you place in the resolve.conf file. Finally, the last file we need to edit is /etc/pf.conf. Like the others, add the following: pass out proto { tcp, udp } from any to any port 53 Final Stretch Now just reboot the server. Log back in as your desired user and everything should be working as expected! You can perform a simple test to check: ping openbsd.org This should work - meaning your network is up and running! Now you’re free to enjoy the beauty that is OpenBSD.
Burning & Playing PS2 Games without a Modded Console 2024-09-02 Important: I do not support pirating or obtaining illegal copies of video games. This process should only be used to copy your existing PS2 games for backup, in case of accidental damage to the original disc. Requirements Note: This tutorial is tailored towards macOS users, but most things should work similar on Windows or Linux. You will need: An official PS2 game disc (the one you wish to copy) A PS2 Slim console An Apple device with a optical DVD drive (or a portable USB DVD drive) Some time and a coffee! (or tea) Create an ISO Image of Your PS2 Disc: Insert your PS2 disc into your optical drive. Open Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities) In Disk Utility, select your PS2 disc from the sidebar Click on the File menu, then select New Image > Image from [Disc Name] Choose a destination to save the ISO file and select the format as DVD/CD Master Name your file and click Save. Disk Utility will create a .cdr file, which is essentially an ISO file Before we move on, we will need to convert that newly created cdr file into ISO. Navigate to the directory where the .cdr file is located and use the hdiutil command to convert the .cdr file to an ISO file: hdiutil convert yourfile.cdr -format UDTO -o yourfile.iso You’ll end up with a file named yourfile.iso.cdr. Rename it by removing the .cdr extension to make it an .iso file: mv yourfile.iso.cdr yourfile.iso Done and done. Getting Started For Mac and Linux users, you will need to install Wine in order to run the patcher: # macOS brew install wine-stable # Linux (Debian) apt install wine Clone & Run the Patcher Clone the FreeDVDBoot ESR Patcher: git clone https://git.sr.ht/~bt/fdvdb-esr Navigate to the cloned project folder: cd /path/to/fdvdb-esr The run the executable: wine FDVDB_ESR_Patcher.exe Now you need to select your previously cloned ISO file, use the default Payload setting and then click Patch!. After a few seconds your file should be patched. Burning Our ISO to DVD It’s time for the main event! Insert a blank DVD-R into your disc drive and mount it. Then right click on your patched ISO file and run “Burn Disk Image to Disc...". From here, you want to make sure you select the slowest write speed and enable verification. Once the file is written to the disc and verified (verification might fail - it is safe to ignore) you can remove the disc from the drive. Before Playing the Game Make sure you change the PS2 disc speed from Standard to Fast in the main “Browser” setting before you put the game into your console. After that, enjoy playing your cloned PS2 game!
Perspective 2024-08-06 I recently read both Starting Hospice and No Salt posted on Jake’s blog and was quite moved. I don’t know Jake and have never met him - but his writing and shared experiences give a very real look into his mind and perspective. If you haven’t yet, I strongly recommend giving his site a read (or at the very least those two posts). It made me reflect on my own life, shift my perspective and realize how fortunate I truly am. Losing Focus I think we all find ourselves losing focus on the truly important things in life. That’s normal and expected. Maybe your house needs repairs, or you’re crunching for an upcoming deadline, or your prepping for a long a work trip, or your stressed out hunting for a job. Whatever it might be, our brains are very good at getting derailed and putting all our attention into less important things. But I believe our minds need to wander and focus on the less important. Otherwise your mental health would suffer greatly. And I should note, some of these “stresses” still require our attention. I just don’t think they should consume us. I’m not advocating that we need to constantly be obsessing over the limited time we have on this spinning rock, or that we should smother our families with over-the-top love. Just stopping and reflecting on these things can really put any worries you have into perspective. It might be cliche to state the obvious, “Be grateful for what you have!” but cliche or not - it’s true. Jake will be leaving behind not just his friends and family, but also his wife who is 7-months pregnant. I can’t begin to imagine the range of emotions everyone close to him must be feeling. I know I would be furious, which doesn’t make sense since something like this is so far removed from human control. Being angry would just be wasted energy. But that’s easier said than done. I don’t have a whole lot else to say on the matter. This post also pales in comparison to Jake’s actual experience and shared perspective on his site. I really wasn’t even sure to share this on my site, in fear that I would be somehow disrespecting Jake’s memory (along with his much better writing skills and openness). But then I thought, if anything, I could help reach Jake’s story to even one other person and help them reflect on their own perspective as well. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a long, purposefully slow walk with my family.
Dual Booting OpenBSD and Alpine Linux on a X220 ThinkPad 2024-07-10 I’ve always found it useful to run both OpenBSD and some form of Linux variation on my personal machines. Most times, I would default to running one OS on bare metal, while the other would simply live in a VM. This works okay but I prefer my operating systems having a “hardware separator” - if that makes sense? So, I set off to start dual booting both OpenBSD and Alpine Linux on my X220 ThinkPad. I should mention that I planned to write this blog post a couple weeks ago, but the original Dogfish mSATA SSD I ordered wasn’t compatible with my X220 (even though they say it is supported…). Luckily, I found a replacement drive in one of my “computer parts” drawer. Hoarding tech always prevails! The original Dogfish mSATA slotted in the X220. Too bad it didn't work... I came across my old Raspberry Pi 400, which I previously wrote about when stuffing an SSD inside it, and proceeded to gut the drive. It’s a cheap KingSpec SSD with a whopping 64GB of storage space. But that didn’t matter since the plan was to install the wonderfully small Alpine Linux. 64 GB would be plenty of space for us! Getting Started I already had the Alpine Linux ISO installed on a random thumb drive, so that made things quicker right off the bat. The next step was opening up my X220 and slotting in the very tiny mSATA. This introduced the first minor issue: the drive was too small. I could have looked into something more “professional-looking” in order to seat the drive properly but I decided to stick with electrical tape. Get it?… After applying the tape I closed the machine back up. The KingSpec mSATA slotted in the X220 and secured with top-of-the-line electrical tape... Installing Alpine Linux Next, I needed to tell the BIOS to boot into my thumb drive containing the Alpine ISO. Once the proper order was set, I rebooted the machine and ran through the standard Alpine installer. No problems to report there. My X220 booting into the Alpine ISO thumb drive The Alpine Linux installer showing both disk options for installation destination. SDA is currently running OpenBSD. Once that was done, I rebooted the machine, being sure to remove the thumb drive and set the BIOS order to point to the new mSATA disk. Then I ran through my personal Alpine Suck installer to get my go-to applications installed alongside my dwm desktop environment. Again, no problems to report during this process. Alpine Linux running my personal `dwm` setup. Absolutely beautiful. Extras? That’s really it. Nothing super interesting to report, but that seems to be the running theme with these older ThinkPad machines: they were built for tinkering and taking apart regularly. If I was less lazy, I could look into setting up a boot loader to avoid swapping between disks via BIOS settings, but for my use case this setup works fine. Now I have the power of OpenBSD and Linux on my personal machine!
Building rbenv on OpenBSD 7.5 2024-06-02 I use Ruby (specifically with Jekyll) for a lot of my clubs/projects while using my personal laptop (X220 ThinkPad) which is runs OpenBSD. Since I recently upgraded to OpenBSD 7.5 I thought it could be helpful for others if I shared my process of building and using rbenv to install different Ruby versions. Before We Build First, be sure to install the required packages in order to build from source, and then clone the core rbenv repo: pkg_add git gcc gmake libffi libyaml openssl git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv Building rbenv Add rbenv to your PATH and initialize it (place this inside your .bashrc or .zshrc etc): export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH" export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/shims:$PATH" export RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--with-openssl-dir=/usr/local" eval "$(rbenv init -)" Then reload your shell (zsh in this example): source ~/.zshrc Next we will need to install ruby-build as a rbenv plugin. Clone the ruby-build repository into the rbenv plugins directory: git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build Installing Ruby and Setting Our Version Now use rbenv to install the desired version of Ruby (we will get an older version for this example): rbenv install 3.3.0 If you run into issues, you may need to specify your openssl directory: RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--with-openssl-dir=/usr/local" rbenv install 3.3.0 If you’re on a slower machine (like mine) this might take a little bit. Just grab a coffee or a snack while you wait! Then navigate to your project of choice and set the local Ruby version: rbenv local 3.3.0 That’s it! If you’d prefer to set this version of Ruby for all projects going forward, simply replace local with global.
More in programming
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I like how they fit around other tasks. I press play, lock my phone, and put it down. I’m free to wash the dishes, fold the laundry, or shop for groceries. Unfortunately, more and more information is only published as a video. Technical talks, conference sessions, video essays – they don’t work in an audio-only podcast app. I could convert these videos to MP3 files, but that breaks down the moment a video isn’t pure spoken word. If a speaker says, “Look at this slide” or holds up a diagram, an audio-only file leaves me stranded. I don’t want to give up the podcast player I like, nor stare at a screen for an hour – but I do want the information in these videos. To solve this, I’m abusing my podcast player’s chapter support. This gives me the best of both worlds: I can listen to a video as audio-first, and glance at my lock screen if I need a moment of visual context. The idea: Chapters every few seconds MP3 files can have ID3 metadata, and ID3 metadata can include chapters. A chapter covers a particular time range, and it can have an associated title, description, and cover art. My podcast app of choice is Overcast, which can’t play videos, but it does have robust chapter support. I can jump between chapters, navigate a table of contents, and see per-chapter cover art. To get videos into Overcast, I’m creating MP3 files with a new chapter every few seconds, and the per-chapter cover art is a corresponding frame from the video. As I play the file, I get a slow, stop-motion-like rendition of the original video. If my phone is locked, I can glance at my lock screen and see the current frame in the Now Playing screen. Overcast is developed by Marco Arment, and I got this idea from Forecast, his app for adding chapters to podcasts. In particular, I was struck by its ability to create chapters that don’t display in the chapter list – ideal if I don’t want a table of contents with hundreds of entries. As I was developing my script, I compared my output to the output from Forecast to ensure I was creating the chapters correctly. The code: FFmpeg and Mutagen There are three steps in this process: Convert a video file to an MP3 Extract images from the video at a fixed interval Insert the images as hidden chapters in the MP3 file Let’s go through each in turn. 1. Convert a video file to an MP3 Converting a video file to an MP3 is a single FFmpeg command: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 audio.mp3 This is consistently the slowest step of the process, and I do wonder if I could use different settings or an alternative encoder to make it go faster – but it’s not slow enough to be worth further investigation. 2. Extract images from the video at a fixed interval Extracting images from a video needs a more complicated FFmpeg command: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 \ -vf 'fps=1/5,scale=iw*sar:ih,scale=min(iw\,945):min(ih\,945):force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease' \ thumbnail_%04d.jpg This extracts an image every 5 seconds, downscales any image larger than 945 pixels square (while preserving the original aspect ratio), and saves the results as sequentially numbered JPEG images (thumbnail_0001.png, thumbnail_0002.png, and so on). The key is the -vf flag, which defines two FFmpeg filters: The fps filter selects one frame every 5 seconds (fps=1/5). The first scale filter scales the width based on the sample aspect ratio (scale=iw*sar:ih). Without this filter, frames can be stretched and distorted. The second scale filter scales the input video, preserving the original aspect ratio (force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease), and ensuring the output images fit within 945×945px or the size of the input video, whichever is smaller. My limit is 945 pixels because that’s the largest size that cover art is shown on my iPhone. This filter still isn’t completely correct – it sometimes creates images from portrait videos that are smaller than I’m expecting – but it’s good enough. These are only thumbnails for glancing at, and if I want to change it later, I can always do the image resizing outside FFmpeg. 3. Insert the images as hidden chapters in the MP3 file Inserting the chapters into the MP3 file is more complicated. Although FFmpeg has basic support for ID3 metadata, as far as I know, it can’t insert chapters with per-chapter artwork. Instead, I’m going to reach for Python and the Mutagen library. Here’s the code to add a chapter to an MP3 file: from mutagen.id3 import APIC, CHAP, ID3, PictureType audio = ID3("audio.mp3") with open("thumbnail_0001.jpg", "rb") as f: img_data = f.read() image_frame = APIC(mime="image/jpeg", type=PictureType.OTHER, data=img_data) chapter_frame = CHAP( element_id="chp1", start_time=0, end_time=5 * 1000, sub_frames=[image_frame] ) audio.add(chapter_frame) audio.save() This creates a single chapter that lasts the first 5 seconds (0 to 5000 milliseconds), and the per-chapter cover art is thumbnail_0001.jpg. If we ran this in a loop, we could add images for every 5 second slice of the original video. This code is inserting two frames into the ID3 metadata: The CHAP (chapter) frame contains the timing information, and it can have subframes for metadata like title, chapter art, or associated URL. The APIC (attached picture) subframe contains information about a picture, which can either be a blob of image data or a URL to an image on the web. Normally, you’d also insert a CTOC frame which defines a table of contents, but I don’t want a TOC with hundreds of 5-second chapters, so I’m deliberately not doing this here. This is allowed by the ID3 spec – you’re not required to insert a CTOC frame if you’re using chapters, and you can have chapters that aren’t listed in your table of contents. To work out which frames I needed, I used Forecast to create some chapters by hand, and I inspected their frames. In particular, loading an MP3 and calling Mutagen’s pprint() method shows a human-readable list of frames, and then I could drill into the individual fields: from mutagen.id3 import ID3 audio = ID3("audio.mp3") print(audio.pprint()) I wrapped all this code in a project called glancecast, which allows you to convert a video file with a single command, with optional flags to set the frame length and chapter art size: $ python3 glancecast.py interesting_talk.mp4 interesting_talk.mp3 The process takes a minute or so to complete, most of which is spent transcoding the video file to MP3. The resulting MP3s are usually 40 to 50 MB in size, which is very reasonable. The outcome: How it looks in practice Here’s what one of these “glanceable” podcasts looks like in Overcast and on my lock screen: Maggie Appleton presented this talk over two years ago and it’s been on my “talks to watch” list ever since. Once I put it in Overcast? I listened to it in less than a day. It’s not a lot of extra information, but enough that I can quickly glance down and get the gist of what a speaker is saying. Both views update with a new frame every few seconds, or I can put my phone in my pocket and ignore the screen. I’ve used this approach for half a dozen videos so far, and I’m happy with the results. I expect to keep using it, because I have a long queue of videos I’ve been meaning to watch. If you’d like to try this, check out glancecast for the full code and instructions. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
Andrew Baker, the current Group CIO at Capitec Bank wrote an interesting piece on AI and open source, and how these tools that generate code according to one’s specification may replace the general reliance on open source implementations done by contributors around the world. I’d really recommend reading it. I have great admiration and respectContinue reading "AI Isn’t Replacing Open Source"
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