Category Archives: Guides

Tips, tricks, and guides around pitfalls of technology.

Funtoo Plex Media Server Overlay

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Both Gentoo and Funtoo provide Plex Media Server within their portage repositories via the plex-media-server ebuild. However, lately, Funtoo’s plex-media-server ebuild within media-kit has fallen behind Plex releases. The quick solution is to use Ghent’s funtoo-plex overlay. With Funtoo moving to kits, local overlays are quite easy to use.

Assuming an install setup per the Funtoo default kits instructions, start by creating a directory for your overlays. Then, clone Ghent’s funtoo-plex overlay:

mkdir /var/git/overlay
cd /var/git/overlay
git clone https://github.com/Ghent/funtoo-plex.git

At the time of writing, Ghent’s overlay is still configured for a pre-kits setup. Fortunately, migrating to a kits compatible setup is straight forward: open up /var/git/overlay/funtoo-plex/metadata/layout.conf and replace masters = gentoo with masters = core-kit.

The last step is to create /etc/portage/repos.conf/funtoo-plex.conf. Place the following into /etc/portage/repos.conf/funtoo-plex.conf:

[DEFAULT]
main-repo = core-kit

[funtoo-plex]
location = /var/git/overlay/funtoo-plex
auto-sync = no
priority = 10

Now, running emerge -av plex-media-server should grab the newer ebuilds from Ghent’s funtoo-plex overlay. Note that you will need to occasionally pull the latest master branch in the repo using git pull origin master from within /var/git/overlay/funtoo-plex/.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

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GoPro HERO 4/3+ Power Mod

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While the GoPro HERO is nice and small, a consequence of this small size is poor battery life. Battery backpacks can help extend the run-time. However, they can be finicky and do not add that much to the device run-time. Another solution is using a power cable. Preferably, one that plugs into the HERO port so that a case can be used.

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Raspberry Pi Zero W and Funtoo

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After finding the PaPiRus ePaper panel, I picked up a Raspberry Pi Zero W to drive it. To be perfectly honest, the early Raspberry Pis never really excited me. However, the Raspberry Pi Zero’s small footprint caught my attention. Add in WiFi and Bluetooth, as found on the Zero W, and you have a solid IoT starter board.

Thanks to the popularity of the Raspberry Pi, both Funtoo and Gentoo have guides on setting up Funtoo/Gentoo on a Raspberry Pi. Getting a base system up and running is straightforward. Though, if you have to compile anything it will take a while.

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Making Sense of the *title Breadcrumb Template Tags

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Currently, there are several, closely related template tags that each exhibit slightly different behaviors. These are: %title%, %htitle%, %ftitle%, and %fhtitle%. As their names suggest, they will be replaced with the resource’s title. However, how this title is processed differs between the tags.

Note that the “Max Title Length” setting is deprecated. Hence, both %ftitle% and %fhtitle% are deprecated and not recommended for use. They are included in this discussion for the sake of completeness.

Below is a table outlining the behavior of these tags for the same title with the max length set to ~10 characters and with the max length setting disabled.

Template Tag Max Title Length1 Title Result
%title% 10 Hello <em>World</em> Leaders Hello <em…
%htitle% 10 Hello <em>World</em> Leaders Hello <em…
%ftitle% 10 Hello <em>World</em> Leaders Hello World Leaders
%fhtitle% 10 Hello <em>World</em> Leaders Hello <em>World</em> Leaders
%title% Disabled Hello <em>World</em> Leaders Hello World Leaders
%htitle% Disabled Hello <em>World</em> Leaders Hello <em>World</em> Leaders

%title% and %htitle%

Notice that the resulting strings for the standard %title% tag and the %ftitle% tag do not contain HTML tags. Thus, they are safe for use within HTML tag attributes (e.g. the title attribute). To maintain HTML tags present in the resource’s title, use the %htitle% tag.

%ftitle% and %fhtitle%

Note that the Max Title Length setting does not affect the resulting string for the %ftitle% and %fhtitle% template tags. In fact, by design, they are the same as %title% and %htitle% when “Max Title Length” is disabled. However, note that since the Max Title Length setting is deprecated, these template tags are as well.

Lastly, note that when using the Max Title Length setting, HTML tags may be left open or even incomplete. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that CSS is used to trim the breadcrumb title length rather than the deprecated Max Title Length setting. An additional benefit to using CSS is it does not mess with the actual content of the breadcrumb trail, allowing search engines to pick up on the full titles rather than the trimmed ones.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Notes:

  1. Note that use of the Max title Length setting has been deprecated in favor of using CSS to trim Breadcrumb titles lengths. ↩