WirelessMoves – Page 18 – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

Starlink – Part 1 – First Bring-Up

Starlink antenna affectionately called ‘Dishy’ by some on the rooftop

I’m sure you’ve seen the one or other satellite focused post on this blog over the last year. So far, I’ve mostly been looking into handheld satellite text messaging, but I always had a close eye on Starlink as well. Recently, Starlink has lowered their prices and introduced mobile tariffs that can be activated and deactivated on a monthly basis. Mobility is important for me, as I wanted to test and potentially use satellite based Internet access in a number of different places. Also, I don’t need it all year around, so being able to only pay for the months while in use is just what I was waiting for, too. In other words, the time had come for me to order a terminal and see how it really performs in the Cologne area in Germany.

Train Windows Permeable For Cellular Signals – From Theory to Practice

While heat insulating windows are a great thing, they have one big disadvantage: They also block RF signals. That means that cellular reception inside buildings and trains becomes very difficult. Back in 2016, I first heard about the concept of modifying the heat insulation layer of windows so they would let RF signals through. At the time I had little hope that I would see this in trains in my lifetime. But I was wrong, it has really happened now!

How to Fix Flickering Videos in Impress – X Quirks

Just a quick note today about what to do when videos inserted in OpenOffice Impress start to flicker: I had this strange behavior with Ubuntu 20.04 and the rather old OpenOffice version that comes shipped with it by default. And it seems I’m not the only one. But here’s the fix: Instead of using the default X-window compositor, switch to Wayland during login. There’s a little cogwheel at the bottom right side of the login screen where the compositor can be changed after selecting an account. And there we go, after starting the desktop with Wayland, no more flickering! That’s not a permanent solution for me, because apps for taking screenshots and recording the screen as well as remote desktop sharing do not work any longer, at least not with Ubuntu 20.04. Over time, these issues will probably go away anyway, as Wayland is the default compositor starting with Ubuntu 22.04. I guess that’s probably why nobody is keen to fix this in the first place. But I’m not quite there yet.

Raspberry Pi With Remote Screen Sharing – A Quick Installation Guide

It’s been a while since I installed a headless Raspberry Pi from scratch with a desktop GUI to be accessed over the network. In the ‘early days’ of the Pi this used to be very simple: Get an image file from the Raspbian website, use ‘dd’ on Linux to copy the image to an SD card and start it. SSH was active by default and the username and password was known. Done! But then the project became very popular and these days things are a bit more complicated. I guess it probably turned out that having an open SSH port by default with default credentials is not ideal. Also, the makers of the Raspberry Pi have made some decisions that are not quite to my liking. So here’s a quick guide how to get a headless Raspi up and running with a GUI over the network WITHOUT using special installers and proprietary remote desktop viewers.

Nextcloud – OnlyOffice Install – With A Reverse Proxy

In the previous post, I discussed how to do a straight forward OnlyOffice install on a server or VM with docker-compose and then connect it to a Nextcloud installation running on another server. It turned out that this was phenomenally simple. Now that everything is up and running and working like a charm, I wanted to see if I could consolidate the setup somewhat. To reduce the number of virtual machines, I run many of my services with Docker and docker-compose on a single virtual machine and behind a simple dockerized reverse proxy that also takes care of getting TLS certificates via Letsencrypt. So the big question: Can I run an OnlyOffice inside Docker containers behind that reverse proxy to save me a public IP address and a separate virtual machine?

Nextcloud – OnlyOffice Install – Quick and Simple

In the previous post on the topic, I gave a general overview of how Nextcloud and OnlyOffice can play together. There are many ways to combine the two online services and hence, installation instructions that can be found on the net from Nextcloud, from OnlyOffice, from third parties and from each with many different installation options. This confused me to no end, I couldn’t see the wood for the trees anymore. But I finally figured it out and if you already have a private Nextcloud instance up and running, you can install OnlyOffice with just a few commands on the shell if you are willing to go for a no frills setup.

Online Word Processing – Part 4 – OnlyOffice and Nextcloud – For Real

For working collaboratively on text documents with others, I’ve been using Nextcloud and Libreoffice / Collabora Online. Unfortunately, Collabora Online must have been designed to be used on-premise, as the document rendering is done on the server. Any network delay noticeably slows down the output and generates other undesired side effects. So I decided to look for something else.

Microsoft and Google online editors work a lot better, as they perform the document rendering in the browser rather than on the server. But these products are closed source solutions that suck my documents into their clouds and are hence not an option for me. So I gave Nextcloud with OnlyOffice a try. In the Nextcloud app store there’s an app to install OnlyOffice alongside Nextcloud on the same server. Unfortunately, the solution looks like it is abandoned and fails pretty quickly when one starts to work with it. That really puzzled me for a while…

The Two Body Problem

A few days ago, a very strange GUI problem suddenly materialized that made me start sweating: After working on the notebook for a while, I suddenly could not switch between windows anymore and generally, the desktop started to behave very strangely. Suspend and resume helped, but after 15 to 20 minutes the desktop started to behave very strangely again. The same after a reboot. And, of course, this started happening just after making an update. So did the update actually cause it? I couldn’t see how, as nothing GUI related had changed. So I started to investigate and it took me several hours and several reboots to figure out what the problem was. And then I felt stupid.

A Locomotive or an Airliner – What’s Heavier?

Here’s an interesting question that recently popped up with an answer that surprised me. What is heavier, a locomotive or an A320 airliner? Before you read on, think about it for a second.

Shrinking a KVM Virtual Machine Image – What About Snapshots?

I run quite a number of virtual machines on a bare metal server in a data center, and most of those are almost identical copies of virtual machines running at home. So my strategy so far for a failure of that server has been to restore service with another set of copies of the VMs running at home. But in recent months, I have started to run a number of VMs there for which I do not have a master on my home server. So I needed a different backup/restore approach here.

I use QEMU/KVM for virtualization on my network servers, and creating a copy of a VM is as easy as copying the disk image file of the VM and transferring it to another place. The challenge: VM images tend to bloat quite a bit over their lifetime, particularly when snapshots are used, and transferring a 50 GB VM image over the Internet and relatively slow VDSL downlink takes quite a bit of time. The solution: Compacting and compressing the image before transfer. Turns out that has an interesting effect on VM snapshots, which are also stored as part of the disk image, that one should be aware of.