blog.crox.net

Since Apple moved from JPEG to HEIF as default format about two years ago, there has been a lot of progress.

There is a very straightforward way to add minimal HEIC/HEIF support to Ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:strukturag/libheif
sudo apt-get install heif-gdk-pixbuf heif-gimp-plugin heif-thumbnailer

That's it! You don't even need to logout or restart, the new functionality is available immediately.

More details here and here.

The geohashing wiki hosted at wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing had been down since September 2019.

It is now back at a new address https://geohashing.site/geohashing/.

[updated with the latest info on 2020-03-09]

I've been using the staticmaplite library for a while to generate static maps based on OSM tiles.

Recently I started getting the following error when downloading tiles:

Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect.

The OSM team was very responsive when I contacted them and they pointed me to https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/.

Based on that info, I checked how staticmap.php was fetching tiles and noticed that the User-Agent string was hardcoded to "Mozilla/4.0". I fixed this and now I can fetch tiles again. You can get the updated version from here: https://github.com/crox-net/staticmaplite.

Discover/list other hosts:

ping6 -I eth0 ff02::1
ip -6 neigh show

To connect to a host using the link-local address you need to specify which interface to use (see "zone index"):

ssh -6 fe80::a00:aaaa:bbbb:cccc%eth0

It took me some time to figure this out, maybe it can be useful to someone else...

I kept getting "no ping" error for unknown reasons. It turned out that I had enabled DumpPreUserCmd and UserCmdCheckStatus for that specific host to check for an encrypted partition being mounted.

Due to some changes on the host after an upgrade, the script triggered by DumpPreUserCmd was returning an error... And for some reason this showed as a ping error in the web interface.

I eventually figured it out by checking the last lines of the LOG.** file in the pc/[host] directory, which looked like this:

2018-05-08 19:15:45 Output from DumpPreUserCmd: /[partition] is not mounted
2018-05-08 19:15:45 DumpPreUserCmd returned error status 256... exiting