If Your Garmin Forerunner 945 Keeps Wanting to Update
I want to share this out to the world because it really helped me. When I would connect my Garmin Forerunner 945 to my phone, the sync status kept saying an update was being sent to it, but it would never actually finish the update. It was frustrating the heck out of me. After doing a bit of searching, I found a suggestion to use Garmin Express to update it because it might need to update its maps and that can’t be done over Bluetooth. I connected it today and it’s now updating TopoActive North America (which is scheduled to take an hour to do). I’m hoping after this update it will no longer pretend to get an update that never truly updates.
Bitwarden Unwarranted Panic
Last weekend I started seeing a lot of people I follow either posting or boosting posts about Bitwarden no longer being open source. I did a bit of Googling and, at the time, the only news story I could find was this story from Phoronix about Bitwarden. It wasn’t quite clear exactly what was going on. I waited all week for Ars Technica to cover the issue, but unless I missed it, they never covered it. So I was confused - was this a real issue or people panicking on social media? Then I saw this video by Brodie Robertson:
Frustrations With Digital TTRPG Sourcebooks
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
Thoughts on the newly announced Raspberry Pi 5
Woke up this morning to many news stories that the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced (after the head of Raspberry Pi had said there wouldn’t be a Pi 5 in 2023). Interestingly, if you subscribe to the Raspberry Pi magazine, you’ll be first in line for pre-orders. After having read 5 articles summarizing all the new features ( ars technica article, very detailed hackaday article), here are my thoughts as bullet points:
- It’s awesome that you get about twice the processor speed for only $5 more than what the Raspberry Pi 4 is now selling for.
- However, at $80 for the board (with the need to buy power, case, cooling, etc) the Raspberry Pi is moving out of the realm of an impulse buy item. And, for non-tinkerers, why not buy a Chromebook?
- Somehow it has taken 11 years, but we finally have a power button built into the Raspberry Pi 5. Hurray! Supposedly, pushing it will trigger a controlled shutdown.
- Unfortunately, there is no longer an no audio out jack. I use one of my Raspberry Pis as an MPD daemon device to play music for the kids at night. In the future I would either need to get an audio hat or a set of USB speakers.
If you prefer watching a video about the new features instead of reading one of the articles above, you can watch Jeff Geerling’s video about the Raspberry Pi 5:
Technology Update
As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.
If you get a LEGO Boost set and can't update the firmware...
There’s apparently a bit of a software fail for the LEGO company. When you launch the LEGO Boost app, it won’t continue until you’ve updated the firmware. It asks you to connect so it can update it, but it never actually updates. As I learned in this reddit thread, you actually need to get a different app and use that to update the firmware. Having to use a different bit of software while making you think the software you expect to use can handle the firmware upgrade is a HUGE fail in my book. Hopefully they fix this soon, but if they don’t -at least this resource can be here for anyone searching Google for the answer.
Examining Web Browsers: Microsoft Edge on Windows; Linux Browser Update
This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:
- Are Web Browsers getting exciting again?
- Vivaldi Part 1
- Vivaldi Part 2
- Vivaldi Part 3
- Brave on Windows Part 1
- Vivaldi Part 4, Brave Part 2, Qutebrowser Part 1
Quite a bit has changed since I first started this series about 18 months ago. Back then I was sure I would only be trying Microsoft Edge on Windows and that I would be sticking with Firefox on Linux. Yet Microsoft Edge is now available for Linux, Mac, and Android. On my laptops I continue to prefer non-Firefox browsers. Things continue to be interesting in this realm.
FunkWhale vs Ampache
One of the categories of software people often go to /r/selfhosted to ask about, is for software to host music. This has become even more important with the dissolution of Google Music and Amazon and others removing the ability to upload your own music to listen to. I’ve got some experience with both FunkWhale and Ampache, so I decided to create a video to compare and contrast the two.
Setting up my Raspberry Pi Zero W for the Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT
As I mentioned before, I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W to replace my Arduino MKR WIFI 1010 and ENV board in the bathroom. My Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT (or bonnet, as Adafruit calls them) finally arrived a few days ago, so I setup a git repository for my code. The Pimoroni git Enviro+/Enviro Mini repository has a one-line configuration, but I’d rather do things manually so I know what I’m doing and also so I can set up a proper requirements.txt in my Python venv.
An Update on my Roll-Your-Own IoT
As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.