Bread maker recipe for Heygates Malt Crunch flour mix

We eat a lot of bread in our family, baked with a Panasonic bread maker, which is excellent.

I buy flour in 16kg sacks by mail order from Heygates UK.  Recently I tried some of their Malt Crunch Bread Mix flour, which is really great, and should be very healthy.

You can use the 50% wholemeal bread recipe in the Panasonic bread maker handbook, if you want to mix it 50/50 with white flour.  But I wanted to use 100% malt crunch as it's healthier not to use any white flour if you can avoid it.  I couldn't find a suitable recipe, so it took some trial and error.  

After some false starts, this is the recipe I've ended up with...

• 600 grams of Heygates Malt Crunch bread mix flour
• 2 teaspoons dried yeast (Allinson's Easy Bake)
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 25 grams olive oil
• 375 ml water

For measuring teaspoons, I use the small end of the pink scoop that came with the breadmaker. Quick and easy.   I bake for 3 hours, using Panasonic programme no. 5 (the rapid wholemeal programme).

The whole family loves this bread.  I had thought our younger kids might moan about the bread having bits in it, but they've really found it a great improvement on my previous 50/50 white/wholemeal loaves.

Hope this is useful!

Bad packet length 1144391034. ssh_dispatch_run_fatal: Connection to x.x.x.x port 22: Connection corrupted

In the last few days, I've started getting this message when connecting with SSH from Ubuntu 22.04 to Oracle Linux 8 systems.  

Fix:    ssh -c aes256-gcm@openssh.com user@host

Presumably either Ubuntu or Oracle Linux (and possibly RedHat) has messed up a patch for the default cipher (apparently chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com) for that combination of operating systems.  But selecting aes256-gcm works around the problem.

This probably relates to early fixes for the Terrapin vulnerabilities.

UPDATE... If I merely disable cipher chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com then the two ends negotiate cipher: aes128-ctr with MAC: umac-128-etm@openssh.com , and I get a different error:

Corrupted MAC on input. 
ssh_dispatch_run_fatal: Connection to x.x.x.x port 22: message authentication code incorrect

So for now perhaps the easiest thing is to enable just cipher aes256-gcm@openssh.com in /etc/ssh/ssh_config whilst we wait for more mature fixes for Terrapin.  I'm reluctant to go forcing just one cipher on the server side, in case I lock myself out of a box.

UPDATE: This error was fixed in a late update to Oracle Linux 8. I guessed I just patched my system at a bad time.

HOWTO: Stop "Finish your Chromebook Setup" pop-up from displaying

I recently added a new sign-in account to our Chromebooks for the kids. They had been using "Browse As Guest", but I've disabled now, that so that I can deploy the Chrome browser extension "BlockSite" to block an addictive game page (Nightfall) on the BBC website without blocking the rest of that website.

Normally I'd use a GMail account for signing into a Chromebook. That's  really easy (even setting up a brand-new Chomebook from scratch only takes 1 minute) but this time around, the kids already had an iCloud account, so I used that rather than giving them Gmail access - as I don't think 5-year-olds need email accounts.

It was nice to see that the Chromebook allows non-Google email accounts to be used for signing in.  As ever with Chromebooks, it was very quick to set up.  But there was one annoyance! Each time a new browser tab was opened, a small pop-up appeared:

          Finish your Chromebook Setup: [Try This] [Don't Try This]

Clicking [Try This] just goes to a pointless marketing page containing no functionality whatsoever.  Clicking [Don't Try This] makes the dialog box go away only to reappear next time you open a tab.

The fix as noted at https://support.google.com/chromebook/thread/10029131?hl=en is :-

Go to your Google Account.

Select 'Data & Personalisation' from the left hand side list.

Scroll down to 'General preferences for the web'.

Complete the 'Language', 'Input Tools', 'Accessibility' and 'Search Settings' 

I'm not sure how much you need to put in those fields, but anyway it makes the nag prompt go away.

One remaining annoyance is that user profiles can be deleted accidentally from the Chromebook login page without giving a password!  Only the owner's account is immune from this.

FIXED: Ford Focus engine won't stop when switched off - and loud clicks from one loudspeaker

In case it helps anyone else... Here's how I fixed two weird faults that had appeared at the same time on my wife's 2013 Ford Focus Mk3, which is a 1.0 EcoBoost UK version.

The faults were:-

1. The engine didn't stop when the ignition key was switched off. It kept on running smoothly (not like the rough "dieseling" you sometimes get when you switch off an old car with a messed up carburettor). The rev counter stopped working, and I could hear a component shut off (probably the fuel pump), but the engine kept running, and responding to the throttle.

2. A loud clicking noise was coming from the driver's door loudspeaker (even though the stereo was switched off).

Automatic Patch And Reboot on CentOS Server 6 7 or 8

CentOS seems to lack easy commands for automatically patching a server and then rebooting it if anything needs restarting.

Basically I want to run a script via /etc/cronttab at regular intervals to patch a system and reboot if necessary.  Obviously this might cause an outage (very rarely, some service won't restart), so we do it early in the morning, and we don't patch paired systems at the same time.

My script for Centos 6, 7 or 8 is attached below but it's a bit scrappy!   Does anyone have a better way?

(UPDATED 19.6.20: Added 2>&1 stderr redirection to fix issue seen when running from /etc/cronttab on CentOS 8.)

HOWTO upload a Centos8 image to Digital Ocean

So you'd like to run Centos 8 on Digital Ocean... But the Cloud version of Centos 8 has not been released yet, so therefore Digital Ocean does not offer Centos 8 as an option...

No problem, just create a VM on your own workstation and then upload it as a Custom Image.

This HOWTO assumes you have a desktop running a Linux OS, with a copy of the free VMware Player installed.

Fixed: Saeco Intuita coffee machine - water coming from steam wand only

At the weekend I decided it was time to decalcify my coffee machine - a Saeco Intuita bean to cup machine that's served us well for 5 years.    I hadn't decalcified it for ages, and hadn't used the steam wand for months either.

After the cleaning cycle, I found the machine could not make coffee any more.  The brew unit seemed to be doing the rights things... Coffee beans were ground, and the little pucks of ground coffee were put into the waste hopper.  But water came out of the steam wand, and no coffee from the coffee spout.

The fix was to run some more cleaning cycles, and to use the hot water mode (press the tea cup button) to run lots of hot water through the steam wand.

I think the issue was that the decalcifying cycle must have disturbed some crud in the boiler, which then got stuck in the solenoid valve that controls the steam wand.  With that valve blocked open by the crud, the water was taking the easy route and coming out of the steam wand rather than going through the brew unit.

So.. if you get no coffee - just lots of water from the steam wand - your first step should be to set the machine to send hot water to the steam wand, and/or try one or two decalcifying cycles with or without decalcifying chemicals.

Fix: Windows 10 update stuck at 0% via HTTP Proxy

My new network requires my Windows 10 PC to sit behind an HTTP Proxy.  Normally this is no problem - the proxy settings configured in the browser just work - but sometimes the Windows Update process gets stuck at 0%.  Maybe there's a race condition.

Fix: 
      netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server="1.2.3.4:3128"
from an elevated command prompt, where 1.2.3.4 is your Proxy server IP

FIXED! MacOS 10.14.4 Update Breaks Gmail in Apple Mail

Like many Mac users, after taking an automatic update to 10.14.4 in early April 2019, my dad found that Apple Mail could no longer send or receive mail on a Google Mail account. 

The messsage "Google requires completing authentication in Safari" kept popping up when Mail was opened.  That took you to a Safari GMail login session - but that failed to work, even with the right password, so it went round and round in an endless loop...

I managed to fix it via the following steps:

Fix for SSH login takes 90 seconds!

So...  We type:

ssh user@host.example.com

and it hangs for ages before it lets you log in.

On older distros, you got a delay of around 30 seconds unless you set UseDNS=No in /etc/ssh/sshd_config but that's the default on recent OS installs e.g. Ubuntu Server 18.04.

I had a different problem... The DNS for host.example.com had both A and AAAA records, and somehow IPv6 was taking precedence over IPv4 - despite my machine having no working IPv6 route.  This led to a login delay of around 90 seconds before it finally fell back to IPv4.

Fix: 

ssh -4 user@host.example.com

Duh'oh!

SCP the config from a Cisco ASA

The syntax you're looking for is:

scp user@myfirewall.myfqdn.com:system:running-config myfirewall.txt

Or indeed:

scp user@myfirewall.myfqdn.com:system:startup-config myfirewall.txt

Ubuntu 18.04 - how to lose 127.0.0.53

I dislike this automatic 127.0.0.53 DNS server you see by default in /etc/resolv.conf.  Whilst it works most of the time, it makes it hard to tell which upstream DNS servers are really in use. Fortunately I found a fix...

Linux script to cleanse unwanted MP3 tags

After making a copy of my CD collection converted from FLAC to MP3, I found it failed to play in a 5-year-old car stereo on a USB stick... My Ford Focus SYNC car stereo said "Indexing USB" for about an hour, then eventually said "Bad USB Media".  (Sync is "powered by microsoft" which probably explains its general crapiness).

From web searches, apparently some MP3 taggers include cover art and other crazy tags, which can confuse the Ford car stereos. Maybe my FLAC-to-MP3 script pulled in some such tags (as it seemed to go to internet to pull tag data).

So here's a quick and dirty Ubuntu script to iterate over my entire MP3 collection and rip out any dicey looking tags.

strip_unwanted_id3_tags.sh

for TAG in TCOP APIC PRIV TXXX TCOP MCDI POPM TCON TDAT TENC TLEN TPUB TSSE WXXX
do
   echo Stripping tag $TAG from all MP3 files below current folder...
   find . -name *.mp3 -exec id3v2 -r $TAG  '{}' \; >/dev/null
done

The list of tags to remove came by using 'id3v2' to examine the entire collection, removing the more rarely used tags plus the album art ones.

This seems to make my Ford Focus accept the 128GB FAT32 USB stick. In early testing however it has failed to play tracks in correct order - grrr....

By contrast a VW car stereo of a similar age (their RNS 315 unit) accepted the original unaltered MP3 files on a 128GB FAT32 SD card and just worked!  Much more impressive...

Linux script to convert FLAC to MP3

Found this somewhere on the net but have lost the source - apologies if you are the author!

Nice clean script to convert FLAC to MP3. Nice thing is that it leaves it alone if you've already done it... So you can run it again if you've added a few FLACs.  Also, for those albums that I have as MP3 rather than FLAC anyway (e.g. Amazon autorip CDs) the script copies the MP3 across to the copy directory tree, which is just what I want.

Works very nicely on Ubuntu 17.10. Idea is to convert my CD collection (stored as FLAC) into MP3 format for playing in the car on a USB stick.

IPTABLES refresher

Needed to activate iptables on an Ubuntu server on DigitalOcean.  Found some excellent write-ups on the DO site, to solve an initial problem running 'iptables -L' and to summarise the basic stuff - including the use of "conntrack" to make the rules properly stateful rather than just noddy.

TL;DR: if "iptables -L" mutters something about "no such file or directory", you need to

• sudo apt-get install linux-image-$(uname -r)
• More info in the links below... 
  
  PS: You should run "iptables -L -n -v" not just "iptables -L".  The "-n" prevents rDNS lookups. The "-v" says that the interface names for each rule will be listed, without which you can't meaningfully review the ruleset!
  
  

Win7 clean installs - fixing Windows Update breakage

For the second time in recent months, I did a clean install of Win7 x64
Enterprise and got a solid hang in Windows Update.

FIXED: VMware Workstation Shared Folders don't work

The current release of VMware Tools fails to compile its Shared Folders (HGFS) module on Ubuntu 14.04 guest VMs.

It seems that VMware has failed to keep their code up-to-date with routine updates to the Linux kernel for some months.

Solution:
1. Take a snapshot of your VM guest in case step 2 goes wrong...
2. Patch the VMware Tools source code in your VM guest...

Installing & Recovering Ubuntu Server 14.04 using BTRFS

Our new servers are all running Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS.  This was chosen because it's free, it's fairly mainstream, and it's supported for security updates for 5 years between major releases (after which you can update in-place to a new major release).

An unexpected benefit of this system is that it supports BTRFS.  This was something new to me, but it turns out to offer a simple way to recover a system in the event of a disastrous update, and to recover lost files in the event of the user deleting them by mistake. 

FIX: Ubuntu 14.04 Software Updater hangs with message "Querying Software Sources"

Had this problem today. Fixed after some head scratching ....

UK OS Paper Maps are safe!

Contrary to press reports, there seem to be no plans to stop printing the Ordnance Survey core paper map products.  https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2014/03/maintaining-national-coverage-of-paper-maps-in-great-britain-commitment-from-ordnance-survey/