Blog

Undoing RAID With mdadm Without Reinstalling Operating System

Sunday, May 8, 2022

Currently, I have a dedicated server at Hetzner where I’ve been hosting some personal things. A couple of days ago, I found myself needing to remove one of the two hard drives that the server has from the Software raid that’s configured by default in all Hetzner images, at least from Linux systems based on Debian that can be installed through Hetzner robot.

Enable Automatic Login in Windows 10, Version 2004 and Later

Monday, May 2, 2022

In Windows 10 versions 2004 (May 2020 update) or later, the method to enable automatic login has changed a bit, as now you must edit registry information mandatorily before being able to see the checkbox that allowed enabling automatic login (that is, for a specific user account to be the one that logs in to the computer, without requesting a password). Now, before being able to enable automatic login, you have to do the following.

GitLab Runners on Windows for Continuous Integration and Delivery

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

For just over a couple of years, I’ve been using GitLab Runners to deploy and perform tests on some projects I develop. It all started as a test with simple projects, like Music DL and socializer. The idea of runners is to use them to complete the CI/CD Cycle (that is, continuous integration and delivery). In general terms, this makes it possible that whenever a specific condition is met within the source code repository (for example, creating a tag for each new version, sending a commit to a repository), a Runner takes charge of executing a series of commands or scripts to run the project’s test units, or can even compile, package and distribute versions ready for users directly. This is what we’ve been using in TWBlue for Snapshot updates for a couple of years, which in the end was an important factor when deciding to shorten the development cycle of the application versions. Personally, I also like that a runner executes all the tasks, as that helps us keep our personal or work computers out of TWBlue distribution. Since these are Python projects, sometimes the modules that help us generate distributable versions (such as cx_freeze) incorrectly include packages that aren’t used in the application. This can’t always be controlled appropriately and sometimes, a TWBlue version generated in the past included more or fewer extra and unnecessary modules depending on whose computer the distributable versions had been built on. With a runner creating each version of our software, we ensure we have a machine that only has the necessary tools installed for what will be built, and we also provide everyone who wants to review it, a list of reproducible steps that need to be executed to create an identical copy of our versions. Finally, the fact that all this happens completely automatically makes us have to worry less about preparing everything and executing each step manually on our machines: A developer only has to send a commit or create the appropriate tag, and the runner will test, build and upload the executables to our ftp site in a matter of minutes.

Changes in projects for next year

Monday, December 20, 2021

Hello everyone.

Today I just would like to make an announcement for people who are following any of the projects I am involved in. Throughout this year, which is about to end, many things have come up. There have been new opportunities, as well as other projects to which I have not been able to dedicate as much time as I would like. Not to mention new occupations, responsibilities and tasks that I have been taking on in my current job. The overall summary of this year is that it has been one where everything has been very strange. When the year started, I had no idea that I would end up delving into Skills Development for Alexa, or that this development would end up appearing somewhere beyond my Twitter account. But in the end everything has run its course, and that’s why starting next year, all the software projects I was developing so far, will become part of a new project. This project, which I have already talked about on Twitter, is my own software company, called MCV Software.

Alexa Skills as web services - part 1: Creating the Skill in the Amazon developers portal

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Today I will begin with something that I had pending to try for several months already. I will write a little bit about things that I am discovering when developing. New libraries, methods and design patterns, and in general things that I find along the way. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of people writing about this in English, but I don’t know how many people write in Spanish. So I have done some posts about software development, Linux administration and stuff like that in the Spanish version of my blog, partly to contribute a little with the documentation on various topics in Spanish, and not to forget what I’m learning; and after some months I have decided to translate what I have written so far into english. Here I will be writing about some topics that I find interesting. Take into account that this is a translation of several posts from spanish. some info might be out of date or incorrect, so please contact me if you find anything that can be improved in this and other posts.

MusicDL version 2020.07.31 has been released

Friday, July 31, 2020

Hello there, everyone.

I have been wanting to revisit and update some of my projects (including some past projects I have ditched over the years) to make my software up to date and keep working on new stuff at the same time. I know some of you remember about MusicDL, the application I have coded to play and download music from some popular websites such as Youtube. As you remember in this blog post, when i released MusicDl, I wrote that I just made it for learning a few interesting concepts related to Web scraping (or how to extract, thanks to a set of libraries, the info you want from a website).

Undead Assault is back

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Hello there, everyone! over the last few weeks, some of you have been watching and hearing rumours about Undead Assault coming back.

For those of you who don’t know about it, Undead Assault is an audiogame that consists of surviving against infinite hordes of zombies, playing single or in a team with up to 3 more players.

DIY NAS Server: Refreshing the Odroid XU-4

Sunday, June 9, 2019

Continuing with the series of articles dedicated to the Odroid XU-4 and my adventure of trying to convert it into a NAS server without going through installing systems with everything already integrated, now I wanted to share a particularity (or trick) that can help the board components work somewhat better.

DIY NAS: Operating system

Tuesday, June 4, 2019

Hello there,

As I mentioned in a previous post, i have purchased an amazing odroid XU-4 and wanted to use it for a DIY NAS server (a lot of 3 letter codes here, sorry). I just wanted to detail some of the configuration issues I had to overcome in the process, so I will remember those later if I decide to purchase the eMMC module, which would force me to start from scratch with the system (Micro SD and eMMC boot sectors are different, so apparently there is no way to migrate data from one method to another and start the system normally). Also, if this may be useful for someone else thinking in a NAS server with the same setup I am using, that’d be great, too.

A new family member: Welcome aboard, Odroid XU-4

Saturday, May 25, 2019

Hello there,

Over the last couple of years, I have repurposed a few Raspberry Pi’S sitting around in a corner in my bedroom to act as a Home NAS (network attached storage) and HTPC, running Kodi with its awesome screen reader addon for Linux. However, some months ago I have started to look for a change for a more performant SoC, due to some issues concerning Raspberry Pi (examples are lack of hardware decoders for H.265 and VP8/9, bottleneck in the USB bus and lack of properly gigabit etherned port). Honestly I could live with a raspberry pi for most of my use cases (even if file transfers in the NAS device were quite slow), but I have been tempted for quite some time and I could not resist anymore, so I ended by purchasing the Odroid XU-4.