Useful Archives - Jeremys Awesome Blog

Remove Gaps Between Monitors

Do you hate seeing a sliver of light between your monitors? I sure do. I’ve spent a lot of time getting my monitors lined up just right so that they are flush against eachother with no gaps. However, a slight bump of the desk can throw all that hard work out the window.

So, I figured out another solution. Instead of adjusting the monitors to make sure that they are “perfect” I took some black electrical tape and ran it down the seem behind the two monitors. The black tape matches the black border of my monitors and it blocks any light from coming in!

I highly suggest running black electrical tape down the back seem between your monitors. It really helps!

RocketChat server not running. Cancelling

As you might know, I’ve set up a RocketChat server recently on Digital Ocean. So far it’s been working great. An update every once and a while is all it needs.

However, yesterday, I attempted an update that failed. From then on every attempted update resulted in “RocketChat server not running. Cancelling”. This was very frutrating.

First, a few commands to try that might help:

systemctl restart rocketchat.service – This will start your RocketChat server in case it is stopped.
systemctl status rocketchat.service – Use this command to check the results of the previous command. Typically this will report that the service is “Active” if the previous command was successful.

In my case, the second command resulted in a “failed” state. The command itself gave me some information as to what the failure was, but not a lot of context as to what caused the failure. However, it did show me the process that it attempted to run. It said, ExecStart=/opt/nvm/versions/node/v14.19.3/bin/node /opt/Rocket.Chat/main.js (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE).

Alright! We’re getting somewhere. With that I was able to figure out what command failed and where that command was run. I navigated directly to the /opt/Rocket.Chat directory which was where the failure was occurring. From here I ran node main.js. The results of this command were much more helpful. They told me this, Error: Cannot find module '@meteorjs/reify/lib/runtime'. That looks like an issue with npm dependencies.

So, I poked around the Rocket.Chat directory structure and looked for dependencies for the Rocket.Chat server. I found what I was looking for in the /opt/Rocket.Chat/programs/server directory.

From this directory I ran two commands

npm install
npm ci

Afterwards I attempted to start the RocketChat server again using the systemctl restart rocketchat.service command. I checked it with systemctl status rocketchat.service and found that it was working now! RocketChat was back to running normally. The problem with “RocketChat server not running. Cancelling” was gone!

Google Fi Auto Connect Issues

Ok, so I use Google Fi (formerly known as Project Fi) as my phone provider. I have a Pixel 2 and haven’t felt the need to upgrade. Recently I’ve noticed issues with my service. Specifically, my Pixel 2 will connect to an H+ network or an Edge network in an area I know has reliable 4G LTE. So, what gives?

First a quick and dirty explanation of the Google Fi network based on my limited understanding 😁. Google Fi utilizes the TMobile (which I believe includes Sprint now) and US Cellular networks as well as WI-Fi to provide cellular service to their customers. Phones on the Google Fi network smartly switch to whatever provider has the best signal. At least that’s the idea.

Knowing that Fi uses multiple cell networks to provide service I wondered what network my phone was using. Using SignalCheck Lite I was able to determine that my phone was connecting to the TMobile network by default. In my area US Cellular beats TMobile coverage hands down. There is no competition. So what is the deal with my phone auto connecting to Edge and H+ networks?

Honestly, I don’t know yet. I strongly suspect a recent update to the Google Fi app or services set my phone to prefer TMobile regardless of network speed. Whether this was an intentional change or a bug in the auto-connect code, I don’t know. I’ve been able to temporarily fix this issue by forcing a connection to US Cellular using Google Fi dialer code: *#*#34872#*#*

Google Fi Dialer Codes

I pulled these codes come from this post on ArkieNet. I’m including them here just in case the post poofs from the internet in the future.

Note this paragraph from the original article:

The following options are only available for “Designed for Fi” phones. They will not work on the iPhone or “Compatible with Fi” phones because they are T-Mobile only. See which class of phone you have here.
ArkieNet

ALPHA CODE	DIALER CODE	DESCRIPTION
FI AUTO	##342886##	Set carrier selection to automatic.
FI NEXT	##346398##	Select Next Carrier
FI SPR	##34777##	Select Sprint for 2 hours
FI TMO	##34866##	Select T-Mobile 2 hours
FI USC	##34872##	Select US Cellular 2 hours
FI SIMON	##3474666##	Select Three (UK only)

ALPHA CODE	DIALER CODE	DESCRIPTION
FIXME	##34963##	Force reactivation
FI INFO	##344636##	Get information about the current network.
INFO	##4636##	Get general phone information.
DEBUG	##33284##	Phone Debug Options
PRL	##775##	Force download of Preferred Roaming List (Sprint)
PRL	*228	Force download of Preferred Roaming List (US Cellular)
FI ROAM	##347626##	Turn on International Roaming
SWITCH SIM	##794824746##	Switch to / from eSim.

Issue with Mouse Auto Scrolling on Windows 10

Problem. I installed Adobe Premiere Pro and then all of a sudden my mouse starting automatically scrolling. This happened only in certain places. Like when opening the run command dialog, or when hovering over the Premiere Pro timeline. It did not happen in the browser unless I hovered over a section that had a custom scroll type listener.

The issue with auto scrolling was very frustrating. I was able to figure it out though. Here are the steps.

Right click on This PC in the file explorer menu. Select Manage.
Find and click the Device Manager
Expand the Mice and other pointing devices option
Right click the HID-compliant mouse entry and select Uninstall device.
Your mouse will stop working…
Unplug your mouse from the back of your computer, wait 10 seconds, plug it back in.
Windows should redetect your mouse and the problem should go away.

Alternatively you could try to “Update driver” instead of Uninstalling the device. I didn’t try, my problem was solved with the steps documented above.

Validate the Hash or Checksum of a Downloaded File

Every once and a while I want to validate the hash of a downloaded file. Most of the time these are MD5 hashes, but I’ve seen SHA as well.

Windows actually has a couple built in ways of generating the hash of a file. You can use certutil or, in powershell you can use get-filehash.

With Certutil

To verify a checksum with certutil use the following command: certutil -hashfile {FILENAME} {ALGORITHM} replace the FILENAME and ALGORITHM with your choices.

With get-filehash

This is my preferred method. No reason, maybe I like the order of arguments better?

Use get-filehash -algorithm {ALGORITHM} {FILENAME}.

That’s it!