github 14 day traffic stats

Since github has a page which shows 14-day stats, like https://github.com/hn-88/OpenSpace-AppImage/graphs/traffic but which is behind the login of the user, I asked Claude to create a stats page for the traffic to all my public repos. The prompt is here, 

https://github.com/hn-88/hn-88.github.io/blob/master/stats/prompt.md

and the github traffic stats page is here

https://hn-88.github.io/stats/

The "clones" number is so high for the https://github.com/hn-88/OpenSpace-AppImage/ repo because of the multiple daily build workflows.

Enable MFA for Amazon AWS console

PB sent an email asking us to set up MFA for the AWS console logins. I replied that those users don't seem to have the permissions to set up MFA. So, probably set it up using his master login, in IAM, for those users - Google Authenticator. Unfortunately, the name in Google Authenticator gets truncated in portrait mode, so Amazon Web Services is seen, but the account identifying part which comes after is visible only in landscape mode.

adjusting sound volume on Mac

Since I don't have an Apple keyboard, adjusting the volume on the Mac mini was not very straightforward. An LLM's advice seemed to be a bit sarcastic when taken in the context of how easy it should be versus the method suggested - 

Adjusting the volume using the menu bar is a simple and straightforward method. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Click on the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your screen.
2. Select "System Preferences" from the drop-down menu.
3. In the System Preferences window, click on "Sound."
4. Go to the "Output" tab.
5. Drag the volume slider to adjust the volume level.

On my machine, it was "System Settings" and not Preferences. And, there seemed to be a slightly faster way, which is clicking on the "Control Centre" in the menu bar - screenshot below - the "edit controls" button allows us to drag the icon into the menu bar, too.

SSL certificates for an internal web server as backend for app

There was a query about installing SSL certificates for an internal web server, which was to be used as backend for app. Copy-pasting my reply.

Since the app needed trusted certificates, just using a self-signed certificate would be unwieldy, probably needing the installation of our own cert chain on each device or something like that. 

Also, since free SSL certificates from https://letsencrypt.org/ need updating every 60/90 days, buying a certificate may be an option with fewer hassles for this internal server with no external ip address.

https://www.nettigritty.com/sslcertificate.php

has low-cost options. Most probably the lowest cost one will work, can ask nettigritty support if you have doubts.

There are lots of step-by-step tutorials on how to install, like

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/installation-guide/how-to-install-an-ssl-certificate-on-apache/

(Can find more with https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+installed+a+purchased+ssl+certificate+on+my+apache+server+on+centos+stream&ia=web )

A week later, the reply was,

it is just a java application running with java.

NO Apache. nginix is found. so tried installing with let's encrypt website using ngnix

getting thie error... 

 Detail: DNS problem: NXDOMAIN looking up A for theinternaldomain.net - check that a DNS record exists for this domain; DNS problem: SERVFAIL looking up AAAA for theinternaldomain.net - the domain's nameservers may be malfunctioning

Hint: The Certificate Authority failed to verify the temporary nginx configuration changes made by Certbot. Ensure the listed domains point to this nginx server and that it is accessible from the internet.

My reply was,

You will probably need to buy a certificate and install it, as mentioned in the first email in this thread.

Since theinternaldomain.net is not a publicly available DNS record, certbot cannot resolve it.

If the server is a java application running on some port, say 5000, you will need to run ngnix or apache as a reverse proxy, and install the certificate for apache/ngnix.

The reverse-proxy config for apache is mentioned here, 

https://hnsws.blogspot.com/2021/01/adding-ssl-https-to-http-mp3-streams.html

(but of course, don't use certbot, purchase and install a cert instead as mentioned in the first email in this thread.)

interesting - No-AI chatbot

Interesting to see how chatbots can be programmed manually, without any AI - https://p5js.org/tutorials/criticalai4-no-ai-chatbot/

Via https://p5js.org/

Via https://github.com/hedbergj/sims-dev/blob/gh-pages/expanding-universe-2/index.html

using Blender to mask bright scenes

Using the same technique as in this previous post, but running on Blender 5 on Mac Mini, 3840x2160 video for Unseen Earth was being rendered at around 15 fps using the ProRES LT codec. Apparently Blender still doesn't have GPU accelerated output codec support, and this is one of the fastest codecs as suggested by ChatGPT. The ProRES LT can then be re-encoded as HEVC using the py-ffmpeg-warp presets. 

Some more tweaks used were:

• Multiple masks one atop another to darken extremely bright areas,
• Using Shift-D to duplicate and then K to cut the mask
• Using an adjustment layer to increase contrast for the base layer. 

Edit: April 2026 - I now see that Blender 5 has "Curves" as one of the Adjustment layer modifiers - so, we can easily clamp bright regions using a "Curves" filter. And it looks like this has been there in older Blender versions as well.

close all Finder windows on Mac

It looks like Option+Cmd+w is the keyboard shortcut to close all windows of an app. Also, Finder has this method of Option+click on the File menu, which then shows a "Close all" menu item. 

A bit clunky in my opinion. And apparently many people moving from Linux/Windows to Mac have this problem, due to selecting a large number of files and hitting "Get Info..." like I did - MacOS then proceeds to open that many info boxes instead of showing a single window with cumulative info as on Linux/Windows.

tutorials on claude code - ollama - on Google Colab

 https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router - "...route Claude Code requests to different models and customize any request."

running locally - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYDUdnMVDdU

claude code + ollama, another tutorial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x2q6-5XbQ8

ollama on Google Colab - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4R-DyvAux8

Moodle custom reports not being emailed

One of our Moodle instances had this issue being reported, that some newly created custom reports were not being emailed as scheduled. 

The issue was that notifications - including email notifications - were disabled for "Custom report builder schedules" at https://ourserver.org/admin/message.php

After enabling email notifications now for this, "Custom report builder schedules" - the issue was reportedly resolved.

DNS resolving glitch with lovable

One of our colleagues wanted a domain verified by "lovable the AI agent" - https://lovable.dev/

After setting up the verification txt record and the provided A record, he still got an error 1000 when trying to browse the website on the newly added subdomain - DNS points to prohibited IP.

Lovable suggested removing the proxy toggle on cloudflare (but that was already set to DNS-only).

So, I suggested that he maybe needs to click on some "verify domain ownership" button somewhere in "lovable" control panel if any ... 

He replied that he had initially used bigrock setup, now he "removed the domain in project settings of loveable and added again, it is now working."

google workspace storage limits

At some point of time, Google Workspace has added a feature to admin.google.com where we can set individual users' storage limits on or off, or change the value on an organizational unit basis. Our current Google workspace now has this feature. One possible catch is that the on/off setting is inherited from the base organizational unit. And it also seems to allow certain users to use 146% of their quota!

pdfs - make smaller - split or join

There was a requirement to 
1. Make some pdfs smaller than 200 kB to enable uploading on a govt. website
2. Split some pages of the pdf into separate documents.

I used pdfsam - https://pdfsam.org/download-pdfsam-basic/ - to do the separation and merging, 

and the online tool

https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online/compress-pdf.html

to compress the pdf size.

troubleshooting dot net server crash on AWS

First, checked if the AWS dashboard has any troubleshooting info for me. But "This user does not have permissions to view AWS Health events" - so I wouldn't get much help from it. Used my earlier post on investigating another Linux server crash as well as ChatGPT for going step by step.

ChatGPT suggested these,

dmesg -T | grep -i oom

journalctl -k | grep -i oom

which had no results. No out-of-memory events seen with those commands.

du -sh /var/log showed 4 GB of journal

journalctl --disk-usage

also showed nearly 4 GB of current and archived logs.

But the system had enough hard disk space left, 

df -h

showed around 30% remaining for the OS disk. 

Checking authentication log with

tail /var/log/auth.log -n4000 | more

found an entry

2026-01-25T14:38:58.186744+05:30 ip-10-0-0-73 systemd-logind[600]: New seat seat0.

But ChatGPT said that's normal, this is apparently done for each login.

Then, copy-pasting the lines just before the crash from syslog, using T13 since the crash was around 13:30

sudo cat  syslog | grep T13 > /home/theadminaccount/syslogsnippet.txt

ChatGPT immediately found the issue. 

ourtestapi.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 101203

and the reason the service was failing was

The application '/home/thepath/www/ourapi/ourtest.dll' does not exist.

Stopped the service, disabled it, and deleted it from /etc/systemd/system

sudo systemctl stop ourtestapi

sudo systemctl disable ourtestapi

sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/ourtestapi.service

Additionally, as ChatGPT suggested, set up some limits for journalctl's logging by editing

/etc/systemd/journald.conf

and uncommenting these lines and adding values for them - under

[Journal]

SystemMaxUse=900M

SystemKeepFree=1G

RuntimeMaxUse=100M

MaxRetentionSec=30day

and restarted,

sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

Also vacuumed (removed archived logs) with

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=3000M

(0 bytes removed - archives were smaller than that)

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=300M

(500M of archives were removed.)

see who has signed an app on MacOS

Via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UDUtO7LY0k

 Apple Menu > About this Mac > More info button > (Search for System Report on left-hand panel)

In System Report, click the System Report button, then Software > Applications on left-hand panel.

Scroll down to the app in question.

Our self-signed OpenSpace builds show up as "Unknown". Sheepit Mac client also shows "Unknown", so there is a chance that I can edit the manifest of the app to run a script on double-click in order to allow the Mac build to run with a double-click on the app file.

to record a stereo track in Reaper

The default tracks are mono in Reaper. So, to record from a stereo source, as the LLM-powered search says, "create a new track and set it to record from a stereo input by selecting "Input Stereo/Input 1 + Input 2" in the track settings. Make sure to arm the track for recording and then start your audio source to capture the stereo sound."

Azure Storage minimum TLS notification

We got an email "Action required: Update the minimum TLS version of your Azure Storage account to 1.2 or later by 3 February 2026".

Updated the affected storage accounts to TLS 1.2 as required below - they were just backups/files from 2018 - but then, got the message that the old backups can be deleted.

So I have deleted the three storage accounts and their contents now - last modified in 2018 (wordpress files), 2020 and 2021 (server logs). The wordpress files are being served from github pages instead now.

allowing a non-root user to restart a service on Ubuntu Linux server

As described by ChatGPT, the preferred method was to create sudoers rules for the relevant service(s).

sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/ourapi

and inside that file, write

deployuser ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/systemctl restart ourapi.service, \

                         /usr/bin/systemctl start ourapi.service, \

                         /usr/bin/systemctl stop ourapi.service, \

                         /usr/bin/systemctl status ourapi.service

where ourapi.service is the service and deployuser is the non-root user.

Here, we double-checked the location of systemctl using 

which systemctl

After doing this, on logging on as deployuser, we can do things like

sudo systemctl start ourapi.service

where it will prompt for deployuser's password and then carry out the command.

But a caveat - we need to type exactly the same command as mentioned in the custom sudoers file - even equivalent commands like

sudo systemctl start ourapi

will not work unless we add that to the sudoers file also.

Azure supported VM sizes

Some Azure VM sizes become unavailable in some regions - case in point, after upgrading to 16 GB RAM for a day, I could not go back to the B-series 8 GB RAM VM in that Central India location (which had shown quota limited before I stopped it). Went back to a slightly more expensive D2asv4.

Edit - I had noted on 7th Jan that the size was Standard B2as v2 - vCPUs = 2, RAM = 8 GiB - and this was "insufficient quota" in Central India at the moment. It is Rs. 2998 per month. 

We then temporarily changed to D4as_v4 for a few hours, which is 7.5k per month. Stop the VM, change the size and then start the VM. And after the work was done, B2as v2 was not available, so we went to D2asv4 which is Rs. 3,778 per month.

some quirks of my KVM setup and Apple keyboard layout

Currently using this product, 

HDMI KVM Switch 4 Port - 

there were some quirks which I had to work around. 

1. The Dell desktop running Linux Mint needed the USB keyboard to be mapped to it while booting, or else it would boot into Windows instead, even though the default boot sequence was set to Linux. Probably because the "fail-safe" boot option is different, when it beeps to indicate "No keyboard detected."
2. The KVM switch defaults to number 4 on power up, not number 1. So, the Dell desktop needs to be connected to 4 and not 1, for booting up without having to hit the KVM switch.
3. The Mac mini can boot OK without having the KVM mapped to it, but if we leave it on and not logged in, the login screen blanks and we can't get the screen to come back to life with the keyboard or mouse - we need to short-press the power button.
4. The Mac mini default keyboard mapping was showing the Indian rupee symbol ₹ instead of the backtick symbol ` for the key to the left of 1 (perhaps after the upgrade to MacOS Tahoe). Since I need ` for markdown on github etc, changed the keyboard layout to "US" from "ABC India" which was the default. For this, following this,
   chose Apple menu > System Settings, then searched for Keyboard in the sidebar. There, Input sources > Edit button, the small + button at the bottom left to add Input sources. Quite easy to miss.

OpenSpace stopped working with undefined symbol: sqlite3_column_table_name

After some packages were updated / upgraded / autoremoved, openspace, which used to work fine, stopped working (on Linux Mint, using the Ubuntu 24.04 deb) with the error message

./OpenSpace: symbol lookup error: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgdal.so.34: undefined symbol: sqlite3_column_table_name

As suggested by ChatGPT, a reinstall of gdal and sqlite fixed it

sudo apt update

sudo apt install --reinstall libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev libgdal34

https://github.com/hn-88/OpenSpace-AppImage/issues/86 has the full answer given by ChatGPT