PAM (Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules) has become very verbose in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, causing excessive logging of various events. This has the annoying side effect of making the logs too big, and hard to find information in. It also causes log summarizing programs, such as Logwatch, to generate larger reports.

The goal of this page is to detail how to suppress excessive logging by PAM.

Like many people, I need to upgrade from the used laptop that I am using, to a newer (still used) laptop. This is usually every 3 years or so.

Because I don't want to install the operating system that I use (Xubuntu Linux) from scratch when doing so, I used to remove the disk in the old computer, and install it in the new one, and things would work right away, with all my applications still there, and my desktop the way it is when I shutdown the older computer.

Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform, written in Python, which I have been running it for several years for various tasks.

I am running it using a less common method (called Home Assistant Core), which will soon not be recommended nor supported for end users. However, I have consciously decided to run it that way, rather than use a docker container, Home Assistant OS, or the other recommended versions.

These reasons for this decision include:

There has been a lot of debate on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic (2019 to ~ 2022).

Whole House Bypass/Flow-Through Humidifiers

Whole house bypass/flow through humidifiers are convenient, as opposed to Drum type humidifiers. That is because they do not require regular rinsing of minerals deposited from the water supply that accumulates in a tray for drum type humidifiers.

In recent long term support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu, Canonical has been adding more and more packages that are installed using snapd.

Snapd is a package manager that relies on static linking of dependencies, contrary to over two decades of Linux managing dependencies via dynamic linking, with Debian being the pioneer of this approach.

A few months ago, Ubuntu started pushing ads for their Ubuntu Pro service to the command line interface apt command. When you run the apt command from the terminal, you see this message:

Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro

Then about a week ago, more messages were pushed about the ESM service saying that more packages that can be upgraded if you subscribe to that service.

The AirThings Wave Plus is a multi-sensor that can show CO2, Volatile Organic Compounds, Radon, Temperature, Humidity, and Pressure. The sensor is meant to be used through a phone app.

However, since it uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a phone app this is not the only way to use this sensor.

The following is a list of talks and presentation that I have done on various topics.

They are sorted by the most recent first.