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APA106 KiCad library (including APA-106-F8 footprint and 3D model)

Wondering what APA106 addressable RGB LED are? Get some from eBay, AliExpress or SparkFun.

In case this is useful to anyone else: here is my APA-106-F8 RGB LED KiCad library, including 3D model for pretty rendering.

You are free to use/change/distribute it in any way for any purpose. Attribution would be nice but is not mandatory.

The 3D model was made with OpenSCAD based on the instructions from Christopher J. Woodall. (The only difference is that I used meshlab to convert the OpenSCAD STL to binary instead of meshconv.)

Update 2020-12-05: the original post with the instructions is no longer online, but you can still find it here.

If you are interested, here is the OpenSCAD source file.

Linux - extract data from an "OLE Compound" file

As seen here, 7-Zip can extract the contents:
$ file PGPexch.ole
PGPexch.ole: Composite Document File V2 Document, No summary info
$ 7z x PGPexch.ole

7-Zip [64] 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,2 CPUs)

Processing archive: PGPexch.ole

Extracting [1]CompObj
Extracting [1]Ole
Extracting CONTENTS
Extracting [3]ObjInfo
Extracting [2]OlePres000
Extracting [3]MailStream

Everything is Ok

Files: 6
Size: 104336
Compressed: 108544
$ file CONTENTS
CONTENTS: PDF document, version 1.5
$
(If the OLE data is hidden in a WINMAIL.DAT file, you may have to extract it with tnef first.)

Add Ubuntu alongside a pre-installed Windows on an HP laptop (convert primary partition to extended/logical)

Recently I wanted to install Ubuntu next to a pre-installed Windows on a brand-new HP EliteBook.

The notebook came with four primary partitions, with Windows installed on the biggest one:

- sda1 (1 GB, NTFS, label=SYSTEM)
- sda2 (457 GB, NTFS)
- sda3 (16 GB, NTFS, label=HP_RECOVERY)
- sda4 (2 GB, FAT32)

In order to install Ubuntu it's not enough to resize the Windows partition, as you cannot have more than four primary partitions. Removing one of the other partitions is a bad idea according to several reports, as it might render the system unable to start, or prevent BIOS updates. So the idea is to convert the Windows partition to a logical one in addition to resizing it. Fortunately everything you need to do that is already included on the Ubuntu installation image.

1. Use gparted to resize and move the Windows partition. I resized it to 100 GB and added 10 MB free space before it (to leave some space to create the extended partition later on). This will take a while, depending on the performance of your hard drive.

2. Use fixparts to convert sda2 to a logical partition:
# fixparts /dev/sda
Type l then 2, write the changes to the disk with w.

3. Restart the computer without the Ubuntu install media so that Windows fixes itself. This will take even longer than the partition resize, be patient. Restart once more to make sure the Windows install is fine.

4. Proceed with installing Ubuntu, choose the option to "install Ubuntu alongside Windows".

Enable IPv6 on OSMC (wired and wireless)

Despite having read the opposite, it looks like IPv6 is disabled by default on the latest OSMC release (2015.06-1). I've tried adding a sysctl.d file to set /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/eth0/disable_ipv6 to 0, but this did not help. It worked only when I ran the command manually. By going through numerous forum posts I eventually found out that you need to use the connmanctl CLI tool:
root@osmc:~# connmanctl
connmanctl> services
*AO Wired ethernet_b827ebaabbcc_cable
connmanctl> config ethernet_b827ebaabbcc_cable --ipv6 auto preferred
connmanctl> quit
root@osmc:~#
This enables IPv6 with autoconfiguration, turns on Privacy Extensions and prefers these ephemeral addresses over the autoconfigured ones.

The same command works for wireless as well, you just need to select the appropriate interface (the service name will start with wifi_).

"help" will display basic usage info.

If for some reason you would like to disable IPv6, the command would be "config ... --ipv6 off".