ArgonOne NVMe Expansion

This weekend I upgraded the Raspberry Pi that hosts my Mastodon instance and Home Assistant (among other services) with an NVMe drive.  Previously it was using an old mechanical USB hard drive, so the performance increase with the NVMe is huge!  

It runs a bit hotter than with the microSD card + external HDD, but it’s nice to have everything in one case without worrying about SD card wear anymore.

I also finally got around to upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04, just in time for the next LTS release later this year.

Palm VIIx

Reading Mastodon toots on my Palm VIIx in Eudora Mail via a Mastodon-to-POP3 gateway: https://github.com/nkizz/mop3

This was surprisingly tricky to set up on a modern computer:

• Windows needs to be 32-bit because the Eudora conduit is packaged inside a 16-bit installer. Windows 10 needs some extra support files to run 16-bit apps, so I installed Windows 7 in a VM.

• Internet Explorer doesn’t work anymore, so had to copy the Firefox installer into my VM’s hard drive in order to download Palm Desktop, drivers, updates, etc.

• Outlook needs to be new enough to run CalDAV Synchronizer: https://caldavsynchronizer.org to import my NextCloud contacts / calendar

• Outlook also needs to be old enough to sync with HotSync and the Eudora conduit. Office 2007 is the minimum version that meets both requirements.

• HotSync and Outlook both need to be running in Windows XP compatibility mode in order for them to talk to each other and transfer data

• HotSync.exe needs to run as administrator, as it tries to write all the backups/sync data into Program Files instead of the user directory.

• Outlook.exe also has to run as administrator, otherwise HotSync wont communicate with it while running as administrator

• My USB-serial adapter needs drivers on older versions of Windows. They were nice enough to include them on a CD, but none of my computers have an optical drive anymore. Downloaded them from the manufacturer’s website with Firefox.

• CalDAV Synchronizer requires a recent version of .NET to run, so I had to get Windows Update working with Legacy Update: https://legacyupdate.net/

The HotSync conduit update for Outlook 2007 is very difficult to find, luckily there’s an archived copy here: https://www.palmdr.com/important-links. There are unofficial patches for 2010 and 2013 here: http://pizzaboy192.com/download/ but I’m using 2007 with the official update from Palm.

📊

Finally got around to setting up a #Grafana dashboard for my #Mastodon instance, and scheduled a cron job to periodically clean up the old cache files.

Deleted around 10 GB of old cache files that had accumulated over the past 6 months!

If you’re on Mastodon you can find me at https://mastodon.c99.org/@sam