I’m using a ConBee II Zigbee stick by Dresden Elektronik but switched from their own Phoscon/deCONZ software to the Home Assistant ZHA integration.

While I didn’t have any issues with my few Zigbee devices, today, I’ve noticed that there’s a newer firmware available for my ConBee stick. Usually, the firmware update is handled by the deCONZ software – which I’m not using anymore. Also, there’s a dedicated firmware update tool for Windows – which I’m also not using anymore.

However, their update instructions mention the use of Docker on Home Assistant. Which sounds exactly like the thing I need.

The instructions are compiled in the Home Assistant Forums and boil down to:

https://blog.mbirth.uk/2024/03/23/conbee-ii-firmware-update-via-home-assistant-zha.html

#firmware #hassio #homeAssistant #zigbee

Back when I bought my Nintendo Switch, I made sure to buy an unpatched one – turning all the different boxes in the store upside down to read the serial number on the bottom and compare it with the list I had on my phone.

However, apart from some experiments with SX OS and later with memloader, hactoolnet and NHSE, I never made real use of that as I was pretty happy with everything as-is and even subscribed to the Nintendo Online service. Even though I never play online and never really played all the classic console games made available via the subscription.

When it was time to renew the subscription, I’ve realised that I only use this as a glorified savegame backup and that I can have that much easier and for free by hacking my Switch.

So I followed the “Rentry-Guide” (with a few small adjustments here and there) to install the Atmosphere OS and it all went smoothly.

However, I wanted to have my legitimately bought (via the Nintendo eShop) games available in the CFW. While they didn’t show up as properly installed at first (showing the “Cloud” icon), I found out that you need to copy them from the /Nintendo folder on the SD card to /EmuMMC/RAW1/Nintendo – so the emuNAND can find them.

This made them at least show up as “properly installed”, i.e. as if they should work fine. However, when trying to launch a (legitimately bought!) game, an Error 2155-8007 appeared.

All documentation I could find about this pointed to various causes like wrong/missing SigPatches, a bad clone of the sysNAND to emuNAND, bad game data, bad user profile, etc. But I’ve verified everything and was sure it was none of that. And I also didn’t want to risk getting my Switch banned by letting it connect to Ninty’s servers. So I made a post in the GBAtemp forums to ask for further ideas.

After a bit of fruitless discussion, I came to the conclusion that it must be something with the so-called “ticket”. The ticket is basically the metadata for a file, linking its content to your Switch’s user and your online profile. After cloning, I’ve unlinked the user profile in emuNAND from the Nintendo Online service using linkalho. This seems to have made the Switch want to re-authorise the existing tickets. (Even though I’m pretty sure I’ve tried cloning the sysNAND without unlinking the account afterwards, too, and it didn’t work either.)

It took me some experimenting before I found the solution: Using nxdumptool I was able to dump the tickets of all the games’ files. Each base file, update and all the DLCs have their own tickets. After dumping them, I used DBI to install those dumped tickets again. This made sure they are tailored to my current setup. And lo and behold – those games finally launched.

https://blog.mbirth.uk/2024/03/20/making-your-nintendo-switch-seaworthy.html

#firmware #nintendo #switch

In April 2023, Reddit announced that it will start asking for money to use their API for commercial purposes. This also included 3rd party apps, e.g. the famous iOS Reddit client “Apollo”.

While there was hope it won’t get too pricy at first and the other changes looked manageable, that hope got crushed when Reddit’s new pricing scheme got published. Due to this, many developers of 3rd party Reddit clients decided to close down their apps.

On Reddit itself, this spawned the so-called APIcalypse and the search for alternatives.

Many people found a new home in either Lemmy or kbin or went on to completely different realms. And of those, many decided to completely wipe their account on Reddit as a sign of protest. And as deleting content on Reddit only sets a flag in their database while the actual text is kept, there was a desire to overwrite all old comments before deleting them.

One tool to achieve this is the PowerDeleteSuite – a browser extension that collects all available posts and comments by remote-controlling your browser session and going through your Reddit profile.

There’s only one issue: Reddit only associates the latest 1,000 comments and posts with your profile. While you might be able to find a few older items by using the different available filters in the Reddit profile, with 10 years of Reddit history as in my case, you will barely scratch the surface.

I was able to find various more comments from me via a Google search for site:reddit.com "mbirth avatar" that didn’t show up on my Reddit profile but were still in their system. (The added “avatar” string makes sure to only return actual comments from me and not just mentions of my username.) A data export finally revealed that of my 9,000 comments made over those 10 years, over 7,000 were still there and publicly accessible. So I started looking for a way to wipe them in an automated fashion.

Other users of the PowerDeleteSuite noticed the same problem and created this issue on GitHub. User @confluence turned the posted snippet into a working script and published it as a GIST – which I used as a starting point. After adding the deletion of comments to it, I couldn’t help myself and fleshed it out with 2FA support, optional skipping of entries (it you want to resume work without it having to check all previous entries) and a progress bar including calculation of time remaining (thanks to the wonderful Rich library).

I’ve published my version of the script and instructions here: https://github.com/mbirth/reddit-cleaner.

https://blog.mbirth.uk/2024/03/19/leaving-reddit-and-taking-all-my-contributions-with-me.html

#internet #online