WirelessMoves – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

MeshCore – Part 2: Web Serial For Flashing

After having had a first look at MeshCore in the previous post, here’s a follow-up on how to actually flash software to devices. This used to be a bit tricky, as flashing devices over USB in the past typically required downloading a binary for the device and an app to flash the device from a PC or notebook. Then, Web Serial for web browsers came along. Until now, I’ve never used it and always preferred the manual way. MeshCore offered the perfect opportunity to give Web Serial in the web browser a try and learn. I was expecting a bit of resistance and a steep learning curve, and was surprised that what I got instead was an easy process and a working device in 2 minutes.

MeshCore – Part 1: What is This?

Recently, I heard the term ‘MeshCore‘ a few times from people who were quite enthusiastic about this rising star in the mesh radio networking domain. After listening to a talk about it (in German), I decided that I wanted to try it out as well. A device costs around 50 euros, so I ordered a few. Just out of interest, without a particular use case in mind (yet). So what is this ‘MeshCore’ then?

Getting eth0 back on a Debian 13 Server

A quick rant today: Having a network interface name tied to where a physical network interface is actually connected in the overall system can be good idea, but on a virtual machine, this renaming just gets in the way. I want my eth0 back! Here’s a link to how that is done on an Ubuntu server installation in a VM that uses netplan. As I’ve started to experiment with Debian as my VM OS, I wanted to have it there as well. Debian continues to use /etc/network/interfaces for the network configuration, so getting eth0 back works a bit differently there. The fix here: overlay the udev rule that does the renaming:

ln -s /dev/null /etc/udev/rules.d/80-net-setup-link.rules

sudo update-initramfs -u

Done!

P.S.: If you are interested why the initramfs has to be updated, have a look at this Debian Wiki entry.

A Debian 13 VM with 300 MB RAM

Virtual machine RAM use with Debian 13 and Wireguard running in a Docker container.

Back in 2022 I upgraded most of my virtual machines to Ubuntu 22.04. As I had quite a number of VMs that only ran a single program, I ran them with 512 MB of RAM. The bad surprise: Ubuntu 22.04 significantly increased the RAM requirement out of the box, so the VMs wouldn’t even boot anymore after upgrading until I increased the assigned RAM to the VM to 768 MB. Disappointing, but what could I do, I thought at the time. Now I know: Go back one step and use Debian as basis for my VMs. This gets rid of all the stuff Canonical has added to Ubuntu over the years, which I really don’t need on my VMs. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so the learning curve was not that steep. But RAM usage is now even less than what I ever required for an Ubuntu based VM!

Pixel 8 vs. 10 – Do I Upgrade?

The Pixel 11 has recently been released, so it is time to get a Pixel 10 while it is still on the market. The discount is significant. I’ve been using a Pixel 8 for the past 2 years and I needed a backup device so I went for it. I then installed GrapheneOS on the Pixel 10 and installed all apps I have on my Pixel 8 as well. What I didn’t do so far: Move all my data and configure all the apps. This is a lot of work, so the question is if I save myself the extra work for now or go for it? I decided that the answer depends on what kind of benefits I would get from the change.

Buying ASAP vs. Holding Out

Prices for RAM, Flash, hard disks and graphics cards keep rising and rising. The AI bubble keeps inflating and it’s anyone’s guess when hardware prices will return to sane levels. This definitely has an influence on my buying behavior but interestingly enough, in both directions: I buy some things right now because because I expect that those things will get more expensive, and I’m holding out at buying other things which I would have otherwise bought, because I have enough in stock, or because they are good enough. I haven’t made an exact calculation, but overall I think I’m spending less, despite buying things now.

GrapheneOS – When An App is Slow…

I’ve been using GrapheneOS for about a year now and overall, I am very happy with the security and privacy features. There is one app, however, that runs noticeably slower on my Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS than on other Android devices: OpenstreetMap for Android (Osmand). The good side of this is that it has made me look for other map applications on Android, and I’ve found CoMaps that meets almost all of my needs. But still, I’d like use Osmand every now and then as well. So after looking around a bit, I found the reason behind why it is so slow on GrapheneOS and how to ‘fix it’.

Moving an SSH Session to TMUX

If you are a regular user of tmux on the shell, I ‘m sure you been at the following point before as well:

I have logged into a remote host over ssh and started a long running command. I usually start a remote tmux session first, so I can close my notebook and cut the connection at any time if necessary. No harm done, the long running command continues running and I can come back to it at any time by attaching to the remote tmux session again. Every now and then, however, I forget to start tmux before that long running command, so I’m stuck and can’t close the notebook if I want the command to continue running on the remote host.

When this happened to me again recently, I wondered if I could move this ssh session to a new tmux session while the long running command is already active. And it turns out that this is actually possible!

Ubuntu 26.04 and Eduroam – Finally a Secure GUI Config

Another year, another Ubuntu version or certificate to be used with Eduroam Wifi. Keeping an Eduroam configuration secure, safe and private is a bit of a challenge on Ubuntu, because so far, the certificate check could not be configured on the GUI and had to be done manually in the configuration file. But Ubuntu 26.04 finally configures the certificate check on its own… if a certificate is configured rather than the option being disabled completely by ticking the ‘No CA certificate is required’ box. This works as well, but then everybody can impersonate ‘eduroam’ and steal your credentials.

Ubuntu 26.04 Fixes – 4 – Flameshot on Wayland

Ubuntu’s built-in screenshot utility has come a long way and is quite good in the meantime. Unfortunately, there are two features that are missing: I can’t blur parts of the screenshot during the process and I can’t mark a certain part of the image or put an arrow onto the image to draw attention. Sure, I could do it later with another program, but that’s just overhead that keeps me from doing it. Thus, I’ve been using Flameshot for many years. When I moved over to Ubuntu 26.04, however, it looked like it wouldn’t work anymore. Wayland, you know… But that’s not true and there is even a way to make it work without modifying configuration files!