Random Notes

A long time ago, my grandpa gave me his pocket watch. It was passed down in the family to him, then from him to me, and it's one of my most prized possessions. The only thing I knew about it was that it said Zenith on the front, and it had an inscription explaining it was given as a 60th birthday gift to someone in 1939. It runs, but poorly so, having a drift of around 7 minutes per day.

In last September, I wrote about my home server being aggressively scraped by AI companies. Turns out that was only the beginning.

I feel so old. This blog is my "new" blog, to replace the old one I wrote as a teenager. And now it's 10 years old.

As Firefish, my fediverse instance software, had gone into maintenance mode and wouldn't be updated in the future, I needed to move off of it. I settled on Mastodon for my new instance. I set up a new account for myself and added the old account as an alias there, which is required to migrate to it. In essence, the new account must pre-approve the migration by adding this alias. This is to prevent migrating to the wrong account by accident.

After doing this, I tried starting the migration from Firefish's settings, but was met with an error:

Remote account doesn't have proper 'Known As' alias. Did you remember to set it?

As I logged in to my fediverse instance running on my home server today, I was thinking it was running strangely slow. Opening htop painted an ugly picture: all the CPU cores were at 100 %. The reason was that my Forgejo instance was being scraped.

We have a battery powered automatic soap dispenser that you can use without touching it. Sure, it's a stupid item that probably shouldn't exist, but since it already exists, it would be reasonable to keep it working as long as possible. The upside is that it stays clean, but the downside is that it eats through batteries like nobody's business. The thing requires 4 AA batteries and, crucially, rechargeable 1.2 volt NiMH batteries won't work. I'm not going to be buying separate regular batteries just for this device, so of course I had to hack it.

I got a new ISP recently and for the first time ever, a possibility of using IPv6 on a wired home network. IPv6 is still a novel thing in Finland in 2024.

I started by dragging my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X to as close to the present day as possible with the stock firmware, upgrading to 2.0.9-hotfix.7. Then I wasted a whole evening trying to fiddle with the IPv6 configuration in the config tree. The closest I got was that my devices got IPv6 addresses, but couldn't send packets through the router. I found a ton of links online, but even exact copies of some configs didn't work.

On the fedi someone mentioned OpenWrt, and having used DD-WRT back in the day, I was down to try it. Their firmware selector showed EdgeRouter X as supported, but as you'll see I'm glad I read the docs first.

This is a post about how I set up the Valheim dedicated server for socket activation with Systemd, so that it can be started and shut down on demand. This helps it use less resources, keeping the server and the environment happier. If you just want to grab the codes, you might skip directly to the repository, but keep in mind that it requires understanding of Systemd and Linux system administration.