Blog « Seshan's Personal Website

Seshan's Blog

Back to Home

Sunsetting the Blog - June 8, 2021 Full Post

As of June 8, 2021, the Seshan.XYZ blog is no longer supported and no new content will be added. Twitter is now the place to see cool stuff! The blog will remain online for the foreseeable future.
Read Full Post
A post from Windows Live Writer 2009 on Windows XP - August 21, 2020 Full Post

If you can see this post, this was a success! Windows Live Writer 2009 posting directly to the latest version of WordPress.
Read Full Post
Running Classic (Mac OS 9) Finder “Full Screen” on Mac OS X! - August 15, 2020 Full Post

From Mac OS 10.0 to 10.4, Apple shipped “Classic”, a way to run classic Mac OS apps on OS X, by booting a Mac OS 9 environment. This works pretty well (compared to the “Blue Box” used during the development versions of OS X, which was much more virtual machine like, using a disk image […]
Read Full Post
Getting WPA2 Personal/Enterprise WiFi support in OS X Tiger (10.4) - August 13, 2020 Full Post

If you’re anything like me, you enjoy using PowerPC Macs! One interesting problem I ran into was that Tiger seemingly didn’t support WPA2 encryption for WiFi (only presenting an option for WPA personal). This was weird, both because it worked fine in Leopard, and because the latest 10.4.11 combo update should support WPA2. Making matters […]
Read Full Post
Adding a little ARM to my G5! (Pi Zero USB Gadget on a PowerMac G5) - June 10, 2020 Full Post

As some of you know, the server running this website is a PowerMac G5. It’s a great little machine and I love it, but, it’s also a PowerPC machine. As much as that’s really cool, it also means that a lot of newer software doesn’t support it… As it turns out, there is still plenty […]
Read Full Post
Upgrading the XYZ Server! (PowerMac G5, OWC SSD, and more!) - April 19, 2020 Full Post

Hey! As a many of you know the Seshan.XYZ Server is a PowerMac G5 running Ubuntu Server 16.04 (which happens to be the last version of Ubuntu that Canonical provides PowerPC support for). When I bought this G5 originally it didn’t have a HDD, and so I just picked out a random SATA HDD that […]
Read Full Post
Make the YouTube TV WebApp (leanback) Work Again! - January 14, 2020 Full Post

For those running HTPC, a lot of you probably know about the youtube.com/tv Web UI (also known as Leanback). If you don’t know, Leanback is a fully featured YouTube experience designed for… well TVs and Remotes. It also bundles other nice TV features like the ability to “cast” to the TV. And all it needs […]
Read Full Post
“No packages were eligible for install” – OS X El Capitan Fix - November 26, 2019 Full Post

If you’ve tried to install Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11), and potentially other versions of OS X… you’ll run into a problem. OS X could not be installed on your computer. No packages were eligible for install. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance. Quit the installer to restart your computer and try again, As […]
Read Full Post
Booting Mac OS 9 on a (unsupported) PowerBook G4 12″! - November 16, 2019 Full Post

After playing with some old Macs in my Computer Engineering class, I had a itch to play with some classic Mac OS on some of my own Macs. Sadly, the only PowerPC Mac I have is a 12″ PowerBook G4. It’s an awesome machine, but it’s too new to support OS 9. Or atleast I […]
Read Full Post
A breakdown of Ontario’s Energy Generation, and why we haven’t had a smog alert since 2014. - September 22, 2019 Full Post

Considering that I was born in (and still live in) Ontario, I’ve always been interested in the various services, infrastructure, etc, that keep our province ticking. In particular, Ontario’s energy generation is actually quite nice. If you take a look at the page I embedded above, you’ll be able to see a live breakdown of […]
Read Full Post
macOS Catalina now supports VirtIO (Linux Paravirtualized KVM Drivers)! - September 20, 2019 Full Post

Holy crap guys! After watching LTT’s new video about a dual Windows-macOS system using KVM on Linux, they talked about how the macOS Catalina beta has VirtIO support. WHAT? REALLY? Yes! It’s true! From what I have read, macOS Catalina currently has support for display adapters (stdvga and cirrus), virtio-blk (for drive passthrough) and virtio-9p […]
Read Full Post
USB Power Delivery All The Things! - September 18, 2019 Full Post

It’s 2019, and we’re seeing USB-C everywhere, and it’s awesome! One of the things that really excites me is USB-PD, a technology that falls under the USB-C umbrella that allows devices to negotiate up to 100W of power. Every since I got my new Macbook Pro, I’ve loved that fact that pretty much anything can […]
Read Full Post
File Structure View in AppCode (Swift) - September 9, 2019 Full Post

Recently I have been dabbling in Swift, but Apple’s XCode IDE has left a lot to be desired. Thankfully, JetBrains has two IDEs that work with Swift, CLion (great for basic Swift CLI/Server applications), and AppCode (a more direct competitor to XCode, with the ability to open XCode projects and debug on iOS). Like Rider, […]
Read Full Post
Minecraft Bedrock (Windows 10 Edition/Pocket Edition) for macOS and Linux! - August 12, 2019 Full Post

So I have some friends who like Minecraft. That’s pretty awesome, because so do I! Except they play the Bedrock edition. Well I guess we can’t be friends anymore. But wait! The actually amazing MCMrARM (who also just so happens to also develop the MacBook Pro 2018/2019 T2 drivers for Linux) has an awesome project, […]
Read Full Post
Why My Website Went Offline (Blame systemd? Ubuntu? Linux?) - August 10, 2019 Full Post

Hey Guys! You may have noticed that my website has been offline for a few days now. Well, good news, it’s back! (duh.) Now admittedly the multi-day downtime was mostly down to my laziness… but we can ignore that for now… (I kinda put off looking at why the website went off) So what went […]
Read Full Post
WHY WON’T MY REACT-NATIVE-ELEMENTS BUTTON STRETCH!? - July 30, 2019 Full Post

If you were like me and spent way too long trying to get your React Native Elements button to fill the parent width when placed inside a flexDirection: ‘row’ view… here is your solution: Just throw that prop on your button and EVERYTHING WILL WORK! As always make sure your container also stretches by putting […]
Read Full Post
JS Tip: Object Initialization Shorthand! - July 26, 2019 Full Post

Let’s say your writing some React code, and you end up doing something like this: Having to write out variable names twice in your setState() statement seems a bit inefficient. Thankfully, there is a better way in ES2015: That’s so much nicer! The object will be automatically initialized with the name of the variable as […]
Read Full Post
Introducing: React Seshan.XYZ – Fundamentals for Legacy PCs! - July 24, 2019 Full Post

Have you ever wanted to browse my website, but were stuck with Netscape Navigator, IE 5, or something even more obscure? Well, I have the solution for you! No Seshan, no one even visits your website. On top of the regular xyzwp WordPress theme, and the recently introduced client-side React frontend, we have a third […]
Read Full Post
Can’t Eject Your CD During a Windows XP Install? - July 20, 2019 Full Post

So I was installing Windows XP Media Centre Edition on a Mac Mini 2009, and since the Windows XP MCE installer comes on two CDs, the plan was to just burn the first ISO onto a rewritable DVD, then when the installer wants the second one, eject the DVD, burn the second ISO, and pop […]
Read Full Post
Hello, React! - July 17, 2019 Full Post

As many of you know, I’ll never be able to leave my website alone for very long… after all, I wanted it to be a representation of me, and so it has to evolve with what I think is cool! Before we go any further: Don’t worry, the current “xyzwp” website will stay as the […]
Read Full Post
Mobile, Web and Desktop Apps With One Codebase! (React Native/Expo) - June 14, 2019 Full Post

Nowadays if you want to launch a new software product or service, you’ll probably end up maintaining a few codebases for your App, website, etc. At worst, you’ll have separate versions for: macOS Linux Windows iOS Android Windows Web And possibly more. That’s a pretty bad case though, and you can usually reduce it to: […]
Read Full Post
Spotify on Mac OS X Snow Leopard: It Still Works! - June 9, 2019 Full Post

I have an old MacBook Pro (Early 2008, it’s an amazing machine) that I recently installed Snow Leopard on to play around with, and see how useful a laptop with 10.6 can be in 2019. One of the things I remembered hearing was that Spotify has some pretty good backwards compatibility. And yea, Spotify does! […]
Read Full Post
WordPress Performance Tip: Use the System Cron! - June 8, 2019 Full Post

One of the problems with PHP Web Apps is that they are only ever running for the duration of an HTTP Request. What I mean by that is that websites powered by WordPress, for example, aren’t continuously running on a host server. The only time WordPress gets to do any work is when a user […]
Read Full Post
React Native iOS Pods: Header Files not found? Try this! - June 7, 2019 Full Post

As anyone who has worked with iOS development will know… IT’S REALLY ANNOYING. One problem I faced with React Native and Pods (Xcode dependency manager) is that you actually need to add a bunch of RN specific stuff to your Podfile for it to work properly. If you are having compile issues with your Pods, […]
Read Full Post
Android Debugging over USB with Expo (React Native) - June 6, 2019 Full Post

I’ve been working with React Native a lot recently. And so while the straight React Native life is great, compiling your apps with native dependencies (I’M LOOKING AT YOU IOS) can get… annoying. Thankfully Expo makes that easy. By default though, Expo wants you to debug your apps over the network. This is great, but […]
Read Full Post
Installing Windows XP on DigitalOcean! - May 28, 2019 Full Post

Whilst this shouldn’t surprise you by now, I like installing things on other things, especially when it really shouldn’t. There is a great tutorial by GlitchWitch (https://glitchwitch.io/blog/2018-09/windows-10-on-digitalocean/) on how to run Windows 10 on DigitalOcean (something that may be useful to you). As it turns out though, the basic steps work for Windows XP too! […]
Read Full Post
How to Fix PHP/WordPress Curl Errors - May 23, 2019 Full Post

Checking out that new super fancy Site Health tab of your WordPress Site, but notice that the REST API and Loopback checks are failing? How do you fix the Curl issue? Well, I have the solution (maybe)! This probably only makes sense if you are hosting WordPress yourself instead of on a VPS or other […]
Read Full Post
Website Upgrades! (PowerPC, WordPress, Tor, oh my!) - May 22, 2019 Full Post

“upgrades” Hey Guys! We got a new website! 🎉 There are a couple of notable things about this brand new, amazing, awesome, website: Powered by WordPress (Ok that’s not too interesting but bear with me here…) A custom WordPress theme using Materialize (See, it’s not that bad!) Running on Ubuntu 16.04 (Again, not too interesting, […]
Read Full Post
Website Upgrades… - May 21, 2019 Full Post

Hey! What happened to my website? It’s best not to ask any questions for now. ^ This link will eventually go offline once the site transition is complete. The old website is also backed up and available at seshan.xyz/legacy. The backup on this server works, but be warned: the blog doesn’t work (this a new […]
Read Full Post
Installing Mac OS X 10.9 on a AMD A10-5800k and Quadro 600 as a server. - April 20, 2019 Full Post

Hey everybody! It’s that time again: let’s do something entirely random and probably useless! Check this thing out! This is my old computer, which to be honest I don’t really remember when I built it, but it was probably back around 2014 if I had to guess. Specs wise it’s not too bad: AMD A10-5800k […]
Read Full Post
My thoughts after using macOS - March 25, 2019 Full Post

Wow, two blog posts in a row??? It seems these posts come in bursts. I’ve been doing somethings that are probably worthy of a blog post, so here is one. Mac OS X! Wait, no.. OS X! Hold on… macOS! Naming jokes aside (maybe we should call it Darwin/Cocoa…), I’ve been using macOS the past […]
Read Full Post
Setting Up a Proxy/”VPN” using SSH over SSL. - March 24, 2019 Full Post

Hey! It’s been a little while, but don’t worry, there is exciting stuff coming soon! In the mean time, a friend wanted a tutorial on how to run a proxy (“VPN”) using SSH over SSL. This makes a really nice setup that can go through pretty much any firewall, as the SSH and it’s proxied […]
Read Full Post
I’m Still Alive! (plus some updates) - February 12, 2019 Full Post

Hey everyone! It’s been a little while since the last blog post so I feel I should just pop in to say hi. Hi! Nothing too interesting has happened since, but there are a couple of note worthy things: I got a Mastodon! https://mstdn.dolphinbox.net I created a website to help people use GNU/Linux I am […]
Read Full Post
The iPod 2nd Gen (Classic 2002) - January 16, 2019 Full Post

Hey guys! As you probably know by now I got my hands on a super awesome iPod 2nd Gen (Yep, straight out of 2002). Check it out! Do you see that? It’s Podzilla. Yep, I managed to compile my way to iPodLinux! And it worked… OK. As it turns out, probably to nobodies suprise the […]
Read Full Post
Where is my Framebuffer?? (On a Pixel 3 / New Android devices) - January 6, 2019 Full Post

Ahh Android, everyone’s second favorite distribution of Linux (behind GNU/Linux, of course). I have a Pixel 3 XL, rooted et al. But recently I’ve wanted access to a full GNU/Linux environment right in my pocket. Now, setting that up isn’t particularly challenging. Android itself runs on the Linux kernel, and the Toybox userland (a fork […]
Read Full Post
Let’s revive iPodLinux! - January 1, 2019 Full Post

Before I start, Just want to say: Happy New Year! It`s 2019, and we will surely continue to have way too much fun as usual. Anyway, on to your regularly scheduled blog post! iPodLinux… some of you may have heard of it, some of you may have not. Either way, now you know about it, […]
Read Full Post
Unboxing the Xbox One X - December 21, 2018 Full Post

It’s that time of the year again. Christmas? No, it’s international buy an expensive proprietary device day! Of course, I couldn’t pass the opportunity to take advantage of this! As you probably saw in the title of this post… Xbox! The One X is a pretty awesome piece of hardware, and will let me get […]
Read Full Post
Windows Server on KVM in Docker on DigitalOcean - December 12, 2018 Full Post

Yep, you read the title right. I… uh… yea I installed Windows Server 2008 on KVM in a Docker container on a DigitalOcean Droplet. For a production environment… So as some of you may know I work for ConnectUS, a company who is designing a website/service for the educational sector. It’s not released yet, so […]
Read Full Post
We got an Atom/RSS feed! Who asked for this again? - December 10, 2018 Full Post

May 2019 Update: This blog post was on my old, custom blog system. Now that I got bored of it, we have a new blog systems.Just keep in mind that this post no longer reflects how the blog works nowadays. In the ever lasting quest of adding more random stuff to this website for our […]
Read Full Post
The IoT Christmas Tree ft. Ubuntu Core - December 8, 2018 Full Post

It’s that time of year… and so the Christmas Tree makes a return once again. Notice anything interesting? Let’s take a closer look… It’s a Raspberry Pi! Okay, I’ll just say it right now, the tree has nothing to do with the Raspberry Pi. If we look under the tree: This Raspberry Pi is running […]
Read Full Post
Dang it AWS. Is your instance IP Changing? Get an Elastic IP! - December 6, 2018 Full Post

Crisis averted, this website is still online! Let me set the scene here. It’s the middle of the Computer Club and my friend notifies me that my website is offline… Uh oh. I proceed to try and connect, and yep, it’s dead. I tried the direct IP and that didn’t work either. Well, it’s been […]
Read Full Post
Live Production with BMD ATEM Software on Linux - December 2, 2018 Full Post

Recently my school’s band had a fall showcase, and being a part of the school’s ComTech club, it was our job to film and record the whole thing. Our setup is actually pretty cool. The centerpiece is got to be the Blackmagic Design ATEM Production Studio 4K, an awesome 4k-ready switcher. For this setup, we […]
Read Full Post
Building the perfect GNU/Linux Distro* - November 17, 2018 Full Post

IGNORE THIS POST!!! Hey! How’s it goingIn my ever lasting quest of being way too bored despite having tons of work to do… I present to you my “plan” for what I would consider a “perfect Linux distro”. Ok so let’s get right into it: Basically there are a few fundamental concepts here. First is […]
Read Full Post
Direct Post Access - November 13, 2018 Full Post

May 2019 Update: This blog post was on my old, custom blog system. Now that I got bored of it, we have a new blog systems.Just keep in mind that this post no longer reflects how the blog works nowadays. Hey! Quick update to the website… More ASP!!! If you ever wanted a direct link […]
Read Full Post
Hello World! - November 12, 2018 Full Post

May 2019 Update: This blog post was the first post on my old, custom blog system. Now that I got bored of it, we have a new blog systems. Just keep in mind that this post no longer reflects how the blog works nowadays. Hey! I see you have stumbled upon my blog… I just […]
Read Full Post