bundling dependencies in MacOS app

Over several trial-and-error attempts with the help of Claude.ai, these two scripts bundled the dependencies needed to run the OpenSpace app without homebrew - tested by renaming /opt/homebrew to something else. 

https://github.com/hn-88/OpenSpace-AppImage/wiki/OpenSpace-on-Mac

The bundling of dependencies was done using these two scripts, bundle-macos-local.sh and bundle-python.sh.

saga of decommissioned UPS

Dec 18, 2025 - email to the top executive officer of one of our institutions, saying that we could possibly make use of a decommissioned 10 kVA UPS

Feb 20, 2026 - email "received with thanks". It takes 20 65Ah lead acid batteries, trying to charge the batteries with 12V charger ordered on 25th Feb.

June 29, 2026 - requesting electrical people to wire up the batteries which were individually charged

July 23-26, 2026 - internal resistance testing shows 11 of the 20 batteries are bad, which makes the UPS trip when input power fails. So, decide to not use it.

July 31, 2026 - sent the good batteries to another institution. 

Android app policy violation triggered by old testing tracks - Blank release fix

We have multiple tracks in google play console for one of our Android apps. Currently we don't need all of them, we need only the production track. But unfortunately, google does not provide a way to delete unwanted tracks. Also, even releases in paused tracks can trigger "policy violation" of having app releases targeting older target SDK values - we need to update every year to the latest target SDK.

Asking Gemini via aistudio.google.com about this, it suggested a "Blank Release" method - create a new release, but don't upload any aab/apk file. We can do this for each of the testing tracks which we don't need. That would make the older releases "Inactive" and prevent the "policy violation" for old releases.

I've done this yesterday for one of our apps, and it seems to be working. The changes were approved after review in just an hour or less. The policy violation popup did not go away yesterday even after the changes were approved, but today I see that the policy violation popup is replaced with "Policy status - No policy issues found" in the "Monitor and improve" tab.

While we can upload the latest release to all of the tracks, and use the "Add from library" method for each track instead of uploading, the "Blank release" strategy above avoids that busy-work, hopefully permanently.

h5p page in Moodle does not show next activity on completion

There was this issue faced by the admins of one of our Moodle instances - "Quite a few sections use the H5P Interactive Book format and contain a video to be viewed and a few quizzes to be answered. The completion condition that has been set is to view the activities and get a grade in the quiz. Even though the conditions are met, the option to move to the next activity is not available. However, if the learner refreshes the screen, then the next activity is available. But it also clears the submitted responses in the current activity."

Gemini gave a long reply, based on which the final solution, obtained by testing on a development instance, was:

1. Enable "Save Content State" in Site Administration > Plugins > Activity Modules > H5P
2. Add a "Refresh" prompt for students Because Moodle cannot currently auto-refresh the page when an H5P grade is achieved

Instead of just putting in a button or javascript to refresh the page manually, we can achieve a similar result using Moodle's standard activity tools.

1. Turn on Edit mode.
2. Click Add an activity or resource below the H5P activity.
3. Select URL.
4. In the Name field, type: Save changes (or Save changes and continue).
5. In the External URL field, paste the URL of the course page.
6. Under Appearance, set "Display" to Open (or "Automatic").
7. Click Save and return to course.

This will place a link on the course page that looks like a standard Moodle activity. When students click it, it essentially re-opens the course page they are already on, refreshing the backend completion triggers and unlocking the next module.

slightly more user-friendly mass mailing script

Prompted Gemini via aistudio.google.com to make the mass-mailer using Google Apps Scripts a bit more user-friendly - displaying a checklist of actions to be performed for sending the emails, and picking up the rich-text html from a draft email instead of needing to write out the html by hand. Creating a custom menu and displaying a sidebar UI are done by these functions, using this html.

The Draft email with subject MassMailTemplate must not be deleted, it must remain available throughout the run of the script. The body of the email is taken from this Draft.

Inline images inside the draft will be sent as attachments, and it is better to avoid attachments to prevent our mails from being marked as spam. Formatted text is fine.

The Checklist in the Mass Mailer menu item is just for display, unchecking all the items can be done manually before the next send.

disk space alert and cleanup of MySQL databases with Moodle logs

We got an alert from our script that one of our servers had 95% utilization of the root disk. Asked Gemini via aistudio.google.com and carried out the following.

Find the Top 20 largest directories on the root partition:

sudo du -ahx / | sort -rh | head -20

Note: The `-x` flag ensures it only searches the root partition and doesn't scan external mounts or network drives.

Found that 29 GB was being used by MySQL databases.

Find individual files larger than 100MB:

sudo find / -xdev -type f -size +100M -exec ls -lh {} \;

Found that there were some .ibd files, with the names of Moodle table  like logstore_standard_log.ibd which were very large. Gemini suggested retaining only 180 or 365 days of logs instead of "Never delete logs" in Site administration > Plugins > Logging > Standard log.

Then, to get back space ...

First, logged on as the administrator of a particular database which we do not need, and dropped that database.

mysql -u thatusername -p

drop database unuseddbname

(sudo mysql does not work on this server, a root password is set, but I did not need the root password.)

That gave us 3-5 GB. Then, there were two options for Moodle logstore_standard_log - either just truncate the table - very quick, get back disk space instantly - or copy over the last 180 days' logs to a new table and then delete the old table.

(Other methods suggested by Gemini were very slow, mentioning only the good options below. Just deleting entries from a table would require an OPTIMIZE TABLE step afterwards, which would need enough disk space to create a full copy of the table.)

CREATE TABLE prefix_logstore_standard_log_new LIKE prefix_logstore_standard_log;

# find starting id to reduce copy time, since id is an indexed field

SELECT id FROM prefix_logstore_standard_log 

WHERE timecreated >= UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 180 DAY)) 

LIMIT 1;

INSERT INTO prefix_logstore_standard_log_new 

SELECT * FROM prefix_logstore_standard_log 

WHERE id >= YOUR_NUMBER_FROM_ABOVE_STEP;

The copying of log entries into the new table took 51 seconds using this method for our smallest db.

The quick and dirty way, of deleting all the logstore standard log entries (this is only the "what has the user clicked" data - grades etc are not deleted) -

TRUNCATE TABLE prefix_logstore_standard_log; 

This completes in less than a second, and makes disk space available immediately.

Azure portal - Review Azure Copilot agent access settings before 1 August

There was an email from Microsoft, letting us know that if we don't take action, we will be opted in for enabling Azure Copilot agents. In general, my instinct is to disable every new "feature' which Microsoft introduces, because sooner or later, that will be involved in some security incident. After consulting the other admins, I disabled "Azure Copilot" on both Azure tenants I have admin access to, with the result that these agents

Observability Agent

Deployment Agent

Troubleshooting Agent

Optimization Agent

Resiliency Agent

Migration Agent

will not be available.

When we navigate to Azure Copilot Admin Center (which we can access via the search at the top of portal.azure.com after logging in) to disable Azure Copilot, there is a link to toggle the control for <User> can manage access to all Azure subscriptions and management groups in this tenant. Since they recommend turning this off, I turned it on, disabled Copilot and turned it back on. The link to this control is https://portal.azure.com/#view/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/TenantProperties.ReactView

The documentation referencing this is at

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/copilot/manage-access

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/elevate-access-global-admin

transition to Moodle Marketplace - mod_book unavailable

We got an email from Moodle about moving the Plugins directory to Moodle Marketplace - 

"The transition to Moodle Marketplace may require you to make some adjustments to your Moodle site set-up. See what’s changed at Plugins Directory has moved to Moodle Marketplace."

Here is the list of plugins (at the bottom of the page in this link) which will not be supported after 31 August 2026,

https://moodle.atlassian.net/wiki/external/ZTZjOTcwNmFmZmE3NDJjNmE3NzM4NWY1ZjU0YmJiNGY

In case any of the plugins we regularly use are listed there, they may not work (or may not be updated) after 31 Aug.

So, VLS got back saying that he 

reviewed the complete list with the list of installed plugins. I have identified 2 plugins, viz., mod_book, atto_fontfamily. 

ChatGPT suggested running SQL to check which courses use mod_book, which I ran - 

SELECT DISTINCT  c.id, c.shortname, c.fullname,
    COUNT(cm.id) AS number_of_books
    FROM prefix_course_modules cm
    JOIN prefix_modules m ON cm.module = m.id
    JOIN prefix_course c ON cm.course = c.id
    WHERE m.name = 'book'
    GROUP BY c.id, c.shortname, c.fullname
    ORDER BY c.fullname; 

On one of our instances, there were 5 courses with 6 "books" while two others had "books" only in "test" or "dump" courses.

Creating service account for accessing Google Drive API

There was a request from the developers to create a shared drive for them in our Google Workspace, and to create a service account to access it programmatically.

Accordingly, created a new shared drive (and have added email1 and email2 as managers)

I have created the service account under an existing google cloud project under my (admin) google account (initially created for rclone), and have added Google Drive Api to the project.

The service account is called 

servaccname@projectname.iam.gserviceaccount.com

I have added this account also as a Content Manager on the Shared drive and shared the json key with the dev team.

Shared Drive storage quota - According to google help, a single shared drive can theoretically hold up to 5 TB per file, but it is strictly capped at 500,000 total items (files, folders, and shortcuts). 

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/7338880?hl=en

I've currently not put any other cap on the storage quota for this shared drive.