Posts

Agon and Agon Last month I visited the RMC Cave where we got a sneak peek at the Agon Console8 from Heber. The Agon Console8 is a consolised version of the more general-purpose Agon8 Computer. They come in a natty retro case, and features twin 9-pin joystick ports. I’d not heard about the Agon line of Open Source devices before, but they tickled something in me. I’m somewhat fascinated by computers that boot directly into BASIC. [Read More]

I was a guest host on Late Night Linux podcast, episode 249 last week, filling in for Will. We each bring along a ‘discovery’, I brought snapcraft metrics to talk about. I thought I’d write up how I use them, for listeners of the show as it’s hard to articulate this very well verbally. My snaps I have about twenty snaps in the snap store. Some, like Bombsquad and ncspot have been published for years now. [Read More]

As with all recipes on this blog, they’re designed to be easily made, tasty, and not elaborate. I’ll also not put lengthy backstories for them. I was in Exeter yesterday and stumbled into Brewdog where I discovered their delicious loaded fries. So today, I had a go at making something similar. The amount I used here could be shared between four people as a chunky sharing starter. Scale it down for a main meal or snack. [Read More]

This is the fifth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. Scene setting This is another story from my time working on the helpdesk for a large accounting & consulting organisation in central London. A slight difference though, this story is second hand, so take it with a pinch of salt. [Read More]

I wrote previously about debugging a broken x16emu snap. In short, something went wonky with ld. I started a thread on the snapcraft forum and Ken VanDine came to my assistance with an answer and a pull request. I grabbed that pr, and it did indeed build successfully.. $ snapcraft --use-lxd Launching instance... Executed: pull alsa-pulseaudio Executed: pull gnome/sdk Executed: pull x16-roms Executed: pull x16-emulator Executed: build alsa-pulseaudio Executed: build gnome/sdk Executed: build x16-roms Executed: skip pull x16-roms (already ran) Executed: skip build x16-roms (already ran) Executed: stage x16-roms (required to build 'x16-emulator') Executed: skip pull alsa-pulseaudio (already ran) Executed: skip build alsa-pulseaudio (already ran) Executed: stage alsa-pulseaudio (required to build 'x16-emulator') Executed: build x16-emulator Executed: skip stage alsa-pulseaudio (already ran) Executed: stage gnome/sdk Executed: skip stage x16-roms (already ran) Executed: stage x16-emulator Executed: prime alsa-pulseaudio Executed: prime gnome/sdk Executed: prime x16-roms Executed: prime x16-emulator Executed parts lifecycle Generated snap metadata Created snap package x16emu_b16509b_amd64. [Read More]

Today I stumbled on a question in the LÖVE subreddit, asking how to have a portable development environment when you have no control over the host PC. Quick question. Is it possible to download love onto a flash drive so i can make it portable. I’m asking because I can’t download things at work on my work computer but I’m working on a love project in my spare time for a course I’m taking. [Read More]

I thought I’d “live blog” (not live) my way through fixing a snap which I noticed was broken this morning. How did I notice? I happened to look at the build page for it. Maybe my spidey sense was tingling, because I wouldn’t ordinarily have zoned in on this particular snap. I could have some kind of alert that lets me know when this happens, but I currently don’t. I might use my new-found love of GitHub Actions, but that sounds like a future blog post! [Read More]

For the last six months, I’ve been a presenter on Linux Matters. Prior to that, I spent thirteen years presenting the now-defunct Ubuntu Podcast. Both shows have/had multiple presenters, We record every other week, and send our individual audio files to Joe. He does all the magic post-recording production including editing, audio processing and mastering. That file is then uploaded and eventually makes its way into the Patreon “all episodes” ad-free feed, then to our feed a day or so later. [Read More]

NextCloud Box I just stumbled on an old NextCloud Box in my loft. It’s a quiet Sunday in the house, so I thought I’d see if it still works, and if there’s any data on it. I’m pretty sure I did use it for a while, so there must be something on it. Here’s my NextCloud Box in a cardboard box labelled “NextCloud Box”. Here’s what the NextCloud box looks like once installed. [Read More]

Goodbye EmuDeck I’ve had my GabeGear Steam Deck for over a year now, and I love it. When it first arrived, I considered using it to play retro games - via emulators. But a terribad experience with EmuDeck soured my opinon of retro gaming on the deck. The whole EmuDeck installation and configuration was less than straightforward, indeed somewhat cumbersome. I found it to be a loosely connected, and poorly integrated bag of spanners. [Read More]

This is the fourth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. Scene setting Today’s story is another belter from my stint on the helpdesk for a large accounting & consulting organisation in central London. It’s around 1995 and I’m a happy-go-lucky, young, free and single tech support operative. Always happy to help, and generally enjoying the work. [Read More]

Lies Neither of these are “App Stores” in the way average people know them. You can neither buy or sell products in these so-called ‘stores’… …yet. The wording on those two screenshots above is both hilarious and sad. It’s very reminiscent of People’s Front of Judea or Slim Shady. Anyway, here follows a bit of a moan about all this (the app stores, not Monty Python or Eminem). Background I have previously lamented on the following subject as a stream of tweets. [Read More]

My blog at popey.com/blog is hosted on a Bitfolk VPS, built from the Hugo source code in a public GitHub repo. My workflow for publishing a post goes like this: 💻 Use whatever machine I’m sat at 🔽 Clone the repo 🗒 Add a new page, edit until ready 🤠 Push directly to the main branch Early on in my use of Hugo, I was manually using hugo and rsync over SSH directly on the VPS. [Read More]

SOMETIMES I PRESS THE CAPS LOCK KEY BY ACCIDENT, USUALLY WHILE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME. I THEN FIND MYSELF UNABLE TO TYPE A PASSWORD OR I AM ACCUSED OF SHOUTING ONLINE. OVER COFFEE, MY FRIEND MARTIN EXPLAINED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO DISABLE THE CAPS LOCK KEY COMPLETELY IN LINUX. I’D NEVER CONSIDERED DOING THIS, MISTAKENLY THINKING THE ONLY OPTIONS WERE TO REMAP IT TO SOMETHING ELSE. IT TURNS OUT GNOME TWEAKS HAS AN OPTION. [Read More]

My work computer is a ThinkPad Z13. It’s on most of the time, including overnight and during the weekend. I’m one of those horrible people who like to just wiggle their mouse, unlock, and get working. I often leave a ton of windows open, so I quite like to sit down and start working without having to wait for boot up, and subsequent app launch. So when I arrive at my desk on a Monday and discover my GPU has crashed, that’s a poor start to the week. [Read More]

Today I dusted off a Minecraft server backup to see if it would still work, to explore and remind myself what was there. tl;dr The world still works in Minecraft, and I can even generate a nicely rendered map from it. There’s not a tremendous amount to actually see on the map. A lot of work went on underground. There’s also little nostalgia value other than for the sixty people who played on it back then. [Read More]

I’ve just returned from an excellent day visting The Cave and the Arcade Archive with friends. I’ve visited the cave before, and wrote up my experience in Visiting The Cave last year. I decided since (nearly) a year had passed, it was time to visit again. When I mentioned online to some friends, that I was planning on going, they all booked tickets for the same day. We arrived just before 11am, met the greeters who checked our tickets, showed us up the stairs, and introduced the venue. [Read More]

This is the third in a series of Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. In the early 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. In It’s MY monitor, I told the story of dealing with an angry Partner. Today’s story is worse, as I’m dealing with the Personal Assistant of a Partner. [Read More]

I run a small Mastodon instance for Ubuntu Members and related projects. If you’re a contributing Ubuntu Member, then you can have a free account on the site. It’s been running without tremendous issues for nearly a year now. Each time a new release of Mastodon appears, I dutifully follow the guides to upgrade it. Each upgrade requires me to ensure the backups are functioning then follow the precise steps in the release notes. [Read More]

Back in 2020 I stumbled on Bandwhich, a “Terminal bandwidth utilization tool”, written in Rust. More recently, I was looking for a tool to identify which processes on a box were using bandwidth, and how much. I remembered Bandwhich and took another look. I wanted an easy way to install Bandwhich on a variety of machines, running a variety of Linux distributions across different architectures. So I built a snap of bandwhich. [Read More]