Rui Carmo
May 23^rd 2020, at dinnertime · 2 min read

More Elementary

A few weeks before the pandemic started I fixed the touchpad on the ancient Acer ES1-111M we had lying around, upgraded its RAM and turned it into a moderately useful “couch computer”. For good measure, I also installed Elementary OS 5.1.4 Hera on it, and I’ve been using it ever since on a near-daily basis.

So this post is a sort of follow-up to the last time I did a similar thing, but on a C720. And it was also the latest step in a long string of attempts at making this particular laptop somewhat useful.

It had originally run Windows 8 moderately well (soon converging on miserably as the kids tried to do more and more on it), and I had already installed Elementary on it once, but the tiny 32GB EMMC storage it shipped with and the wonky touchpad precluded any extended use.

So I decided to fix what I could. Sadly, there is no way to drop an M2 SSD inside it–the PCB layout has tracks but no connector, and I couldn’t figure out if there was supporting silicon either, but grounding the touchpad and adding 8GB of RAM was enough to turn it into a great little laptop.

The CPU is a Dual-Core Intel Celeron N2840 clocked 2.16GHz, and as such more than good enough to do all the routine sysadmin stuff required to keep my pet projects running (even if some of them haven’t seen any new releases in many months), run VS Code, take notes, and remote desktop to my work machines.

It is even able to do Zoom and Teams calls in a pinch (although I suspect it will handle multiple video streams quite poorly), and can drive an external 2560x1080 display just fine:

display preferences — My LG 29WK500-B 29" UWHDs seem to share the EDID of the 34" model

So yes, Elementary OS is still great, and smooth, and (for me at least) completely trouble-free.

Everything works, and it is probably telling that I use it more than I do my MacBook (although that can also probably be attributed to it being a lot lighter and less of a distraction).

There are a few things I never do on Elementary, though, and that are essential for me on a personal level:

E-mail (I might be in the minority here, but nothing can really replace Mail.app for me yet, and Elementary’s mail client can’t seem to deal with my huge folder trees).
Calendaring (I can probably get away with the built-in CalDAV client, but last time I tried I just couldn’t get it to work, and I need a To-Do/Calendar app that can sync with my phone somehow).
Password management (1Password does not work in Linux without hacks I’m not willing to maintain, and I can’t stuff everything into Firefox).
Photography (the Photos app on Elementary is very simple, and does seem to handle some RAW formats, but lacks the sort of color adjustments I have on Apple plarforms and doesn’t sync with anything).

The good news is that all of these seem fixable, even without resorting to third-party stuff.

And considering the mess that Catalina has turned into, running a full Elementary desktop on a permanent basis seems more and more likely by the day…

Rui Carmo
May 23^rd 2020, at lunchtime · 1 min read

Using OneNote as a Wiki

I’ve been using OneNote for years, but this eluded me throughout all of that time:

You can easily link to pages in the same notebook by just typing [[Page Name]].

OneNote will auto-link and remove the square brackets if it finds a match, or underline with a dotted line and create a new page if you click through.

So far I haven’t found a way to link across different sets of subpages, but this is handy enough.

Rui Carmo
May 23^rd 2020, at lunchtime · 1 min read

Catalina and online executable checks ※

I have been tracking the fallout from Alan Odgaard’s post about Catalina and this seems like the sanest take on the subject so far.

I am, however, more than a bit annoyed that someone at Apple thought it was a good idea to design things this way. I mean, how insane is it that your Mac “phones home” whenever you run a new unsigned binary?

Besides the potential for failure (Apple has historically been mediocre at doing online systems, except for the iTunes/App Store, which is finely honed and cached up the wazoo), the potential for data gathering is serious enough that I can see Macs being banned from use in public sector clients outside the US (development or not).

And even if it can be argued that this caches results and normal users will mostly run things from the App Store and seldom notice any delays, it is something that ought to be surfaced properly for developers and power users alike.

It’s perfectly understandable that iTerm users get bitten by this, but why isn’t the system terminal added to the Developer Tools pane in System Preferences, Security, Privacy automatically (and consistently)?

If I ever upgrade to Catalina, I expect to get bitten by this during the very first day…

Rui Carmo
May 17^th 2020, at dinnertime · 2 min read

Beneath The Surface

Nothing much to report on the creative front. Work has been exhausting, but it has also taken another unwelcome twist: As it gets progressively warmer, my Surface Pro 4 is collapsing slowly under the effect of near-constant video calls, and has already shut down on me once.

Rui Carmo
May 19^th 2020, in the afternoon · 1 min read

WSL2 to get GUI and GPU support in Windows ※

More interesting stuff to play around with in Windows. I still prefer to install Linux directly on my personal hardware, but I can see the appeal for this, and have no trouble imagining useful scenarios.

Apple is looking more and more isolated by the day.

Rui Carmo
May 12^th 2020, at dinnertime · 1 min read

Logic Pro X 10.5 ※

Now that I pay attention to DAWs, this is excellent news. It does feel a little GarageBand-y and more focused on electronic music, but I’m not complaining. Not even about the $199 list price, or the lack of an iPad version (which would be amazing).

Well, except for not having any time for music these days, but that’s not their fault–I’ll buy it when I can spend enough time with it to get some enjoyment out of the investment…

Rui Carmo
May 10^th 2020, in the morning · 3 min read

Knocking on Metal

I’m very, very tired of planning and spreadsheets and slide decks (and even more tired of all the insanity around the pandemic), so I spent a couple of hours this weekend geeking out a bit. Nothing of consequence, just some harmless fun.

Rui Carmo
May 10^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

Clearing Quarantine for Casks

Every now and then I install an app using brew cask and Mojave/Catalina spends ages “verifying” it upon launch.

The solution for that is to clear the com.apple.quarantine attribute from it (and any internal bundles, recursively), using:

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/AppName.app

Obviously, you should only do this for apps you trust.

Rui Carmo
May 6^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

Surface Go 2 and Surface Book Refresh ※

I actually don’t care much for the Surface Book (it is too big, too heavy and too much of a hassle to deal with, which is why I chose the Surface Laptop for myself), but the new Go 2 is quite decent, and I’ve long thought of getting one.

Bumping the display to 1920x1280 and shipping a somewhat decently specced Core m3 at $629.99 makes it a lot more appealing.

Having to pay extra for the keyboard ($100, which is the same as the LTE spec bump) is a bit annoying and the lack of a 256GB storage option makes it a bit questionable in the long run, but if I had to be out and about and pick one Windows machine to carry around with me, this would likely be it.

The fact that it’s half the price of an iPad Pro 11” (regardless of performance, platform and ecosystem disparity) doesn’t hurt either.

Rui Carmo
May 4^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

New 13-inch MacBook ※

Well well, May The Fourth be with us indeed, it has an actual physical Esc key on a 13” form factor, and the right keyboard mechanism.

So maybe we can finally say the keyboards are fixed to everyone’s satisfaction?

It’s also nice to see less stingy (i.e., more realistic) storage configurations at the “same” price, and I guess we could do worse than Iris graphics, but I’m not complaining–it’s a great comeback, and I would love to have one for a daily driver.

But who am I kidding, right?

Rui Carmo
May 2^nd 2020, in the morning · 4 min read

A Short Rant About Remote Productivty

This would ordinarily be a three-day weekend and I would be taking a decent break, but in practice I worked a few hours yesterday (May 1st) and am going to do the same this Sunday.

Rui Carmo
May 2^nd 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

TIL: Pop!_OS has Automatic Window Tiling

Today I learned that Pop!_OS, the Linux distro developed by System76, almost makes up for its silly name by shipping with a very nicely done auto-tiling Gnome shell extension (available at pop-os/shell):

Pop!_OS Auto-Tiling — A nice little demo movie.

Alternatives for macOS

Magnet does almost the same thing on macOS, and if it supported saving pre-defined window layouts I would switch away from Moom.
Amethyst is likely the best tiled window manager for the Mac, but the default keyboard bindings are somewhat annoying after years of Moom.
The LG Screen Manager application also does that, although they don’t actively advertise it.

Alternatives for Windows

PowerToys for Windows 10 includes FancyZones, which lets you define tiling zones.

Rui Carmo
April 30^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Raspberry Pi HQ Camera ※

Very nice and timely. A full kit (camera + lens) is pricey at $75-$100, and you do need at least a 3A+ to capture things at a decent rate, but on the whole it’s not bad - I might get one and see if my Canon lenses fit, and if it could be made to stream NDI video it would likely be an awesome webcam to use with OBS (even if I do think not having autofocus makes it somewhat unsuitable for that).

I can get RTSP streaming to work somewhat painfully with a Zero W, so there’s a lot of potential there. Let’s wait for some reviews and more test shots.

Rui Carmo
April 22^nd 2020, in the afternoon · 2 min read

50-ish Days Later

Here’s a short update on the pandemic situation, partly spurred by crude oil prices having reached zero this week and because we’re now a little over 50 days into it here.

Rui Carmo
April 21^st 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

The beautiful machine ※

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across the Streacom case, but the idea of building another PC has been at the back of my mind for a good while, and it’s good to know you can get AMD’s Ryzen boards to fit well inside.

My current setup could probably take advantage of a Thunderbolt external GPU, but there seem to be no fanless options…

Rui Carmo
April 19^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

Videoconferencing on the Raspberry Pi 4 ※

I’ve been using Pis as thin clients for ages, but it hadn’t really dawned on me yet that the 4 is indeed powerful enough to run WebRTC-based video conferencing software.

My oft-considered experiment of cleaning out my desk, moving everything with fans to a faraway closet and just having a Pi 4 with two monster 4K monitors is closer to becoming a reality, and this is another data data point to consider.

Rui Carmo
April 18^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

A Spotlight-like launcher for Windows 10 ※

Over the years I moved from QuickSilver to Spotlight (avoiding Alfred because I saw no real added value in it), and am now at a point where Spotlight is slow as molasses, barely usable during the first half hour after system boot, and, in general, far less effective than it was in the very beginning.

Having a really fast launcher on Windows would be another point in its favor from a productivity standpoint, and I have been bemusedly watching how the Cortana search bar has followed mostly the same trajectory as Spotlight in terms of bloat and unresponsiveness. So it is something to actually look forward to.

My suggestion is to call it Searchlight, in honor of the little flashlight icon that popped up as a spinner back in Windows 95…

Rui Carmo
April 15^th 2020, late night · 1 min read

So Why Upgrade to the SE 2? ※

No surprises here, the new SE looks just like we expected.

But to be honest, I’m sad that the old, smaller form factor is gone, since I much preferred the old SE to the new iPhone 8-ish SE 2 (which, incidentally, does not have a headphone jack).

All in all, I don’t regret (at all) having bought an “original” refurbished SE for my eldest last month - it is still a much smaller, nicer and manageable phone, even if the SE 2 ships with more recent hardware.

In fact, I suspect the original SE is going to be even more sought after in the second hand market…

Rui Carmo
April 8^th 2020, in the evening · 3 min read

Please Hold, Your Life Is Important To Us

I’m going to break away from the usual tech stuff and write a bit about my current state of mind. So yes, this has something to do with the pandemic. And something to do with breaking points, too.

Rui Carmo
April 8^th 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Mad Luddites Set Fire To Cell Towers ※

I’ve been tracking this for a while (and the ex-telco crowd I hang out with had a field day reminiscing about nearly identical stories involving 3G and inactive masts that hadn’t even been lit up yet), but I can’t help but be utterly amazed at the sheer amount of stupidity involved.

Schoolchildren can figure this out. I’m not sure whether to attribute it to malice, ignorance or sheer lunacy, but these people shouldn’t be allowed outside (or on social networks) even without a pandemic.

Rui Carmo
April 4^th 2020, at night · 11 min read

Three Months With The Synology DS1019+

After a faithful nine years of service, I decided to replace my Synology DS411j with a brand new DS1019+. This actually came to pass a few days before last Christmas, but for multiple reasons I never had the time to write about it–until now, of course.

Rui Carmo
April 3^rd 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

AirPlay 2 and HomeKit for LG 2018 TVs ※

Well, this is very interesting–one of my TVs is apparently on the list, so I’m quite looking forward to it. Right now I’m using a homebridge plugin to control it, but it would be great to have native HomeKit integration.

Also, props to LG for adding value to their products after the sale. In a world of planned obsolescence, this is the best possible reason to keep buying their products.

(I’m considering getting a couple of new 4K monitors for my office, so…)

Rui Carmo
April 1^st 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

macOS 10.15.4 Broke SSH ※

This is starting to wander deep into sheer QA incompetence territory, and I’m seriously wondering whether I’ll ever upgrade from Mojave at all.

SSH might not be something Apple sees as being essential to most of its user base, but it’s likely the most critical tool for anyone who uses a terminal these days. And they’ve broken it somehow.

How can I trust any of the rest?

Rui Carmo
March 31^st 2020, at breakfast · 1 min read

Regarding Zoom ※

A good summary of the reasons why I prefer not to use Zoom at all (and only do it via a private mode web browser now).

Rui Carmo
March 30^th 2020, in the morning · 1 min read

Likely Logic Pro X Update ※

This bit of news tickled my newfound interest in music (which has progressed steadily and deserves an update sometime soon).

Although I’ve been pondering using Ableton Live across Windows and macOS, I wouldn’t mind upgrading from GarageBand to Logic Pro X if the new version had promotional pricing…