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Aaron Fisher - Profile picture

Aaron Fisher

Developer from the UK, currently making cool stuff at The Outlook Creative Group.
Podcasting weekly at munchtech.tv.

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The ultimate 2007 everyday carry


New acquisition: 2006 Black MacBook

Always wanted a black MacBook (“BlackBook”) back in 2006, now I’ve finally managed to find one in great (working) condition 14 years later! Super hard to find one of these that doesn’t look like it’s been dragged behind a car and gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson at a half reasonable price. This one seems to be all working (aside from a missing caps lock key which I ended up getting from a donor machine) and a completely dead (but original) battery. Now complete with Mac OSX Leopard (Dear Apple, please bring back the old intros ????).


Hello 2005


Using Touch ID with sudo in Terminal

I’ve always found it slightly odd that when using any sudo command in Terminal on the Mac you would have to enter your password if your Mac has Touch ID. Well, after some Googling it looks like it’s super simple to allow your Mac to authenticate sudo commands with Touch ID (and I assume the Apple Watch if my experience testing is anything to go by).

Run:

sudo nano /private/etc/pam.d/sudo

At the top of this file add:

auth sufficient pam_tid.so

Save and exit nano (ctrl + o, ctrl + x). That should be it! Now when you next need to use sudo, it should prompt you for Touch ID instead of your password!

Not sure if this has any downsides or long term affects yet, we’ll find out!


Little and large


My new favourite Safari extension

We all know that comment sections on some sites *cough* YouTube *cough* can end up being a toxic wasteland, well this aptly named plugin does a good job of, well, shutting them up!

https://rickyromero.com/shutup/


Watch: The Social Dilemma

Wow, what an eye opening piece of television! I’ve just finished “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix and it really does open your eyes wide to what companies are doing with your data, and how we’re being influenced to think in certain/specific ways by hundreds of tiny little actions every day from these social networks.

We are all aware of the “If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product” saying and we all think we have an idea of what these companies do with our data, but boy oh boy does this documentary really up the “scare” factor on that!


Not Now – blink -182

I’ve recently started building up my blink-182 collection and managed to snag both part 1 and 2 of the “Not Now” single on vinyl, super stoked with them and can’t wait to get them framed!


Mounting Synology folders on a Raspberry Pi (for Plex)

I’ve recently moved my Plex server to run on a Raspberry Pi but I wanted to find a way where I could keep all of my data on the Synology. This is the way I mounted shared folders from my Synology to my Pi so I could use them in Plex.

Make sure NFS is enabled on your Synology

Control Panel > File Services > Enable NFS

Allow access to a shared folder on your Synology

Control Panel > Shared Folder > Edit

Create a new NFS rule

Once the edit panel is open, click “NFS Permissions” and then “Create”.

Hostname or IP: This should be the IP address of your Raspberry Pi (ideally a static address)
Privilege: What abilities do you want the Pi to have? I usually select “Read only”
Squash: Map all to admin

Tick “Allow users to access mounted subfolders”

Click “Ok”.

Make note of the mount path at the bottom

That should be it from the Syndology side, onto the Raspberry Pi side.

Set up the mounts on the Pi

First thing I do is create a new directory in the /media folder on the Pi, in this case I called it NAS (/media/NAS)

sudo mkdir -p /media/NAS

Next up we need to mount the network folder to this folder we’ve just created.

sudo mount -t nfs 10.0.synolgy.address:/volume1/video /media/NAS

Replace 10.0.synology.address with your Synology’s IP adress. Also replace /volume1/video with the mount path you made a note of earlier (found under each NFS rule).

Almost there! Sudo mount is not a permanent command, so we need to make sure it still works next time you reboot your Pi. To do this:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Then on a new line in there, paste the following (making sure to replace the same details as before):

10.0.synolgy.address:/volume1/video /media/NAS nfs defaults 0 0

Save and exit fstab and you should be ready to go!

In theory, you should be able to run “ls /media/NAS” and you should see the files/folders from your Syndology! This should also now mean you can add these folders to Plex on your Pi as libraries, simple!

Known issues

Not being mounted at boot

Sometimes I’ve noticed the mounts don’t always mount when the Pi boots. I’ve yet to find a permanent solution for this, for the meantime I just run:

sudo mount -a

Update 20/11/2021 – Some searching has suggested that adding “_netdev” to our fstab options may help, this should stop fstab trying to mount the drives until the network connection is set up.

In theory, the fstab command would become:

10.0.synolgy.address:/volume1/video /media/NAS nfs defaults,_netdev 0 0

A full list of fstab options can be found here.

Mounting but with no permissions

This is one I experienced recently, I could mount the folder from the Synology on the Pi but I was not able to do anything with it (not even list files in the directory using “ls”). I ended up noticing this was down to permissions on the Synology with the admin account.

Within the shared folder settings in the Synology control panel, make sure “admin” has access to read/write the folder you’re trying to share.


New plates!

…and its first wash in a loooooooooong time