Hardware

Moving more to a low-power solution Several months back I replaced the motherboard in the KODI media centre PC that sits in our living room. For many years our media centre has been rocking a Gigabyte motherboard with a second generation Core i7-2600 CPU. The Core i7-2600 came out in Q4 of 2010, making it almost 14 years old at the time I’m writing this. Still, it’s not a bad CPU. For several years it was the system I was compressing our movie collection on as the A8-5600K 4 core APU that was in my workstation (at the time) had about half the performance of the i7-2600. But about six months ago I replaced the CPU and motherboard with a still old, but more modern solution, a MSI motherboard and an Intel Core i3-7100. ...

Migrating the KODI entertainment system On May 5th I mentioned that we’re Running out of space on our media center. In the comments of that post I followed up outlining a plan to buy another 8TB drive (for a total of 3 x 8TB drives) in order to do a RAID Z1 (for 16TB of space). But in order to do that I would need to reformat the drives, which means I also needed a plan to back up our media center data. I hinted at that solution in the comments too: 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID Z1 – which would give me 9TB of space (1 x 3TB is the spare), just enough to back up all the data. ...

On systemd-based distributions it’s possible to boot to the BIOS from Linux Have you ever found yourself working on a computer that’s just so blindingly fast that you just cannot mash the key you need to get into the BIOS fast enough? It might be possible to reboot from your Linux system into the BIOS of your computer. Not all systems support this feature. On the one system we tested this on which didn’t boot to the BIOS the error message mentioned something about the EFI partition. But I was able to successfully run the command on a couple of systems, a 4th gen and 8th gen system. ...

The problem is power management (workaround) You’ve installed Xubuntu 22.04 on your laptop and things are going smoothly… Then you close the lid on your laptop and discover when you open it back up again that when you move the mouse it moves, but you cannot right or left click for some reason? The issue appears to be with power management. The work around we found that appears to fix this is to edit the file: ...

Switching printers at home Other than running out of toner, there was nothing wrong with the HP Laserjet P1102w printer we have at home. The printer printed cleanly, was compact, and was connected to our wireless network, so any machine on our network could print to it. In fact, I was planning on buying more toner this evening after we did our usual scouring of thrift shops. I thought there was a small chance I might find the right HP 85A toner at one of the stores we planned to go to. I did find some other toner at one of the thrift shops, and the $5.95 price tag wasn’t bad, but it was for a different model in the same line of printers. But this was actually after spotting an even better deal, an HP Laserjet 1320 duplex printer for a whopping $10.95. ...

OBS is awesome! Open Broadcasting Software, also known as OBS Studio, is an awesome piece of free and open source software that lets you capture audio and video from a wide variety of sources: screen capture, webcam, audio capture from the system, from an external source, from static images, slide shows, etc. It’s been awhile since I’ve used OBS to capture the desktop of one of the systems at work, an ASUS M51AC desktop with an i7-4770 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. I installed OBS 30.0.1 and started to record a video of the desktop, using the webcam microphone for audio. After a bit of tweaking, adjusting Xubuntu’s microphone sensitivity, I managed to get audio recording correctly so audio levels did not “clip” (go into the red) in OBS. ...

About findmonitor.sh Note: Note: This script is NOT compatible with systems running Wayland. We use Xubuntu Linux at our project. The Working Centre’s not-for-profit Computer Recycling Project sometimes receives donations of many monitors all at once. Our previous method for handling monitors was to set them up, run them through a bunch of tests, print a label on our label printer, and enter the monitor into our point of sale. This method hasn’t worked very well for us when we’ve received a lot of monitors all at once. Large amounts of monitors were sitting untested for awhile because we didn’t have the resources to do the old process for each monitor. We needed a faster way to figure out some of the details of monitors, and make them easier to sell without needing to create labels and enter everything into the point of sale. ...

About the script I wrote the hardware.sh BASH script to make it a bit simpler for volunteers at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project to figure out what hardware was in a computer. For more than a dozen years we’ve been asking volunteers to gather information from the BIOS, or using phoronix-test-suite under our PXE booted Debian Live environment. Volunteers would write the information on quarter page-sized sheets we would attach to each computer. While this was a useful function to help volunteers get to know hardware in a computer, there were a few problems with this method: ...