It’s time for another blog post. I’ve been working on a side project over the past couple of weeks. It goes by the preliminary name kodinix and is yet another incarnation of the kodi media center software on a small single board computer (SBC). It is similar to LibreELEC, but adding a crucial bit of functionality: the ability to open a browser as fallback for accessing web content that is not covered by a kodi plugin. More details will follow shortly (the usual promise ).

In this context I had to debug some issues with the graphics stack that drove me nuts for a few days. Working with embedded linux systems both professionally and for fun I often touch a wide variety of software components. Each and every one of them is a complex beast by itself. There’s people and teams out there for whom the development and maintenance for any single of these projects is a full-time job spanning years to decades, they are without doubt experts in their domain. Stitching together those components into a full system, selecting, packaging and confgiuring them to work well together is a task that leaves me with a glimpse into a wide variety of components and technologies, but for very few of these I have deeper knowledge or insight. I’d thus consider myself a generalist. And that sometimes makes it hard to track down issues.

Hey there! I’ve decided to cancel #15WeeksToBlog challenge I set for myself to stay motivated to blog more often. I started it whilst the #100DaysToBlog / #100DaysToOffload challenges trended on mastodon, knowing very well that I don’t want additional incentives for spending time in front of a screen daily and writing something supposedly “offloading”. The spirit pushed me towards reviving my own blog though and I tried the weekly blog post to find a fitting level between regular posts and the time and resources to give them enough depth so I don’t see them as irrelevant and “just another guys random thoughts on the internet”. I’ve steadily but slowly been working on blog posts since then, but time is even more sparse than I expected (between the covid19-pandemic related inconveniences, some contract work, searching for a more permanent job, arriving and furnishing the new apartment and taking care of three kids bustling around the home), so weekly and even bi-weekly posts is nothing I can commit to right now.

I announced posting more about my journey getting familiar with Nix/NixOS and getting my printer/scanner combo device to work well with it. Setting myself a challenge to keep blogging weekly (#15WeeksToBlog) and seeing a lot of other peoples blog posts appearing has motivated me enough to actually get this post written down albeit a lot later than planned.

Alongside the revival of this blog through yesterdays post I also added a link to my mastodon profile in its footer. My mastodon profile also had a link to this blog in it for a long time, though it missed the little “verified” checkmark next to it. In case you’ve not seen the mark I’m referring to or are not present on mastodon / the fediverse yet (you should join, e.g. here or here), you can see it in this screenshot:

Getting it in there isn’t complicated and there’s several online resources on achieving that. Basically it’s just adding a URL in one of the mastodon profile metadata fields and then linking back to your mastodon profile on that website with a rel="me" attribute.

<a href="https://chaos.social/@dwagenk" rel="me">My Mastodon Profile</a>

One thing I didn’t see mentioned anywhere: The link verification doesn’t appear immediately, but needs some time. Apparently the mastodon instance server scans those URLs periodically instead of every time the profile is viewed (sounds like a reasonable design decision favoring lower load times). This irritated me, because it needed more than 9 hours for the checkmark to appear on my profile. The timespan got me thinking and double checking, whether I made any mistakes linking back, but in the end waiting was just the best solution for this problem…

I like to dive into problems to learn new skills. Especially when it comes to technology and crafts. This led to a self-made cargo-bike, basic welding skills, but also the basis for my profession: knowledge of embedded systems, programming in C and configuring various software systems.

In this and probably two future blog posts I want to document my last deep-dive into a new-to-me technology:

Nix/NixOS or more specifically getting my printer/scanner combo device to work well with NixOS.

Prelude

I started writing this blog post in a first attempt a couple days ago and it got way too verbose and lengthy, going into detail about the specifics of my setup and the reasoning behind it. So here’s a short version.

Goal

Adding Collabora to an existing Nextcloud instance to enable online collaborative document editing right inside the Nextcloud webinterface.

Step by Step

Prerequisites

I’m assuming you’ve got Nextcloud installed somewhere already (publically reachable, with it’s own domain or subdomain) and also installed the Collabora app (it’s listed as one of the official apps in the Office & Text section of Nextcloud’s list of apps). You also need a server for running Collabora, that has docker and docker-compose installed and a domain or subdomain pointing to it. If both, Nextcloud and Collabora, will be running on the same server, take a closer look at the jwilder/nginx-proxy, that I’ll be using anyhow. It should be no problem having both running behind the proxy on the same server, accessible through different subdomains.

Prelude

I planned writing some posts about embedded systems development. Well, I’ve been too busy to actually get started with that and although I’ve got some half-baked posts somewhere on my hard drive, this blog has been empty up to now. This post is a little out of the embedded systems programming scope I had in mind for this blog, but I’ve spent quite some time on getting it all together and felt the urge to properly document it. Leastwise to give some guidance to my future self about the setup of my PGP keys.