The little NAS under my bed

In April 2023 I’ve built myself a new NAS box to replace a rather old HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 at my parents place. Since I don’t really have any good space in my apartment it needed to fit under my bed and be reasonably quiet. After hearing good things about the ODROID H3+ I’ve decided to order one with a case, hard drives and everything else necessary to fulfil this purpose....

Taking the Grimaldi Lines ferry from Brindisi to Igoumenitsa

All information as of July 2023. Taking the Grimaldi lines ferry from Brindisi to Igoumenitsa (Ηγουμενίτσα) as a pedestrian sounds easy enough. You can easily book the tickets online (don’t forget about the Interrail discount if you have a pass) but after booking it becomes a little bit more tricky. Step 1: Get to the ferry terminal You will want to go to the bus station named “Costa Morena” (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps)....

Mounting Android Retrofit Dynamic Partition images

Android devices launching with Android 10 and newer use a feature called Dynamic Partitions which essentially combines the system_a, vendor_a and product_a (and all the _b) variants into a single partition simplying the actual partition layout while making it more flexible. Think of it like a single physical partition which contains multiple logical partitions, like with LVM. This feature is available on newly launched devices, devices launched with earlier Android versions still have to cope with the rigid partition layout on-disk....

iTunes protocol handler on Linux with Wine

Today I have tried adding my PayPal account to my iTunes (installed with Wine) Account but discovered, that adding my PayPal account as a payment method didn’t work. After inspecting the network traffic, I found that my browser (Firefox) was redirected to an itmss:// URL, but Firefox didn’t know how to handle that and did nothing. To get it working yourself, follow the next steps: Assuming you already have iTunes installed and are using Firefox, open about:config in Firefox, accept the prompt, right-click and select New -> Boolean....

Signing boot images for fastboot

If you have ever seen the error FAILED (remote: bootimage: incomplete or not signed), here’s the solution (at least for the Fairphone 2 😉): Download the BootSignature.jar file from my server (or compile it yourself from the LineageOS 14.1 tree with the command mka BootSignature). curl -O https://public.lucaweiss.eu/BootSignature.jar Download the make_key tool from the LineageOS GitHub. curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LineageOS/android_development/cm-14.1/tools/make_key Make the script executable chmod +x make_key Generate the key with...

Install and configure EFIDroid on the Fairphone 2

Table of contents: About EFIDroid How to install (FP2) Add a new ROM Add a system to the new ROM Booting into your new ROM About EFIDroid EFIDroid is a relatively new multiboot solution for mobile devices. It is based on the EFI implementation by Intel (EDK2). For more information and support, please visit to the Fairphone Forum thread. How to install (FP2) Download the EFIDroid Manager app from Google Play: https://play....

SDDM login with a Yubikey on Arch Linux

If you are wondering how you can login with a Yubikey into your system with SDDM, here are the steps: Step 1: Install yubico-pam from [community]. Step 2: Edit the file /etc/yubikeys and insert text in the following format: <username>:<yubikey_token_id> # eg luca:cclcclcclccl If you don’t know what the token ID from your yubikey is, just open a text editor and press the button on your yubikey to create a one time password (=OTP)....

Fixing the Unity3D 5.3 startup error on Linux

If you experience this error with the newest Unity3D Build on Linux, just do this one simple step: Create the folder ~/.local/share/unity3d and you are good to go! Now have fun with Unity! In more detail, the “main” error message in ~/.config/unity3d/Editor.log is CopyPackageFile failed, unable to copy /opt/Unity/Editor/Data/Resources/Packages/unity-editor-home-0.0.7.tgz to /home/luca/.local/share/unity3d/Packages/unity-editor-home-0.0.7.tgz CopyPackageFile failed, unable to copy /opt/Unity/Editor/Data/Resources/Packages/unityeditor-cloud-hub-0.0.1.tgz to /home/luca/.local/share/unity3d/Packages/unityeditor-cloud-hub-0.0.1.tgz...

Cross-compiling native Linux applications for Android

Here’s how you can cross-compile “normal” Linux applications for Android! Note, that I cannot give you any help in following this. It worked(tm) when I wrote this but don’t know about now. For the android_configure script download this script, place it in your ~/bin folder and (if not already) add ~/bin to your PATH variable. To create a standalone toolchain use something like the following command (run from your NDK root-dir): build/tools/make_standalone_toolchain....

Google Play Services with Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Genymotion

So, I think you want to install the Google Play Store & Services with an Android 6.0 Marshmallow Emulator? To do that, follow either the long or the short version. You need the following three files: Genymotion-ARM-Translation_v1.1.zip gapps-L-4-21-15.zip benzo-gapps-M-20151011-signed-chroma-r3.zip Short version: Download all three files. Create an emulator with the Nexus 5X image and start it. Flash Genymotion-ARM-Translation_v1.1.zip and reboot. Flash gapps-L-4-21-15.zip and reboot. Sign into your Google Account. Flash benzo-gapps-M-20151011-signed-chroma-r3....