Software on The Solutions Are Known

BreadSched

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:32:15 -0400

GNUcash is Great for Many Things

For a long while I have used GnuCash and some spreadsheets to manage my finances. GnuCash has excellent features for tracking income, expeses, assets, liabilities as well as business accounting features (invoices, receivables, and so on) that would be useful for an LLC but that I do not need for my household. It is not especially helpful, though, for projecting cash flow or making long-term projections. So I kept spreadsheets for that, plus a dashboard-style spreadsheet to track my overall current financial picture.

Decrypting Disks without Passwords on Reboot

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:05:01 -0400

Like many tech hobbyists, I run a fair number of servers and VMs at home, and a lot of them hold data I would rather keep encrypted. Drives and SSDs eventually fail (you should have backups, but that is an entry for another day) and sometimes get stolen. If the data is encrypted, both are far less stressful events.

The catch is that encrypted data has to be decrypted before it is useful. The usual model, typical of Linux’s LUKS encryption, is that someone types a passphrase at boot after every power failure or maintenance window. LUKS can instead tie the key to the machine’s TPM, much as Windows BitLocker does, but that is less effective for VMs and does little if the TPM is stolen along with the drive. A passphrase at boot has real security advantages. Its serious disadvantage is that a person has to be present to type it, every time.

Forwarding to Gmail via API

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:05:01 -0400

Google is deprecating, and will soon turn off, Gmail’s ability to fetch mail from other servers via POP. (Despite what you may have thought, Gmail has apparently never supported fetching over IMAP.) In an update, covered in the link above, Google has extended this deprecation to it’s send-as feature as well. So while this tool will still work, it won’t be possible to use your Gmail account as your primary interface to reading and responding to email at another domain. Forwarding by SMTP is not a good substitute: forwarded messages commonly fail SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks, because the forwarding server is no longer an authorized sender for the original domain. (The ARC protocol exists to soften this, but it depends on the receiving side trusting you.) So I turned to Gmail’s API, and after a little more research than I wanted, I wrote a modest Python script.

Constructing this Site

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:49:08 -0400

I had been considering a blog for a while, mostly to hold what I have learned about various things. I did not want to relearn those hard-won bits of knowledge the next time I needed them, so I kept a private collection of notes. I also believe sharing is a good thing, and I wanted to make those notes available to anyone who might find them useful.

Choosing Hugo

While working with Gramps, I became aware of one of its developers, David Straub. When he revamped his personal website, I learned of Hugo, which met my list of criteria for a blog system and was similar to what he described.

Tether iPhone to OPNsense

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 14:30:06 -0400

Last updated for OPNsense 26.7.3_11.

If you have an OPNsense firewall and a spare iPhone on a cell plan that allows tethering, you can use the phone as the firewall’s WAN connection to the cell network. This is handy in a long outage, for example a hurricane taking down your cable provider for more than a week. (Just an example.)

There are some hurdles, and it is best to configure all of this before you need it. During an outage it is hard to download the things you need.

Local Fedora Mirror

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:50:01 -0400

If you maintain more than a few Fedora systems, having each machine download the same updates through your internet connection can waste time and bandwidth. A local repository mirror lets you download those packages once to your network and reuse them. It can also serve any locally produced packages to your systems although that is not implemented in the script below.

Planning

This script is a deliberately simple setup, not the Fedora MirrorManager Mirror Management System which may be more appropriate depending on what you are doing. This script can be hosted on a physical or virtual server. Mirroring the actively updated repositories can take upwards of 550 GiB as configured below, so it is probably worth giving it its own drive. Whether that is part of the root filesystem or a dedicated mount, the script and steps below assume that storage is at /opt/mirror.

Using Gramps Web Sync on Fedora

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:20:21 -0400

When using Gramps Web Sync on Fedora’s GNOME desktop to keep Gramps and a Gramps Web tree in sync, it helps to let the GNOME password manager remember the password. That is not entirely straightforward. You need the Python keyring library to save the sync password, but it defaults to the KWallet backend even when GNOME is the default desktop. This is tracked in this bug.

The workaround:

Install python3-keyring and python3-secretstorage.
Create ~/.config/python_keyring/keyringrc.cfg to make the Secret Service backend (which GNOME Keyring implements) the default, as described in the keyring documentation on configuring a backend.

sudo dnf --refresh install python3-secretstorage python3-keyring
mkdir -p ~/.config/python_keyring
cat > ~/.config/python_keyring/keyringrc.cfg <<'CFG'
[backend]
default-keyring=keyring.backends.SecretService.Keyring
CFG

Run the mkdir and cat commands as your own user, not with sudo, since the file belongs in your home directory.