“It’s been a busy month. I’ve been so busy I forgot to check in on Mastodon on August 1st again! DOH! I did lots of tech stuff, especially with OpenWRT and Armbian.

Summer School

I did 3 weeks of summer school this year. I hadn’t taught summer school in a few years but I like the new style. I only had to teach from 8-12:30 and then had the rest of my day free. It would’ve been better without this COVID-19 crap because that shortened my summer by 2 weeks though. I will try to avoid doing summer school next year though; the extra money is great but total freedom is even better!

Upgraded Old Tablets from Android 4.2 to 4.4

I have these very old (2015) Acer Iconia A1-811 tablets I inherited from my wife’s work. I was going to try to put some custom ROM on them, but that seemed like a lot of effort for very little payout, so I settled on just upgrading the firmware. I used the first part of this guide.

[GUIDE] Firmwares, ROMs, CWM, Root - Acer Iconia (MTK) Tablets

Is there much difference between Android 4.2 and 4.4? Nope. It’s sad how fast things go out of date. I only use these on long bus and train rides for the kids. If these stop being able to use NETFLIX, I’m not sure what the heck I’ll use them for.

Bought Another SBC

I bought another single board computer from FriendlyARM.com, NanoPi R2S. I want to use this as a personal router for me at school. Sadly, this model, R2S, doesn’t come with WiFi, whereas the NanoPi R1S does. I guess in all my flipping back and forth on the website I sorta overlooked that point.

This started out as a frustration but I learned a lot of stuff about OpenWRT, USB Wifi Adapters, and even Armbian while troubleshooting’ this.

I bought a D-link Nano DWA-131 Wifi dongle, but it doesn’t work. I troubleshooted it and it doesn’t work. I spent lots of time messing around with that. I finally gave up and emailed tech support. The suggested 2 USB Wifi dongles that will work from Taobao. I then found Aliexpress.com and ordered them. Still waiting for them.

In all the troubleshooting I did, I also found that this stupid yellow case runs very, very hot. Today, I drilled some holes in the top of the case to give it more ventilation. It seems to be better for now.

LineageOS

All good! I found Titanium backup and made a backup of my stuff. I even made an automatic job to do it for me every week.

I was researching how to encrypt my phone but it seems like a big risk and not worth the trouble. This is the only thing I don’t like about LineageOS. I want to have FDE in case I lose my phone. I don’t care about the phone, but I care about my data. This will be a major benefit of moving to Pinephone.

Pinephone

It’s getting so close to being able to use a Linux phone as a daily driver. Lots of good things are happening with ubports, mobian, and postmarketOS. I hope in about a year or 2, I can buy a Pinephone. https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/15/july-updatepmos-ce-pre-orders-and-new-pinephone-version/

I’m deternmined to switch to a linux phone once core functionality is reached: phone calls, texts, mobile data, front and rear cameras, and GPS.

OpenWRT on Xiaomi

I started using my NanoPi R1 as my main router now. That means I could tinker with my old Xiaoi Mi Wifi R3 router. I got X-WRT installed on it (a fork of OpenWRT). Now I have more options of where to use it. I may use it again on my home network because its wifi speed using iperf3 is 28 MB/s whereas my NanoPi R1 is only 5 MB/s.

Of course, this may all change once I get those USB Wifi dongles. It’s still a work in progress.

Yunohost 4.0 Buster

Finally out of alpha! Now I need to try installing this tonight. Let you know how it goes next month.

Summer vacation!

I’m looking forward to summer vacation. It just started, and we’re taking a trip to Tainan soon! I will be kicking back trying to watch more movies, and read more books.

#MonthlyUpdate”,