Tag: Quick Bites

Short little how to’s or op-eds that I ran into and thought others may like to know about

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Unraid Disk Shown as “New Device” When Its Full of Data

While working on setting up my new hardware and bringing my unraid pool back online on it, I encountered an odd problem that made me sweat. I started my array and immediately it gave an error that the cache drive failed. This was odd since that drive was fine just before I started installing the new hardware, so what changed now. I stopped the array and looked, and it was no longer assigned as the cache drive. When I went and added it to the cache again, unraid claimed it was a “new drive” and would be wiped when the array was started.

This was very wrong, this wasn’t a new cache drive, it was the same one as before. It also has a large amount of data on it that I’d like to keep, and docker settings. So I had to figure out how to tell unraid that the drive was fine and to just use it.

I found out that this was one of the situations the “new config” option was added to the tools for. So I went to tools -> new config and applied it while saving the disk locations in the pool. I double checked them after applying the new config, went to the main page, and checked the box stating that the parity should be assumed correct. After starting the array, everything was in order again. All my containers started, data was all there, and everything was back working again.

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Moving a View between two Home Assistant Dashboards

I decided to reorganize my home assistant dashboards which culminated in adding a new dashboard and moving a number of views from other dashboards to it. What I didn’t realize was that this wasn’t as easy as going into the UI and hitting copy on the view, though it wasn’t hard to do in the end (basically one more step and then hitting copy).

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Updating the Webserver to Ubuntu 24.04

I upgraded my webserver to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS recently and ran into an odd little issue. Apache2 refused to start up due to a PHP plugin failing to load. This was specifically PHP 8.1 failing to load as it was replaced in the repos with 8.3. This ended up having a quick fix to get things in order.

The Problem

All I needed to do was disable the old PHP mod and enable the new one. I used this reference for which versions would be supported in 24.04 to enable the correct version. Overall a nice quick fix and my webserver was back operational

> sudo a2dismod php8.1
> sudo systemctl restart apache2
> sudo a2enmod php8.3
> sudo systemctl restart apache2
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Cura and ESP COM Ports

While attempting to debug a problematic ESP32 recently, I needed to connect to it via the COM port from my PC in order to get more logging from the unit. In attempting to do this, I ran into a very peculiar interaction. I couldn’t connect to the ESP COM port while CURA was open. I guess it was attempting to connect to a 3d printer on the port? Whatever the cause, it was a rather annoying encounter. Once I closed it out, I was able to connect and get the logging I needed.

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Ode to a PSU

The PSU that could, the antec basiq power 550. It ran for 11 years, 24/7 in my NAS, and a few years before that in an old desktop. For a $55 PSU on sale from NewEgg, I’d call that pretty good.

Aug 2011 – Nov 2024

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Nova launcher app switcher stops working

I’ve run into a problem on my phone where the app switcher stops working. This only seems to happen when using a third party app launcher like Nova launcher on a pixel phone. A solution to it is to go to the pixel launcher in the android app settings and force stop it. Even if the pixel launcher app is disabled, still click the force stop button. This clears up the issue and allows the app switcher to work again.

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Fixing the WordPress App Connection to my site

It started out with the WordPress app stopping working for me on my phone. This happened a few months back as well and it stayed broken for a few months before it started working again. This time around I was rather very annoyed and wanted to figure out what was going wrong and fix it. In the end it came down to XML-RPC and an “optional” package in the WordPress health check.

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InkScape Printing

In making the labels for my NFC music tags, I ran into a fun bug when printing from InkScape. Sometimes it doesn’t print your entire image. In my case, it printed all the outline boxes for the labels but NONE of the actual images for the labels. I found out from a forum post that this is a common problem for more complex images.

The way to get around this is to”Save a Copy” of your document as a PDF format, open that PDF in your favorite PDF viewer and print that out. Ensure in the print dialog that the PDF isn’t being scaled as well, as the application might try to be “helpful” in that way (which is entirely unhelpful when you need it to be a specific size). Don’t print the InkScape drawing as a PDF since that runs into the same print bug, it needs to be save as to the format for everything to work.

“Actual Size” is the setting you want here

I use Edge to open and print PDF documents, so I make sure “actual size” is selected rather than “fit to printable area” which will shrink the document that already fits just fine on a sheet of paper.

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Oddity in ESPHome

I ran into an oddity with the latest NFC Deck that I built. When starting up, it would take an hour for home assistant to connect and for me to be able to get logs out of it over WiFi with the ESPHome addon. The ESP I used was no different from the first NFC Deck that I built, and the vast majority of the configuration was the same too.

There were however a few things that were different this time based on how the ESPHome web installer and home assistant adoption process went. The big one I found was the web_server was enabled on the new one. This lets you access a little web page to see everything onboard and interact with it. I guess it just couldn’t handle the number of components and sensors onboard the NFC Deck ( 9 buttons, 27 templates, 9 lights, NFC reader, piezo buzzer, rotary), because removing that from the configuration and uploading a new firmware fixed it.

TlDr: If you have an ESP that takes FOREVER for home assistant to connect to, check to see if the web_server component is included in the build, if it is, try removing it and see if that fixes everything.