Month: March 2019

Home Assistant – Open Source Home Automation

One day I will get to this whole subject of home automation. Or office automation. Or some other premises automation. That day, I’ll probably need to look at Home Assistant:

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.

Open Source, locally hosted, and private – that’s nice. It runs on a variety of hardware, like Raspberry Pie or Amazon Fire HD tablet, which can be mounted on the wall with 3M wall stickers.

There’s also a whole lot of ready components ready to use. And new ones, I hear, are easy to develop in Python.

The Grand Theory of Amazon

As a heavy user of Amazon Web Services, I often find myself in deep discussions about Amazon company, its broad portfolio of brands, the way they make money, and their strategy going forward.

Admittedly, that’s not an easy area to understand, let alone explain or argue about. That’s why I really enjoyed this video. It is oversimplifying a lot of things, but it does a nice job of shedding some light on what is going now, where it is heading, and how it is similar and different to some other companies.

BOFH – The Bastard Operator From Hell

The other day I came across the classic “The Bastard Operator From Hell“. I don’t think that anybody knows how many of the BOFH stories were ever written, but this site has a good collection of them.

For those of you, who haven’t heard about BOFH, Wikipedia provides a good summary:

The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH) is a fictional rogue computer operator who takes out his anger on users and others who pester him with their computer problems, uses his expertise against his enemies and manipulates his employer.
Several other people have written stories about BOFHs, but those by Simon Travaglia are considered canonical. The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to Usenet by Travaglia, with some being reprinted in Datamation. They were published weekly from 1995 to 1999 in Network Week. Since 2000 they have been published regularly in The Register (UK). Several collections of the stories have been published as books.
By extension, the term is also used to refer to any system administrator who displays the qualities of the original.
The early accounts of the BOFH took place in a university; later the scenes were set in an office workplace. In 2000 (BOFH 2k), the BOFH and his pimply-faced youth (PFY) assistant moved to a new company.

If tech humor in the office is your thing, have a look at Dilbert comic strips as well.

Fedora Linux : Change user icon in GDM login

In general, I’m pretty happy with my desktop setup. I use MATE with i3 on my Fedora Linux laptop for quite some time now, and it works well.

However, there was one annoying tidbit that I decided to fix today – my user icon on the login screen. I remember that I used to have it at some point, but it disappeared during some upgrade a few month ago.

The login screen is managed by Gnome Display Manager (GDM). In previous versions, you could easily customize the user icon via either some GUI tools for users and groups, or by simply dropping your icon into ~/.face file, in, preferably, PNG format, and GDM would pick it up just fine. Turns out, not anymore.

It took me a few Google searches to find the solution, so I’m sharing it here (just replace ‘leonid’ everywhere with your own username):

# Copy the user icon file
sudo cp /home/leonid/.face /usr/share/pixaps/faces/leonid.png
# Edit user settings file and add the following line:
# Icon=/usr/share/pixaps/faces/leonid.png
sudo vim /var/lib/AccountsService/users/leonid
# Logging out is not enough, so just ...
reboot

Once your system restarts, you should see the proper user icon on the login screen.