Timekpr-nExT Remote

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tl;dr – Timekpr-Next Remote is an easy to use web app to add or remove time to users of linux login time tracking app, Timekpr-nExT

Recently, one of my kids got a drawing tablet and wanted to use it with Krita. Given they were on a Chromebook, we decided to repurpose an old Intel NUC i3 server with a clean Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop. Not only would this allow Krita to run well, but it would also enable video editing via KDEnlive and other hard-to-run on ChromeOS softwares.

For some time now, we’ve been happily running Legba to track computer usage. However, we wanted something with a bit more teeth, so we settled on Timekpr-nExT (henceforth just “Timekpr”, but it’s the “nExT” one, not this out of date one or this waaay out of date one, k?). This is a great app that allows for a finite amount of time to be used per day, and it is relatively easy to add more time. Well, easy if you’re on a desktop. And you have SSH installed. And you know the login and password to each computer you want to control. So, not at all easy if you’re a busy parent who’s juggling managing kids and helping with school work and cooking dinner. So, not at all easy if you’re a parent, amiright?!

Enter Timekpr-Next Remote! This is a Dockerized Python app that allows you to easily update update your kids’ computer time right from the nearest parental phone or desktop device:

As you can see, for any given user (only one sample user, “Muhammad”, is shown here) you can easily add more time (or remove time if you fat fingered the add time). Given how ubiquitous phones are, having a self hosted, non-cloud way to easily control time has been a win for us. Video chat with grandma after you’ve done your homework and used all your time allotment? Add -> 30 min -> Save, it only takes 3 seconds \o/

SSH FTW

Let’s have a look under the covers at how all this works.

I should start out by saying that Timekpr is licensed GNU GPL v3 and they post the code online. I did consider adding an HTTP server to handle REST requests to core package up stream. Then I realized I’d have to do the securely and that I’d have to deal with certificates and such. A greenfield approach would be quicker (grok only my code, not someone else’s) and more secure, but not as clean (I used SSH vs REST). With that out of the way…

Timekpr Remote uses SSH to communicate! This is clunky, indeed. But, Python has a wonderful SSH library in the form of Fabric (which turn uses the awesome Paramiko) which took a lot of the really clunky parts out and made them pretty elegant.

Here’s the flow of data when we load the page and want to get the current usage of Mumammad:

This “handwritten” diagram compliments of JS Sequence Diagrams – thank you!

All data flows this way, and there’s three AJAX endpoints which the web client sends via this flow:

Get all Users and IPs
Get usage for a user and IP pair
Add/Remove time for a user and IP pair

This isn’t a perfect REST API, but it’s OK enough. It was my first time writing an app in Flask, so it was fun to figure how to do different URL handling and JSON returning and such, even if my REST uses some GETs instead of POSTs/PUTs

“s” in Timekpr-next Remote is for “Security”

While we an trust SSH between Timekpr Remote and Server, you may note a lack of authentication between the mobile handset and Timekpr Remote. Indeed, there is none. Here’s what I recommend:

Run something like Traefik or Caddy in another docker container. From there you can bind the timekpr-next remote server to the host docker IP with something like TIMEKPR_IP=172.17.0.1 docker compose up -d. It will no longer be available on the network, only only via the revers proxy you set up.

You can then either use basicauth (eg in Caddy) or what I did is make a host name that is un-guessable like https://user-time-8957446623432192758492038.domain.com. Everyone just bookmarks this. Even if your kids see the URL, they won’t be able to remember it.

For those that give SSH the stink eye (smells like an injection attack, eh?), you can harden this too. Ensure the SSH user on the server can not do anything more than run timekpra by restricting it in the authorized_keys file on each client. This will ensure if extra variables are passed (though we do explicitly protect against this), they won’t do any more harm.

Like and Subscribe that video

Here’s a 9 second video demonstrating it in situ!

Jokes on you though, there’s no like and subscribe because it’s not actually YouTube (though GitHub is pretty close to a social media network…)

Keys-To-The-Tunnel 1.1.0 released

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Hey hey! I’d been meaning to consolidate some of my VMs I’m paying for and semi-accidentally deleted the place where I was hosting my work’s instance of Keys-To-The-Tunnel (KTTT). With this VM deletion, I decided to leverage my recent dabblings with Caddy and do a big refactor of KTTT by replacing Apache with Caddy.

As a reminder, KTTT is an easy way for an organization which both develops web apps and uses GitHub to share their local dev app on the internet via a publicly accessible URL all protected with solid TLS and SSH encryption.

Let’s dive into what the update means and why I did it!

Parenthetical aside about TLS for local Android development

Originally I asked if potential KTTT users :

ever need to test an Android application against a web server such that you need a valid TLS certificate?
Not so good idea on my original KTTT post

This is actually a bad idea if all you need is a valid TLS cert for Android testing. The reason is that you’ll literally be holding your phone in your hand which is less than a foot from the computer hosting your app you want to test against. By introducing KTTT into the mix, you send your traffic thousands of miles/kilometers (you pick which) and back just to get a TLS cert. Crazy times!

A much better approach is to use something like local-ip.co . If you want an easy way to keep your traffic entirely local, you can use nginx-local-ip with a one line docker compose call to set up everything you need to locally run a local-ip.co TLS. It’s a really sweet set up! (I’m biased because I help author some of it ;)

KTTT is still a great idea if you need to share your local dev environment though!

With that out of the way, back to KTTT updates…

What’s new with KTTT

For an end user of KTTT who just wants to share their app, it’s now WAY easier to figure out which SSH command to run and which URL to share. This is thanks to the handy web app which walks you through three easy questions:

What is your GitHub Username?
What port is your app running on locally?
Is your local app using http or https?

This is MUCH better than wading through a list of random ports and other GitHub usernames which you only cared about your username and port. Here’s what the updated web app looks like in action (15 second video):

For the administrators of KTTT, you’ll note that KTTT now uses Caddy instead of Apache. While there’s nothing wrong with Apache, Caddy is a simpler take on the needs of an app like KTTT that requires a bunch of small reverse proxies. Caddy is 7 years old and came to being in the world of Docker, containers and micro-services. Where as Apache is 27 years old and came being near the birth of world wide web.

Ironically, a key feature of Caddy, the ability to automatically provision and renew TLS certs, is NOT being used. Instead, the opportunity to use a wildcard TLS cert came up via acme-dns.io and I took it.

That all said, it’s a joy to use Caddy because I can create a simple JSON file with four lines to define a reverse proxy:

mrjones-plip.awesome-tunnel.plip.com {
   tls /etc/certs/fullchain.pem /etc/certs/privkey.pem
   reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:3089
}

Love it!

Putting it all together

The web app above gives a pretty good idea of the improvements, but since I added a demo video of the whole KTTT experience on GitHub, may as well post it here in case you’re curious (44 second video):

Other odds and ends in 1.1.0

There’s also a bunch of other fixes and improvments I made while in there. Here’s the notes from the 1.1.0 release:

Replace Apache with Caddy
Add mini web app to help devs figure which URL and SSH command to use
Unify mutli SNI certs to one wildcard with acme-dns.io (still using Let’s Encrypt though) per #1
Don’t overwrite existing user’s ports every time you run setup per #3
Don’t regenerate TLS certs every time you run setup per #3
Don’t rewrite vhosts in web server every time you run setup per #3
Update MOTD on login per #4
Try my hand at being an artist and create a KTTT logo

My first from-scratch 3D printed design (that is actually useful)

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I’ve had a 3d printer for a about 8 months now. It’s been fun to download STLs from the internet and print them. We’ve done articulated snakes and planetary gear prints. It is really amazing to print something in one go that you can move and spin around. Amazeballs!

The kids have printed up little castles and and little knickknacks the designed in TinkerCAD. This has been fun, but I was always bothered that I didn’t know a “real” design program that was also open source. Really that left FreeCAD. I did a tutorial or two on-line which were pretty great. I understood “parametric” and “fully constrained” finally \o/. But, it was time consuming to learn, and I was impatient. I printed up a laptop holder I found online. Time went on.

Recently I got some new mini servers (I’ll save the setup and install story for another blog post) and I wanted to mount them to the wall. I knew this would be pretty trivial to design a custom bracket if I’d learned FreeCAD well enough, but I still hadn’t.

I just decided to go for it, use TinkerCAD even though it was proprietary and online. Not ideal, but I got what I wanted! I made a two left and right brackets that held two mini servers against a plywood board. Perfect!

The point of this blog post is to let other folks know that they should just go for it – don’t let the tools slow you down. Once you see the power of creating something from nothing, and a physical something (not just software), you’ll see how empowering and inspiring it is!

I will say, you won’t get it right on your first try. I already knew this from some earlier prototyping I’d done, so I was ready for the 4 or 5 prints that failed before the final one succeeded. Don’t get flustered when, even after measuring twice before you ~~cut~~ print, that it’s still wrong!

So, here’s what I made:

What you see here are two “L” type brackets that each can hold the corners of two mini servers. Note the hole through the cross brace that allows you to screw in the top screw (the first draft totally lacked this and it was nigh impossible to mount). These are of course rotated up in how you’d mount them, and in a terrible position to print.

While these held the servers pretty well in place, there was still a chance they could tip forward off the wall, so I made a toolless top bracket to match. The nice thing is that you can screw this in as one piece, and the slide off the bracket from the screw mount. Some very light sanding was needed to ensure the two pieces slide together with just the right of amount of friction (showing two of them side by side, but only used one):

And here they are in situ:

If you have little servers and you want the STL, here’s the file and here’s the TinkerCAD link (which may go away b/c I’m not a fan of cloud services).

I hope if you’re thinking about designing your first part from scratch, you go for it!!

Legba the Net-tracker

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Intro

I’d been meaning to learn how to write an app using something more than CSV files, but less than MariaDB, to store files – I’m thinking SQLite of course! Then along came the desire to have a simple way to track when a computer was on a network as a proxy for kids’ daily screen time. After all, the network is the computer, right?

While there’s so very many ways to solve detecting if a computer is online (more on this later), I thought it’d be fun to write a simple app that could correlate multiple IPs to a single person, and then give a histogram of minutes per day per person. Given this is just a proxy for screen time, it’s fine if it doesn’t have alerting, password protection or even a way to prevent going over the allotted time per day. The goal will be for any interested parties to see how long a device has been on for the current day. It’s then up to the family to have a discussion about what it means to go over your daily allotment.

Ok, let’s do this! We have a requirement to track computers being online and to write and read the results to a SQLite DB. I’ve been groovin’ on learning Python, so let’s double down and use that. I did some Wikipedia exploring and read about Papa Legba, and thought it made a mighty fine sounding name. Finally, after some nudging from a friend, we’ll package it up in Docker so it’s easy to try out and host in an isolated container.

Ping FTW

The first step to using Legba, is to define a list of users and which IPs they’ll be on. Very likely the best way to do this is to either use static IPs on your LAN clients, or have your DHCP server set the same IPs per MAC every time.

Then you’ll create a conf.py file copied from the conf.example.py file and fill it out. Here we see Jon and Habib have one IP each, where as Mohamed has 2:

trackme = {
    'Jon': ["192.168.1.82"],
    'Habib': ["192.168.1.12"],
    'Mohamed, ': ["192.168.1.240", "192.168.1.17"]
}

The code to track if a device is achieved via the subprocess module via a ping() function with just two lines that send a single ICMP packet:

# thanks https://stackoverflow.com/a/10402323
def ping(host):
    """ Ping a host on the network. Returns boolean """
    command = ["ping", "-c", "1", "-w1", host]
    return subprocess.run(args=command, stdout=subprocess.DEVNULL, stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL).returncode == 0

Back in the main() function, we then read in config, loop over each person and try and ping() each of their IPs. If we see them online, we write to the DB via record(). It ended up, just as I’d hoped, that Python’s SQLite libraries are robust and it’s just 6 lines to insert a row:

sql = ''' INSERT INTO status(name,state,date) VALUES(?,?,?) '''
cur = sqlite.cursor()
activity = (name, state, datetime.now())
cur.execute(sql, activity)
sqlite.commit()

return cur.lastrowid

Just before the end of the loop we call probably the most complex function of the lot output_stats_html(). This function is responsible for reading the day’s active users, getting each users activity by hour, the total for the day and finally output static HTML as well as a static JSON file that will get called via AJAX so the stats will auto-refresh.

At the end of the loop we sleep for 60 seconds. In theory if you had hundreds (thousands?!) of IPs to track and they were on connections with >500ms latency, it would take way longer than 60 seconds. Legba will not scale to this level. It’s currently been comfortably tested with 5-10 devices on a LAN where each device has ~20ms of latency.

A histogram is worth a 1000 words

After you’ve done a bit of a git clone with a lil pip3 install and fleshed out your own config.py and done a little systemd love, you’ll have some sweet sweet histograms! (Some keen eyed readers may note this histogram looks familiar ;)

It’s interesting to note that mobile devices, as seen withe “Adnon Cell”, are effectively on all the time. In this sense, Legba is not much use to track a cell phone. Meanwhile, Bobby Table’s desktop, Adnon’s Laptop and Chang’s Nintendo Switch all work as expected (NB – I didn’t actually test with a Switch).

Existing Solutions

I’ve been running this for solution for just about 4 months now. It’s been a great way for our family to have an open discussion about what it means to spend too much time on the computer and it’s been rock solid. Checking ls and select count(*) from status; I see my DB is 23MB and has 487,069 rows.

Given the simplicity of this app, could this DB and rows be easily stored and retrieved elsewhere? When I wrote the app, I didn’t care – I just wanted to write it for the fun of writing it! However, I was listening to episode 171 of Late Night Linux and they mentioned how utilitarian Telegraf is. It struck me that, indeed, if you had a Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana (aka “the TIG stack”) already set up, it would be pretty trivial to capture these same stats. I would do this by setting up a centralized instance of Telegraf and either use the built in Ping plugin, or possibly the more extensible [[inputs.exec]] input type. With the latter, you could even re-use parts of Legba to pretty trivially input the data to InfluxDB. Then, it would be equally trivial, to slice up the ping counts per hour, per user and have a slick dashboard. Just food for thought!

Otherwise, I hope some else than me gives Legba a try!

DockStat: Docker stats in a simple to use and easy to read Bash script

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Intro

At work I’ve been doing a lot of Docker based projects. I ended up writing a neat little Bash utility which I then recently extended into what I’m calling DockStat. It shows running containers and their related resources. You could use it if you’re repeatedly upping, downing and destroying docker containers over and over like I was. Or maybe you just want a nice little dashboard to see what’s running on your server?

However, if you have more than say a dozen active containers, this script might not scale nicely (oh, perhaps a monitor in portrait mode might fix this? ;)

Being the good little open source nerd that I am, this is of course available for download with a permissive license in the hopes that some one will find it useful or possibly even offer a PR with some improvements to my nascent Bash coding skills.

Background

With countless primers on how to use Docker out there, I won’t get into what the commands all mean, but the impetus for this script was repeatedly running docker ps to show a list of the active containers. A bit later I remembered you could run endless Bash loops with a one-liner which made the process a bit nicer as it auto-refreshed:

while true; do clear;date;docker ps;sleep 5; done

A bit after that I stumbled upon the glorious watch command! Wow – just when you think that that you know and OS, they come and show you that there’s this awesome command they’ve been hiding from you all these years. Thanks Linux!

watch greatly improved on my Bash one-liner as it was an even short one-liner, could trivially be configured to refresh at what ever frequency you wanted and show a header or not. The icing on the cake was that prevents the flash of a redraw upon refresh:

watch -t -n 1 docker ps

About now I got more cozy with the --format feature built into most Docker command line calls. This was handy because I could reduce the number of fields shown in docker ps that I wasn’t interested in. Here’s maybe the simplest of them which shows JUST the container name and if how long the it has been running:

docker ps --format='{{.Names}} {{.Status}}'

Research continued on how to architect the helper script. I had need to show different data than docker ps had to offer. I branched out into docker inspect as well as finding other Dockeristas one-liners that I shamelessly co-opted (I’d be honored if anyone did the same of my work!!). This allowed me to joined ps and inspect like as seen with this fave that shows all the running containers’ and their internal IPs:

docker ps --format='{{.Names}}'|xargs docker inspect --format='{{.Name}} - {{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}'

I was ready to assemble all the docker Data dukets I’d gathered into a nice CLI dashboard so our app developers could see the status of our containers booting. Finding a solution for this enabled both the the helper script to spring forth and simultaneously created the nascent DockStat. This was a Bash utility that was both easy to use, automates flash-less refreshes and introduced basic terminal layout functionality with a near zero learning curve (assuming you know Bash): Bash Simple Curses

Thanks

Thanks to James and Russ for reviewing my code and an early draft of this post. I’ve been trying to improve both my posts and code and this won’t happen without folks kind donation of their time and input!

Easy way to play Boggle on a flight

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I was taking a flight and wanted to play Boggle while onboard. I looked for a simple “show me a Boggle board” app for my phone, and only found ones of dubious quality, ad laden ones or ones that were something like “play a boggle-like game with friends (account required, has ads, is not boggle)”.

Eventually I gave up when I found this great website that generates .png images of Boggle boards. Even better, I could do a bunch of curl calls (with a 5 second sleep in-between, to be nice) to download a BUNCH of boards. Then I could use ImageMagick’s montage to stitch them all together in a 2×4 layout, which printed out nicely. montage -tile 2x4 -mode concatenate *.png output.png to be exact ;) With 4 or 5 pages printed out, I cut out each board, stapled together and made for the perfect Offline Boggle Booklet. Worked great!

However, on the flight I was thinking that it’d be pretty easy to write a bit of JavaScript and bang out a board that worked well offline. Further, I realized that CSS supports transformations, like transform: rotate(90deg)that could even mimic the rotated dice like the site above I referenced. Indeed, by the end of the flight I had all the hard parts worked out. This was mostly me working offline without Stack Exchange to remember this or that. Special thanks to xuth.net for post the source to the perl app which gave me some good ideas on how to write this!

After landing, and doing some refining, I’m happy to present Offline Boggle Boards. Load up the web page before you take off and you’re good to go! Also, for you coder types, pull requests welcome!

Keys-To-The-Tunnel

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tl;dr – An open source bash script which provisions a server to terminate TLS traffic with a valid certificate and reverse proxies the traffic back to a web based development instance via an SSH tunnel. Enables sharing of a dev instance and testing Android apps.

Intro

Are you an ngrok user (or one of its many competitors)? Do you use GitHub (GH) or work in a GH Organization? Is part of your application a web server? Do you ever need to test an Android application against a web server such that you need a valid TLS certificate? Have you ever wished it’d be easy to share you local dev instances with a colleague? If yes, then maybe Keys-To-The-Tunnel is for you!

Keys-To-The-Tunnel converts a newly provisioned, dedicated Ubuntu instance into a multi-user server that can both terminate inbound TLS traffic as well as gives developers easy to follow instructions on how to connect their web based instance of their app to it. By using easy to get public SSH keys for your users, Keys-To-The-Tunnel takes the legwork out of setting up a reverse proxy.

This post discusses the impetus and some of the background ideas that make Keys-To-The-Tunnel possible. If you’re all ready to get started, the GitHub repository and the FAQ have everything you need!

DNS & TLS via Let’s Encrypt

The first cornerstone to Keys-To-The-Tunnel is that Let’s Encrypt offers free TLS certificates. Once the script creates the certificates, they’re automatically renewed because that’s how certbot works. Free certs with free renewals – love it!

By using valid certificates with root CAs already deployed in Android, the resulting vhosts in a Apache allow you to test your Android apps against the URLs. Further, if you’re working with other members of your organization on the project, they can easily access your local instance via your URL. As well, while desktops allow responsive mode testing, sometimes you just need to see your app/site in a true mobile browser to properly test.

A critical part of making this all work is that you need both an A record and a wildcard in your DNS for the host you’re on. This allows Let’s Encrypt to verify your certificate no matter which hostname it is as hostnames are dynamically generated off GH handles.

Usernames & Keys

The second cornerstone of Keys-To-The-Tunnel is that GH allows anyone to know your public SSH key(s) (e.g. here’s mine). When you couple this with the fact that GH has an API to retrieve all the members of an organization (needs a token), it means that given just the organization name, the script can provision dozens of accounts with just a one liner:

./installTunnelServer.sh domain.com you@domain.com

Any GH users that do not have an SSH key are skipped, but you can simply re-run the script to add a user who has since added an SSH key to their account. In a soon to be released version, you can run the script in a cronjob so it will both add and remove users when your GH organization changes.

SSH

SSH is the final of three corner stones of the project. By using SSH, specifically an SSH tunnel, something which every developer has already installed, it’s easy to quickly set up an ad hoc tunnel. Here’s example command that your users will be given:

ssh -T -R REMOTEPORT:127.0.0.1:LOCALPORT GH-HANDLE@domain.com

So if you had a web app running on http://localhost:8080 and your GH Handle was mrjones-plip and Keys-To-The-Tunnel had assigned you a port of 1234, you would run this SSH command to set up a the tunnel:

ssh -T -R 1234:127.0.0.1:8080 mrjones-plip@domain.com

When you run the SSH command, you know you’re successfully connect when you’re greeted with this text:

Connected to SSH tunnel server
Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.4.0-51-generic x86_64)
Press 'ctrl + c' to exit

When Keys-To-The-Tunnel is done running, it will write an index.html to the root of your bare domain instructing users how to use the service:

Caveat Emptor

There are some gotchas to this script which you should be aware of:

Unlike ngrok which generates a random hostname every time your connect, Keys-To-The-Tunnel always uses the same hostnames. While handy for on-going use, it means the URLS may be discovered and scraped/crawled. As developer instances often have weak or no passwords, care should be used to tear down the tunnel when not in use (or use strong passwords – or both!).
Highly distributed teams may consider deploying multiple instances of Keys-To-The-Tunnel so they’re closer to the team members. If a developer is in Kenya and is connecting to a server in Canada, their traffic might be MUCH slower than if the server was deployed very close to Kenya from a packet’s perspective.
While this should Just Work™, this script was only tested on LXD containers and Digital Ocean (referral link) Ubuntu droplets. Please open a ticket if it doesn’t work!

Portable, headless Raspberry Pi development

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The Problem

Back when I was writing Cattrotar on a Raspberry Pi (or really, any other of the myriad times I was hacking on a small embedded device), I often faced some sort of problem or another:

I thought I set up the network for a device, but can no longer remotely access it over WiFi
I’ve just written a new OS to a microSD card, want to further configure the OS but it’s not yet reachable on the network
I want to take my set up to the hacker space to be social while I work on an issue
I’m waiting in the library for my kids to finish up a class and can’t easily get my Pi on the library WiFi to hack on it from my laptop
I don’t want to carry around, or even bother setting up, a keyboard and monitor to get access to my Pi

The Solution

As many of you lovely readers may know, I’m already a fan of small travel routers made by GL.iNet, like the fine GL-MT300N-V2. For a scant $20 dollars (shipped!) you get DHCP server you can not only bring with you, but will happily run off a battery. Better yet, because it has a USB port, you can actually power your Pi off the wee router. Daisy chain USB power for the win! The final icing on the cake is that you can make the two Ethernet ports on be both LAN (instead of LAN & WAN). While these are great devices, their WiFi stack is a bit flaky, so being able to hardwire your network devices is a great, if not slightly cumbersome, work around.

The net result is that your around town bag can have:

A USB Battery
Two very short Ethernet cables
A USB Ethernet dongle (w/ USBC adapter tah boot)
A travel router (GL-MT300N-V2 in this case)
Two micro USB cables
Pi (In the picture below I have an Orange Pi Zero with a temp sensor and a screen threaded through one side of a case)

When you put it all together, you get a nice tidy mess and it works just great, solving all of the above problems. Your laptop can be on two networks so it can have local access to the Pi and to the internet too. Further, if the WiFi your on isn’t too hostile with their captive portals and such, you can actually have the GL.iNet router act as a WiFi repeater and backhaul that bandwidth to your Pi. Run your apt update away!

This set up is not only small and lightweight, but lets me work un-tethered on my Pi setup and Python code. Now if this frickin pandemic would just be solved, I’d actually be able to take this out of the house instead of just co-working with my partner in our office in our house!

Happy Pi Hacking!

Replacing two iPods with a Bash script

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13 years ago we got an iPod to actually listen to music on the go. It was awesome! Some time later we had our first kid and some time after that smart phones became prevalent, so our iPod fell out of use. But it was about 9 years ago that we started to use the old iPod as an easy way to play the same a bedtime playlist for our kids (oh yeah, we had a 2nd kid at some point too ;). Soon, the kids split into their own bedrooms so we picked up a used iPod on eBay and loaded up the same bedtime playlist onto it. These two iPods dutifully played the same songs day in and day out every night for years. They’re even more utilitarian than designed, but worked well at their finite task (Photo by Nicnicoleleeolee):

However, over time things started to not work. First one of the fancy docks we used as a speaker stopped charging which ever iPod was in it. This meant every week or so we’d have to swap it over to the good dock to charge up. But then one started to lock up and had to be rebooted. We feared we’d have to replace them soon.

It was around this time that I starting using the Cast All The Things software (aka catt) in my quest to both (finally) learn Python and to easily control the volume on a chromecast. Checkout my cattmate and cattrotar projects! catt is a command line script and python library that allows you to easily control and play videos/music on Chromecasts. It was also around the time that Chomecast Audio’s were stopped being made so I’d stocked up them. We have about 4 or 5 plugged in here and there about the house, including one in each kids room. They work really well!

By now you can likely see how this post is going to resolve itself, but lets find out, shall we?

Yes, that’s right, I wrote a full featured web site that you could pull up and easily play music in which ever room needed to hear the play list. It was simple, yet fancy ;) On the front end there was a series of 2 buttons, one for each room. When you pressed a button, it sent an AJAX call to a to the single endpoint on the back end. The back end then made an exec call to a bash script. This in turn used catt to play a MP3 on the specified Chromecast.

This worked great for a day or so. But then a bug reared it’s ugley had. Let me tell you, the cost of a software bug in your web app which involves waking your child up at 10.30pm is EXTREMELY high. Like, unacceptably high. Sleeping children are gold. Parents get grown up time, the kids get much needed rest and we’re all better for it the next day. Don’t fuck with a kid’s sleep.

After some unfruitful debugging, I got lazy and realized I’d already installed the wonderful termux on my phone, along with a $2 add on to have a bash script launcher widget on my phone’s desktop. So, after a dozen or so minutes of coding and a little ssh-keygen -t ed25519 for good measure, I had this on my phone:

Here’s what happens when you press one of those four links:

Call a local script on the phone with the same name shown above
Each script has the same contents but just calls the remote server with a different argument: ssh napserver controlmusic.sh CHILD PLAY_STOP. So for the first one above, that’d be ssh napserver controlmusic.sh e play
The remote server, (hardened of course to only allowing one command to be run for that SSH key,) inside controlmusic.sh runs a catt command: /usr/bin/catt -d DEVICE COMMAND OPTIONAL_COMMAND. Again for the first button that’d look like: /usr/bin/catt -d "E's Chromecast" cast songs.mp3

So, while not nearly has fancy as the web app I initially wrote, it works every time, has saved me the time of debugging the web app (aka let me be lazy ;) and most importantly, does not wake the kids up after they’ve gone to sleep! Icing on the cake is that continued my lazy streak and bought the app for my partner’s phone so they could activate the playlist while I’m out of town (instead of me VPNing in and activating it remotely on request ;).

How to get the Dell Windows 10 OS Recovery to boot on XPS 13″ 9350

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Remember that awesome Dell XPS 13 I got back in 2016? The one that came with Windows 10 but then I wiped clean with Ubuntu 16.04? Well, it’s still goin’ strong! So strong that it’s time to sell it to another happy user now that work got me an upgrade. In that post I just linked you can read about how I upgraded it to have a better wireless card. Since then I’ve also upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 with zero hardware compatibility issues. Further, I put in a faster NVMe drive and replaced the battery with an OEM Dell one to give it a bit more running time (battery health in the BIOS showed as bad).

My buyer wanted to run the stock Windows 10 OS, so it was up to me to get it back to it’s roots to close the deal. Dell, it turns out, makes it REALLY easy to do a clean re-install of Windows 10 on your XPS laptop. They have this great tool called the Dell OS Recovery Tool. First you go to their site and punch in your Dell Service Tag. Then you download a windows executable. When you run that, you again punch in your Service Tag. The magic happens here then: the software builds a USB bootable image for Windows 10 with all the drivers needed for your specific laptop. This is totally awesome and saves a TON of time. Thanks Dell!

If you’re not on a Dell then that center panel isn’t available, still works though!

Then you wait a while (10 min?) while the program runs it’s course and you see the final screen saying it’s done. Odly, the other steps are not clickable to find out more information, they’re just showing you’re on step two of five:

Now you should just need to reboot your laptop and press “F12” to get the one time boot prompt to go so you can specify the USB drive to boot off of (screen shot curtesy of jasoncoltrin.com):

However, no matter what I did, my USB drive never showed up under “UEFI BOOT” there. My Ubuntu 18.04 install drive? It showed up. Ubuntu 20.04 server install drive? Yup, no problems. Ok, maybe it’s the brand of USB drive? I reflashed a different brand USB drive and it had the same problem. Maybe BIOS settings are tweaked? I reset BIOS back to defaults, still no option to boot. After a couple hours, i walked away and slept on it.

The next day I was researching more and some one mentioned something about an NTFS partition:

One thing folks may not realize is the Flash Drive has to be formatted as FAT 32 in order to boot as UEFI..
Dell Forum Post

This was a bit silly though – the Dell Recover Tool completely formats the USB drive so it’s pristine and nothing is left on it but the FAT boot partition. Wait, is it silly? Let’s look at the USB drive in question in the Ubuntu 20.04 Disks utility:

Yup, see, just like I said, FAT boot par….hey!! What’s that other partition there!?

What? What’s this possibly BIOS confusing NTFS partition doing there? Let’s click that minus icon:

Yes I’m sure, delete that thing!!

Now let’s see what the BIOS thinks when I reboot with a USB drive with just the one FAT partition that DELL originally wrote. It thinks life is wonderful and is happy to proceed with re-installing Windows 10. This, by the way, takes a good number of hours. Be patient.

So, tl;dr – if you can’t get your Dell USB Windows 10 Restore image to boot on your Dell XPS 13 9350, and likely a lot of other Dell models, consider deleting this extra partition on the USB drive. It worked magic for me.