Hacker Public Radio Hacker Public Radio

Introduction
This is a follow up episode on Home Assistant (HA), see
hpr4099
:: An introduction to Home Assistant (HA) for an explanation of what
Home Assistant (HA) is, and why you might want to install it.
The Home
Assistant Installation page offers several different install
methods, listed along with the level of difficulty.

Easiest: Plug and play with Home Assistant Green
Easy: DIY with Raspberry Pi
Intermediate: Extend with Home Assistant Yellow
Hard: Install on other hardware
Expert: Advanced installation methods

Today we will be installing Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS),
on a x86-64 machine.

Home Assistant can be repurposed and installed on various hardware,
such as an Odroid or a generic x86-64 machine. The Home Assistant
Operating System allows you to install Home Assistant on these devices
even if you have little to no Linux experience.

We are going to my HP t610 Flexible Thin Client, which has a 16GB
SATA Flash Drive, and I upgraded it to 16G of Ram.
Note that this will install Home Assistant Operating
System (HAOS) as a computer appliance. That means that it will run a
bare OS with the various components in a customised docker setup. It
will take over the entire computer, and requires secure boot to be
disabled.
On the HP t610 Flexible Thin Client, that involves pressing "Esc" at
boot to get to the bootup menu. If that doesn't work try pressing "F10"
just after turning on the power.
Two methods to install
HAOS has no integrated installer like you would expect with
distro
hopping, but it requires that the image be burned directly onto the
disk of the computer itself.
It has two methods to do this and "Method 2: Installing HAOS directly
from a boot medium", is basically take the disk out of the target system
and attach it to your own computer. The use a burning tool like Balena
Etcher, or dd to write the image to disk. Much as you would
burn a sdcard for a raspberry pi. I don't have a way to do this so let's
go with method 1.
Method
1: Installing HAOS via Ubuntu booting from a USB flash drive
Here you download and burn live operating system as you would if you
were
distro
hopping, the document suggests to use Ubuntu. I tried it but my HP
t610 Flexible Thin Client didn't like it. It also didn't like Fedora
despite having worked earlier, so I just used
Debian
LXQT.

https://www.debian.org/download
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-12.5.0-amd64-lxqt.iso

Now you have Debian running off a usb stick on your target
machine.
Steps
to burn Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS) to disk on target
Anything after the '#' character is a comment and doesn't need to be
typed.
Note The following steps are optional, and you
should only do them if you wish to ssh to the target machine from your
pc.
# Anything after the '#' charachter is a comment and doesn't need to be typed.
apt install openssh-server # Install the ssh s

https://github.com/timeprism/introduction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

KeepassXC Update
Sgoti talks about
the KeePassXC 278 release.

Tags: KeePassXC 2.7.8 release, Password managers
Source: keepassxc: KeePassXC 2.7.8
released



Passkeys are still a fledgling technology, as of this writing, and we
are trying to keep pace with the rapid adoption across various websites,
in addition to specification refinements. The following is a short list
of critical improvements to our passkeys support:



Update an existing passkey or add one to an existing entry
Support more specification standards
Various UI improvements to dialogs and context menus
**Show a warning prior to exporting a passkey**



In addition to bug fixes, we always strive to deliver something
useful in each of our updates. For 2.7.8, we have brought forward
several awesome features including:



A database setting to allow a delay prior to auto-save
Improvements to Bitwarden and 1Password importers
Improvements to monospace font display
Improve display of dialog buttons on Linux
**SSH Agent: don’t auto-load keys that are in the recycle bin**



Supporting source: github: KeePassXC 2.7.8
release.



Changes.



Add hotkey for showing search help.
Add hotkey for group switching (Ctrl+Shift+PgUp/PgDown).
Add per-database auto-save delay setting.
Add configurable password strength check on database password.
Add setting to hide menubar.
Improve Bitwarden 1PUX import and support organization collections.
Show advanced settings checkbox only for settings that have them.
Remove obsolete setting for requiring repeated password entry.
Passkeys: Allow registering Passkeys to existing entries.
Passkeys: Show warning about data being unencrypted before Passkey export.
Passkeys: Support NFC and USB transports.
Passkeys: Pass extension JSON data to browser.
SSH Agent: Do not use entries from recycle bin.
Linux: Change hotkey sequence used for {CLEARFIELD} Auto-Type.
Windows: Improve DACL memory access protection.



Fixes.



Fix crash when deleting history items.
Fix crash on screen lock or computer sleep.
Fix search field not being focused after unlock.
Fix loss of window focus when Auto-Type needs to unlock a database.
Fix inconsistent TOTP visibility on unlock.
Fix CSV import skipping over single-name groups.
Fix key file folder being remembered even if disabled in settings.
Fix issues with entry editing and database locking.
Fix key file text when provided on command line.
Fix issues with hardware key auto detection.
Do not override monospace font size.
Perform group sort only when group view is in focus.
Do not show decimals for attachment sizes in Bytes.
Prevent merging of global custom data when merging databases.
Fix minor translation issues.
Passkeys: Fix StrongBox incompatibility.
Passkeys: Set RP ID to effective domain if unset instead of returning an error.
Passkeys: Various UI fixes and improvements.
AppImage: Fix URL opening.
Flatpak: Fix application autostart.
Linux/macOS: Fix button sizes on modal alert popups.
Linux: Fix clipboard clear on Wayland.
Windows: Preserve file-hidden attribute.



Supporting source:

Ken Talks to Marc Balmer and Kristoff Bonne about spectrum24, The
Conference for Creative Use of the Radio Spectrum in Open Systems.
Following the success of the Software-Defined Radio and Amateur Radio
devroom at FOSDEM, spectrum24 plans to bring users of the radio spectrum
together.
For over a century, technology has made it possible to transfer more
data, faster, further. Today, wireless technology is everywhere and
commonplace. However, it remains a playground and a ground for
innovation for many communities.
This conference is an opportunity to publicize your projects and
allow the different communities that use the spectrum to meet over a
weekend.
If you have an interesting talk you would like to give please see https://spectrum-conference.org/24/cfp for more
information
spectrum24 will take place September 14./15. at SmartCity Campus (1
rue de Clairefontaine, 78120 Rambouillet.) at an old radio factory in
Rambouillet near Paris, a short 15 minute walk from the train
station.

Conference Website: https://spectrum-conference.org/
Conference Mastodon: https://mastodon.radio/@spectrumconf
Conference Location: https://smartcitycampus.fr/
FOSDEM Dev Track: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1662-trx-control-modern-software-to-control-amateur-radio-transceivers-and-other-hamradio-hardware/
Marc Balmer: https://trx-control.msys.ch/, https://msys.ch/, https://marcbalmer.ch, https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbalmer/
Kristoff Bonne: https://mastodon.radio/@on1arf

All right. Well, good evening, hackers. My name is Clinton. And this
is a very off the cuff episode for me just to announce that I've got a
new microphone. So I just wanted to run through a couple of details of
that. Make a show, say a little about the microphone while I got it.
What I hope to do with it. So this is a roadie wireless go to setup. It
comes with three little boxes. Roughly, roughly, you can fit each one of
the little boxes inside a matchbox. So there are three of these that
come with the set that I bought. Two of them are microphones that you
clip onto your lapel. The third is a transceiver. So at the moment, I've
got the transceiver on and I've got one of the microphones on. I bought
this because I'm going to be going to a conference soon. And one of the
things that I do try to do at conferences is to interviews with people.
And this is kind of nice in that I can switch these two microphones on.
Give one to myself. Give one to the person I'm interviewing. And I don't
have to use a single microphone and shove it underneath their faces. And
I don't have to swap the microphone between the two of us. The other
feature, like the particular reason I've got this model is that each of
the two microphone units actually has built in RAM. So it will actually
record, like if you've got it set up in the mode, which I do, you can
get each microphone to do a backup recording of your presentation. The
regular mode for this set of microphones is to actually treat the
transceiver as a source and plug it into computer or plug it into your
camera as a external microphone. But it has this lovely mode, which I'm
recording this particular episode to. We can just turn it on. It's not
the transceiver is not plugged into a computer. It's not plugged into
anything. And it'll record something like 40 hours of voice. And later
on, I can hook it up to my computer as a standard mass storage device
and just download the waveform I believe. So it does have some Windows
firmware or Mac firmware. I didn't have too much fun getting that to
work under Linux. I tried under a couple of different VM products and
wasn't having any luck. So try it under wine. I tried under open box.
Eventually I did end up installing like a full Windows 10 install onto a
qemu image. And that had enough stuff working such that I could install
the Rode firmware on it. That let me do an upgrade of the firmware on
the two microphones and the transceiver because the first thing you do
when you buy something these days is out of the box you have to upgrade
the firmware because why would they do that at the factory before they
send it out when they can just make the users do that. And there is a
phone app but it does not let you update the firmware on these
particular hardware models. If I remember the error message correctly it
does look like the Android app lets you update the firmware on other
Rode microphone devices but not this particular model. So I had to go
down the track of setting up a qemu. I did find a good blog post on how
to set up a Windows box on qemu. It had a few things that seem outdated
so maybe it's a job for future me to write an updated blog post on how
to do this. If for nothing else instructions on how to do this in future
when I need to rerun the firmware update. The other thing that I really
needed to use the software for though is to switch on the recording
option. So out of the box these things do not record to the memory
that's built into the microphones. So I had to get, I had to update the
firmware and then I had to run the software on both of the microphones
to switch on the recording option. But now that that switched on I can
just hook it up as a USB master device as I've mentioned before and
presumably I can just copy the files and delete the files and I won't
actually have to run that software. So yeah there's a number of options
going forward so I can write that blog post with the updated details.
There were a number of hoops that I fo

We finish our South Carolina visit touring a plantation, and then go
to see a magnificent live oak tree. After that, it is time for us to
head back home.
Links

https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAvW57
https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAvWaN
https://www.palain.com/travel/rv-trip-2022-2023-southeast-us/south-carolina-to-home/