Month: April 2025

Home alarm clock update

I am delighted with my current home alarm clock setup.

I have the Morefine M8S N100 Alder Lake PC running Fedora Workstation KDE Spin. It is cabled into an OLED television set. I use the remote on the TV: settings > energy saving > panel > turn the panel completely off.

The Morefine M8S stands out in that crowd of machines for having active cooling, but running quiet. At the moment, they are on sale with 12 GB RAM and a 128 GB NVME drive for $170.

A full kit Raspberry Pi isn’t that much less, doesn’t have full size HDMI, isn’t running Intel hardware (super Linux compatible) and they do have that nasty problem of writing /var/log to the SD card, burning it out. The newer Pi can do an NVME drive, but that’s going to drive the cost up close to the M8S. But I digress.

The tuner part of the TV stays on all the time. The M8S is cabled to the TV via an HDMI cable. Although the OLED panel is off, the tuner keeps the HDMI port active, so the M8S doesn’t disconnect or try to rejigger the display when the panel is turned off for sleep mode.

Previously, to connect to the sound bar, I used Bluetooth, bypassing the TV. This was not great. Specifically, Bluetooth wants to disconnect if not streaming, and Linux doesn’t want to play with an audio source that isn’t there. Sure, there are kludgy ways to get it to light up for a sound, but this is clearly paddling upstream for drudgery and debt.

But I saw the Toslink optical S/PDIF connector on the sound bar, and the lightbulb went on. Feed everything in to the TV over HDMI, and feed the audio from the TV to the sound bar over Toslink. We’re back to fun and profit. Well, fun, at least.

This is working out great.

The M8S is a Nextcloud client, so it has access to my audio files directory, and via the web, the Music app player.

KAlarm on the M8S runs VideoLAN Client (VLC) headless, pointing at the audio file (or for waking up, a .pls playlist file). I have seven .pls files for seven days of the week.

I also happen to have my source files for iPhone ringtones in Nextcloud, so when I want a short alarm sound, I’ve got a passel of those available.

KAlarm lets me set schedules for every Sunday of the month. I happen to need a different schedule for the second Sunday, where the first, third, fourth, and fifth are a normal schedule.

What is super nice is that I can have Nextcloud playing music at a low volume, but when VLC kicks in, it plays at the normal volume. They don’t interrupt each other, they simply multiplex.

Lastly, I’ve been playing with Coqui TTS (text-to-speech), so sometimes the sound being played by KAlarm is a feminine Scottish voice saying “Do daily inventory”. 🙂

Next, I want to generate Westminster Chimes sound files, and have it play those on the hour. It would be fun to generate the sound file on-the-fly, starting with the announcement chime and then Coqui TTS saying “Seven” or “Noon” or “Thirteen hundred”.

A future project I have in mind is to write a Perl script to pull down my calendar out of Nextcloud, and then write entries into the KAlarm file for special events.

Also, I wouldn’t mind turning the M8S (and my other machines) into Snapcast clients.

Fun indeed.

Quarterly inventory – 2025 Q1

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?

Future Me

Whoops – I’m sixteen days late. I just added twelve reminders to myself, to be delivered by Future Me

I support Future Me, and am delighted when I see an email sent to the future arrive in my mailbox.

Personal Life

Ooooof. I’ve been in such a funk these last four months. It is bordering on problematic.

I still don’t have a girlfriend, and my house is messy enough that I don’t want to bring people over. Saint Valentine’s Day highlighted my awareness that I really need to change things if I don’t want to die alone. I probably will anyway, but keeping things the status quo will guarantee that.

One positive thing I have started is a sun shade for my western facing glass door. The original owner put reflective film on it to try to drive the heat of the sun back, but it isn’t effective. So I got the idea that I’d build a shade from roofing panels. There’s no way that I can transport them in my Ford C-MAX. However, my brother happened to have a need to drive down here with his long bed truck, so I asked him if he would help me. The Lowes buying experience was underwhelming, but by the end of the afternoon, we put four 3′ x 8′ sheets in the bed of his truck and brought them home.

I still need to bolt them together and to a board or rail to hang them. And I’d like to buy some Rust-Oleum to paint the holes after I drill them and put bolts in. And then I need to hang the shade. But I can already tell that without the tree, this summer would be exceedingly hot inside that room.

I did reconfigure my home alarm clock a little bit, and am delighted with it. Previously, it wasn’t very good. Today, I would rate it splendid. I should do a blog post about it.

Another change is that my main machine and my alarm clock machine are running Fedora Workstation, KDE Spin. Most of my other websites are running Debian, away from Ubuntu.

I do need to redo my personal mail server. This is yet-another task that would be fun if I had a week to do it, but I don’t so then it just adds to my stress level.

Factorio: Space Age was a letdown. It feels too much like a grind, and the really fun part, blasting bugs with artillery, is unreachable until several planets are exploited. That just makes the grind worse. Sigh.

Work Life

If $25,000 fell out of the sky and into my lap, I would retire tomorrow.

I’m counting down: fifteen months to go.

Volunteer Service Life

This was another one that kicked my ass this quarter. I upgraded the version of PHP on the website, and the calendar plugin prompt started killing off the server. We’d get an out-of-memory error within five minutes. The event calendar is just about the second-most important feature of the website. The website became dysfunctional: what to do?

Probably the best event calendar is The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe. Problem is that it didn’t play nice with our theme. I use an older Twenty Fourteen theme, with a child theme, Fourteen Press, too. Since The Events Calendar wasn’t working, I went with Sugar Calendar. Mostly, I liked that it exports and imports JSON instead of ICS or CSV.

I have my regrets, though.

We paid $100 for it, and as mentioned in the previous quarterly inventory, finances were already so tight that we had had to cut our one employee’s hours 20%. The other regret is that support in the WordPress world is clownish. I tried to get a technical support call going, and they replied that they don’t do support sessions. They want me to create a user on the website with admin privileges and then send them the name and password so they can root around, fixing things.

WTF?

Okay, sure, I’ve got the home lab thing going, and I can copy the website here, and let them root around in the copy of the website, but … this is ridiculous and idiotic. I feel like a fool contemplating the idea.

The third regret is that they advertise that their event calendar can also do ticket sales. Well, that is only true if you set up a Stripe account with them: they don’t do the other payment systems. We’ve got three, and none of them are Stripe. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stripe kicks back a part of the commission to their service partners. So the ticket sales idea was a waste of time for us.