Greg's Computer Stuff

Congrats Greg moving to the free (as in free speech) operation system that won’t do anything that you have never asked for, like forcibly rebooting the PC all of a sudden!
Here are a few tips from me:

  1. KDE is indeed easy to use, but if you want more light-weight desktop I’d recomment Fluxbox. I’ve been using it for decades and am perfectly happy with it.
  2. Have some terminal multiplexer such as tmux or GNU Screen. They will really help you if you use terminal a lot.
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Yeah, and I could have gone for Ubuntu, but then I would have probably ended up getting my data stolen and stuff, according from what I’ve heard. But Gnome is too much like Apple for me, so KDE it is.

I don’t use the Konsole all that much, sure I have tons of scripts that run through it, but I dont manually type into any of those, they are just a single Key press on the Keyboard for me.

And I have Windows 10 on this new Computer, if I ever seriously need that garbage. I originally planned to keep it for Steam Games, but now that Steam Play is better at doing Windows Games than Windows itself, that is thrown out the "Window"s. (pun intended)

As far as I know Adobe Shit is the last thing that Windows might be good for (and most of those people use Apple), now that Valve mostly killed the need for Windows Gaming.

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Windows XP was the last best version I used until my computer upgrades out grew it’s capabilities. At Overmind’s nudging I started using Ubuntu and I have been using it ever since. I have not had any worries like I did with Windows. Been with Ubuntu nearly 20 years now and no regrets.

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I can confirm Windows XP was the best :wink:

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Yeah back on Windows XP everything just kinda worked, but now on newer Windows nothing works!

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Recently I got pissed at Youtube again not showing the Notifications for my Subscriptions despite ringing the Bell and everything, so I decided I will write something that does it for me.

First I grabbed all the Channel Page Links I could get (except for the 10 that this wont work for)

Then I added the argument for making an Archive of already downloaded Links to keep track of:

 --download-archive "~/Documents/Scripts/downloaded.txt"

And an Argument for stopping the Check after 24 Videos:

 --playlist-end 24

Now the Script will download the 24 most recent Videos from the Channel Page, but clearly I dont wanna download 24 of the videos I already watched, so I needed to be a bit tricky and changed this:

 -o "/data/Downloads/%(title)s.%(ext)s"

to this:

 -o "~/Documents/Scripts/dummy.txt"

And added an empty dummy.txt File to that Location, so now the 24 most recent Videos will be added to the List of Links it already downloaded, because youtube-dl thinks the File is already done.

Then I changed it back to the actual Location, since all Videos were marked as Downloaded now.

Now the Script, whenever I press the Macro Key on my Keyboard for it, will automatically download all new Videos regardless of what Youtube thinks I should be notified about, and that at the Resolution I want them to be (unlike what the Youtube Media Player often does).

But there was more, Videos that go at 240p get throttled by Youtube, which is ofcourse slowing down this entire Script. Adding this Argument fixed that though:

 --http-chunk-size 10M

Though one problem was left, there is Channels where I want 360p Videos for one Type of Content and 240p for another Type. Mainly in case of TeamFourStar, so I needed to use a Regex so the DnD and the Fan Art Streams were downloaded at a higher Resolution.

 --match-title "tfs.at.the|fan.art|fanart|inktober"

And then follow the 360p Regex Filtered Line with a 240p Unfiltered Line, which thanks to the Download Archive that keeps track of downloaded Videos will not repeat downloading the 360p Video.

youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyfG7-7lPhf6EIC6igUOfzw/videos" -if "best[height<=360]" -o "/data/Downloads/%(title)s.%(ext)s" --restrict-filenames --retries infinite --console-title --download-archive "~/Documents/Scripts/downloaded.txt" --playlist-end 24 --http-chunk-size 10M --match-title "tfs.at.the|fan.art|fanart|inktober"
youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyfG7-7lPhf6EIC6igUOfzw/videos" -if "best[height<=240]" -o "/data/Downloads/%(title)s.%(ext)s" --restrict-filenames --retries infinite --console-title --download-archive "~/Documents/Scripts/downloaded.txt" --playlist-end 24 --http-chunk-size 10M
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So Youtube recently removed the 3gp Formats from almost all Videos, some ancient Videos still have it, but anything less than a year or two old doesn’t have it anymore afaik. This makes the 240p Option impossible to get without splicing Audio and Video together after downloading.

Ofcourse I do want to save on Bandwidth and Drive Space, so I decided to setup Values for that on most of the Channels.

-f "bestvideo[height<=240]+worstaudio/bestvideo[height<=360]+worstaudio/best[height<=240]/best[height<=360]"

This (if ffmpeg is installed, and only for Videos on Youtube) will download the 240p Video and the “worst” or actually smallest possible Audio Track and mix them into one small Video, as opposed to me being forced to use the 360p with “good” audio that is about twice as large or more in the end.

Ofcourse it has a fallback to the 360p Version in case things are broken.

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Which is pretty simple to do with ffmpeg if you want to go that route. :slight_smile:

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I already do, that’s what the script does. :stuck_out_tongue:

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You did not expect me to post anymore on this Thread did ya? Well I consider this the “random stuff about my non-Pi Computers”-Blog-Thingy so here I go!

When I decided to move my Network Switch one meter to the left and install Pi Hole onto my Pi 4B, I was curious on how well the Gigabit Networking works. Turned out, it did not. So I went to testing out all the Connections.

First I thought the Cisco Switch must be borken. Nope it works fine.
Then I thought maybe the PoE HAT on my Pi 4B reduces the data that can be transferred over Ethernet. Also Nope, that works just fine.
Then I actually used mii-tools to see how the connectivity runs through the Network and somehow my zbox ran at 100MBit/sec at half Duplex, despite having a Realtek Gigabit Network Card.
Turns out autonegotiate is somehow OFF, meaning Debian just defaults to this bad setting. But why is it OFF? It should be ON by default at normal circumstances. Something isn’t right.
But turning that ON does only work when I manually do it after logging in. Clearly running a sudo command on startup manually is a PITA. So why the fuck does it not work when I put it into my /etc/rc.local to run during boot regardless of who logs in?
Well guess what the Realtek Driver does when you log in. It renames eth0 and eth1 to enp2s0 and enp3s0. So my Boot Script (and probably the OS too) ofcourse doesn’t work, if it references those two instead of eth0 and eth1, meaning I need to take both names into account in the Script and now everything works at Gigabit Speeds, I think. I got it to like 400-500MBit/sec with VNC and KDE Connect combined, so I guess it actually works.

Here is the Script I am using in /etc/ in case anyone would ever need it to fix their Zotac zbox or other Realtek Network Cards.
rc.local (223 Bytes)
P.S. yes I know rc.local is NOT the way to properly run root stuff at startup, but the legacy still works for me, and is far easier to setup than a proper service and everything.

Also nice is that the Pi now actually uses PulseAudio and I can use the “paprefs” command to setup Networked Audio to my Main Computer, so the Pi actually emits Sounds over my Speakers. It is super easy to setup, due to spawning a GUI for it instead of requiring arbitrary parameters.
Just dont use it for HD Audio from a Pi, sure it only uses 2MBit/sec but it stutters for certain things. It did work fine when I used it for my slightly faster Laptop to stream Factorios Audio to my Speakers, and I did not notice any stuttering there.
And yes, everything on my Network has access to my Sharkoon SB1 Soundcard and therefore my Speakers. I by the way don’t run anything over Bluetooth or WiFi, everything is wired.

Did I also mention I hate flimsy DisplayPort Ports? Just a little jiggle on the Cable and everything fucks up the Widgets on my second Screen…

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A proper service is a very short and simple text file that you drop in the right location then systemctl enable blah it. ^.^

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The problems I have with that are simple, whenever I looked up an answer to my question, all answers said “just register a service” WITHOUT TELLING HOW TO DO THAT PROPERLY. They only gave half the solution to registering a Service, or worse, a Solution for OLDER Systems, that doesn’t work for me.

This is why I chose the Solution of “just drop a technically deprecated File with all my Stuff into there, that no program would ever use nowadays, and everything is safe”

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Well for future reference, what you were trying to create was a oneshot service, I.E. it runs a command when triggered (which for you would b e when the, say, network service is loaded, or when you manually systemctl start blah it) then stops.

First google result seems decent:

Although making the bash script is useful to keep things separated well, it’s entirely unnecessary for note, the service itself can call whatever it wants without it so if you have something super simple then meh, lol. You can leave out things like the teardown (ExecStop line) if you don’t need it, etc… etc… Keep the RemainAfterExit=true line for oneshots so it thinks it worked. You’ll want to uncomment the line in the above example of #After=network.target to After=network.target to auto-trigger on the network load being done

This page is pretty descriptive if you want to know what lines do:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.service.html

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I feel stupid now. Due to another Pi Zero related Project I am gonna write about once it is done, I had to share my Network over USB, so far so good.
There I noticed buried in my fucking Network Settings “100 MBit/sec Half Duplex” meaning the default Network Settings of the Version of Kubuntu that I was using (at the time at which I installed it), dictated this slower speed, and my now completely useless rc.local File overwrote them later in the cycle.
This is clearly fixed in later versions of Kubuntu as it works on my Pi 4B just fine. It was just human Error and a random Bug I guess…

Well, back to trying to make a Pi Zero into a USB Device, before I go buy the Board that gives it a Male USB A Plug for 5 Bux (and another Pi Zero W, because I dont want to waste the one with the soldered on GPIO Pins I bought last year).

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So reading my most recent post here, yeah the Pi Zero Project did not work out like i hoped it would (USB Storage + WiFi in one thing). I can do USB Storage, I can do WiFi, but i cant do both at the same time!

But now for the reason I am actually writing this Post! So ever had the Issue that Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive and similar File Sharing Solutions behave increasingly bad towards the End User?

What if I told you, you can easily share Folders between People and/or your own Devices without even having a Server to host them on, and without making any sort of Account whatsoever? All that is needed is that both Devices are “online” at the same time, but it does not even have to be over the internet, it can also be just the local network!

I tried out Syncthing in various common configurations and so far it behaved really well and always made sure I dont just randomly lose Files, without spamming the ever loving crap out of every action that I take, in an attempt to scare me into staying with some paid corporate Service!

And it does not even need you to port-forward or anything, it just works, and does so on pretty much all operating Systems and Smartphones.

Here are some practical things you might want to know:

  1. Setup Syncthing to autostart with this being the command to launch it “syncthing -no-browser”, so it wont just pop up a Browser Window (with the Syncthing User Interface) every time you reboot your system. The User Interface also has a Setting for it somewhere.

  2. Just remove the Default Folder, you wont need it, you should just put a Folder where YOU want it to be located and declare that Folder as a brand new Location to sync.

  3. Once a Sync Location has been set up you CANNOT change its unique ID or the Folder Path anymore, if you want to change the Path you have to remember the unique ID and make a new Sync Location and paste that unique ID into it, and then remove the old Sync Location. It is a safety thing because changing the Path can mess with things.

  4. Syncthing does NOT follow Symlinks, but it does copy Symlinks as is (unless you are on Windows, where Symlinks are not supported by Syncthing). This is a really important safety Feature. But if you dont like that, you can always “reverse Symlink” something! (which means moving the real location of the linked Folder and symlinking the original location to the new one)

  5. If you install Syncthing using apt-get make sure you actually add their PPA because older Versions (and i mean like half a decade older) do not like linking up with newer Versions. Found that out when trying to have a shared Folder with someone.

It is working great and was really easy to set up, I primarily use it on my local Network and so far it has not eaten any of the metered Bandwidth from my ISP.

For example I have set it up to share my Music Folder in Send Only on my Main Machine, and then declared the PRE-EXISTING Music Folder on my GPD-WIN-2 as Receive Only for that Sync.
It detected all matching Files and it detected a bunch of not matching Files (I recently renamed the majority of my Music Files), but it KEPT the non-matching Files and just offered me a non-intrusive Button in the UI to Revert Local changes (aka delete the non-matching Files), and after hitting Confirm it just worked!

I cant believe that something this simple and obviously working, is fucked up so badly by companies trying to sell you synchronizing Folders!

I only got pointed out to this existing by @OvermindDL1 linking me this Post by an Apple User complaining about how fucked up Dropbox and iCloud are: Computers as I used to love them @ tonsky.me

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Is it only a single connector shared for both those tasks? Or what’s up? Can they be swapped back and forth enabled/disabled in software if they can both be connected?


Syncthing is awesome, I didn’t know greg didn’t already know about it or I would have introduced it sooner, lol.

Yeah, symlinks start to bring up issues like “what happens when a file is synched back on it, does that update what it points to or does it just replace the symlink, etc… etc…”, lots of issues to consider, especially with security (what if someone sends a symlink that points to your password database, and then reads that back?!). Better to do it as it is as it is safe!

Because their sync tool isn’t the product, you are, you are how they get money, so they encourage subscription subscription subscription, lol. FOSS tools only!

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eclisple is ancient… unlucky you can’t use intelliJ idea because it is just a better option

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I could use IDEA but some of the things I have set up and gotten used to for Minecraft are kinda bound to eclipse. But hey everything else is gonna use IDEA, lol. Did not expect someone to reply to the oldest post in this Thread, I only renamed it. XD

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So after 3 and a half years of using my passive cooled ZBOX, I got myself a new Computer. This time it’s AMD Ryzen instead of an Intel Celeron. Lets first talk about all the bad Stuff with my old Setup, now that I migrated most of it over.

Did you know Celeron CPUs are shitty at decoding Videos? Yeah if I did anything in VLC Media Player the Video would turn into a garbled mess until the next Key Frame.
Still Image portions in Videos? You guessed it, that alone causes a garbled mess!
Skipping back 3 seconds, while the playback speed is higher than 1x? Yep, garbled mess!

Ever heard of bad DisplayPort Cables? Yeah that one seems to be a duh, but what if the Cable is alright, and the damn Port on the Computer is so fucking flimsy that merely touching the Cable disconnects the Monitor? And thanks to a Bug in Kubuntu, all widgets on that Monitor just turned into a jumbled mess in the process!
Now whenever that happens (as in if I actually plug it out and back in to test it), only the Wallpaper resets, but the Widgets are fine!

Back in 2018 ecryptfs was slowly being phased out. I did not know that when installing Kubuntu, and ofcourse chose THAT option instead of Full Disk Encryption via LUKS.
It has caused so many tiny Issues and performance problems, like Filename Limits being shorter than usual, or just generally more SSD writes.

Speaking of borked Setups, I installed Oracle Java 8, while it still existed in the repositories.
I should have went with OpenJDK 8 instead, considering I only use it for Minecraft anyways… And yes, now I tried more up to date Versions of OpenJDK first (18 and 11), they did not work with Minecraft 1.7.10.
Glad I am no longer playing that Game in online Mode looks at all the security Issues and the lack of MS Account.

A lot of those weird Issues, and bad configurations on my end, especially the ecryptfs one, prevented me from updating my distro to any other major Release.
I basically had a deadline until April this year to get a new Computer because of that, since security updates would have stopped by then.
I know I would technically not have needed a new Computer, but I did not want to deal with accidental data loss, also hey, it’s way more performance now!

My Home Folder was just a giant mess, I cant believe the default of so many damn Programs is “lets dump all our Files into the Home Folder, but it is okay because its in our hidden Folder!”, and more importantly I cannot believe that most Distros decide to “lets put the cluster of User Folders like Downloads, Desktop and Documents into the Home Folder too! That will surely not cause any Issues with people who have viewing hidden Files enabled!”…
So yeah, now I have a home Folder inside my home Folder just for keeping my own Stuff sorted away from the garbage dump that is the default home Folder…
I also merged these cluster Folders to be just one “desktop” Folder, so whenever I download something, it is instantly on the Desktop, whenever I save a File?, Default Save Location is the Desktop, taking a Screenshot?, the Desktop!, a place where I made sure I can navigate to other places easily.
And yes I am a “keep-the-desk-clean” kindof person. I do not understand people just having a Downloads Folder with thousands of unsorted Files in it. If something is in the Desktop or Downloads, it has to be dealt with!

Now that I listed most of the Issues I had with my old Setup, time for talking about my new Setup!

AMD Ryzen 7 4800U (8 Cores/16 Threads, 1,8 to 4,2 GHz)
AMD Radeon (1750 MHz)
DDR4 16GBx2 Dual-Channel
M.2 2280 512 GB SATA-SSD
a Gigabit-Ethernet-Port and a 2,5-Gigabit-Ethernet-Port
Wi-Fi 6; BlueTooth 5.1

Not much to say about it, it’s definitely an upgrade for sure (especially for playing Factorio, lol, yeah I am still stuck playing that…). Guess I should talk about Software Issues I had, lol.

When I booted it up I very much noticed that ofcourse Windows 10 was installed (even though I did insert a bootable USB Stick!). And there was no fucking way to avoid booting into Windows first, because the Boot up is just way too damn fast.

You know the “Internet Explorer exists only to download a better Browser” meme?
Well in order to install Linux you HAVE to go through the Windows Setup, there is no way around it, unless you have physical access to the Drive and some other Device to stick that Drive into!
Now what did recently make the News with Windows 11? Oh yeah you MUST HAVE A MICROSOFT ACCOUNT AND INTERNET CONNECTIVITY TO INSTALL IT!!!
Imagine what would have fucking happened if this Computer shipped with Windows 11 instead of Windows 10…
Yeah not everybody has a way to avoid making a Microsoft Account, especially if they dont have any other Computer with an M.2 Slot. And plugging that M.2 out until after boot and sticking it back in, may not always work well.

But luckily that was Windows 10, and I did not connect the Ethernet Cable, so I could easily just go through the Setup and see how bad it got, and damn was it trying to push me into giving them my data… I then just booted from USB like I wanted to.


And then the first actual problem arised. When I was in Windows, the USB 3 Ports on the backside of the Computer were working perfectly fine, but on Linux they did not. Some random Software Issue must have borked on the Linux end. I plugged Stuff into the frontal USB 3 instead for the moment.

So here is the dmesg output for what happened, just for reference. This happens a few seconds after plugging in ANY device into the Backside Ports. The Device will work, and then this Error will eventually pop up in dmesg and nothing will work on those Ports until after reboot.

[ 204.763891] xhci_hcd 0000:05:00.0: WARNING: Host System Error
[ 204.763934] xhci_hcd 0000:05:00.0: AMD-Vi: Event logged [IO_PAGE_FAULT domain=0x000f address=0xfeda5000 flags=0x0000]

Turns out this is a Kernel Issue, and I needed to disable “IOMMU” in the UEFI. And now it just works.
It was a WTF Bug, but with the power of Linux and looking it up on the Interwebz, I got it fixed.

Another thing I noticed with Kubuntu was that AGAIN the Ethernet Ports in the Network Panel were autoconfigured to be 100Mbit/s on Full Duplex, even though if you have carefully read the Stats, that is not the case. On the ZBOX it pulled the same shit with 100Mbit/s on Half Duplex.
Low and behold, just manually setting it to Gigabit Speeds fixes the Issue.
Yes I did run a Speed Test on my local Network to validate that. I cannot validate the 2.5gig port though, since I do not have any other 2.5gig device.

One of the first things I did after installing Kubuntu was ofcourse the obligatory “sudo apt purge snapd”, because I am not a fan of the random downloads at random times bullshit, that snap pulls on metered Internet Connections. I do not want shit to behave like Windows Update, thank you very much.


I think I have ran out of things on my mind to say, soooooo, have a nice day! XD

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I filter my all of my DNS through a Pi hole, works great for stopping Windows and Mobile trackers among other things. Surprised you aren’t running one, Greg.

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