Memory Matrix

It can be difficult to add a secondary storage to Nextcloud if the storage location is a new local drive. Authentication errors abound and leave one unable to use the additional space. To resolve this, add the drive to the system, and use the occ command to add the secondary storage. Add the new drive, whether real or virtual, and boot the machine. Then use lsblk to identify the drives. This is an example from my nextcloud instance:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0   480G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   472G  0 part /
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
└─sda5   8:5    0     8G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:16   0 464.3G  0 disk 
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom 

Create the path for the mounting of the partition via mkdir /mnt/secondary which is the path that I am using on this machine. Then use fdisk to setup the formatted partition. In the example above, the sdb device appears as the one that needs configuration. The command to begin is fdisk /dev/sdb and after that launches, use the menu to create a new partition ttable, add a new partition, set it to primary, write to disk, and exit. To confirm the existence of the partition, run a fresh lsblk and compare verify the output. After doing that, format the disk via mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1.

Obtain the UUID of the new partition via the lsblk -f command. Example outpout of this command is:

lsblk -f
NAME   FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                           
├─sda1 ext4   1.0         d9720050-a770-4d6c-8620-78595132d60e   87.2G    76% /
├─sda2                                                                        
└─sda5 swap   1           f70c9ad7-e991-405b-b093-8b3c92ae8568                [SWAP]
sdb                                                                           
└─sdb1 ext4   1.0         8561c6b1-6cf0-4487-bf95-0cfb1befbb0f                
sr0   

Use nano to exit the mounting details via nano /etc/fstab. Add the new partition to that using noatime as an option, along with 0 and 2 as the parameters. The parameter noatime tells the system not to update the access time everyone a file is accessed and the 2 tells the operating system to continue booting if the disk is not present for some reason. Here is an example of the file where the data for sdb1 appears.

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=d9720050-a770-4d6c-8620-78595132d60e /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=f70c9ad7-e991-405b-b093-8b3c92ae8568 none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/sr0        /media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto     0       0
UUID=8561c6b1-6cf0-4487-bf95-0cfb1befbb0f /mnt/secondary  ext4    noatime         0       2

Then mount the new partition via mount -av which will process the fstab file. After that, cd into the /mnt directory and change the ownership of the secondary folder created earlier via chown -R www-data:www-data /mnt/secondary. The www-data user may not be the username. In this case, the webserver for the Nextcloud instance runs via the www-data account so that is the one that works here. After changing the ownership of that mountpoint, cd /var/www/html/nextcloud or whatever the Nextcloud path is for the PHP files. There should be an occ file present. Use the following command sudo -u www-data php occ files_external:create SECONDARY 'local' null::null -c datadir="/mnt/secondary" and SECONDARY will appear in Nextcloud as an external storage visible to all logged in users.

I love Joplin, but Joplin seems more like an incredible file cabinet and set of bookshelves. It is possible to link from one note to another, but a Joplin icon appears by that link in the text. It can also be cumbersome to navigate between multiple documents while working on one. Joplin recently added the ability to open documents in a child window which really makes the problem wonderful. QOwnNotes includes an excellent Markdown Cheatsheet that one can open in a tab. I am looking for a solution for the extensive file cabinet, and one for the rough drafting. QOwnNotes syncs with Nextcloud.

chmod +x QOwnNotes-x86_64.AppImage 

This .AppImage file not extract via the normal method. Running the AppImage works, but an extraction to squash-fs fails as it leaves nothing in the folders. It is necessary to run it directly from the .AppImage file.

When creating new notes, they automatically receive file names like Note 2025-12-17 20h10s34. From this, I remove the word note and add a title and tags so that the name may serve me well in the future.

A local mirror of the source is available on this website. A local mirror of the AppImage file for version 25.12.6 is available on this website. The developers release the source and binaries on Github. The web companion for Firefox and LibreWolf is online, as is the Chrome extension. The web companion features seem to require more scripting than I am comfortable with for them to work. The number of Linux distributions for which for which one may download via official repositories is very impressive. Zettlr remains prettier and more fun to type in, but QOwnNotes builds documents that are ready for a simple copy-paste into the WordPress editor for publishing.

Nothing can replace Joplin. Joplin recognizes the reference style links of QOwnNotes, and the preview with preformatted text fields for code copy-pastes perfectly into WordPress. Joplin is a definite winner. Especially with the MDI interface.

I tried all these apps, and settled back on Joplin, but Zettler is fun to type in. Zettlr is for making a book, and Joplin is for making a reference library. All of this experimentation leads to me deciding to use Joplin better. Zettlr makes it easy to link existing notes by simply starting to type. The readability feature in Zettlr is also very helpful and helps me focus. Joplin can also use Zettlr’s footnote features.

This entry may have meandered a bit. I have settled on Joplin or organizing and remembering and and Zettlr for crafting. I will post completed pieces via Joplin preview to WordPress.

This post used Joplin 3.4.12 on Debian 12 and Zettlr 3.6.0.

My refined direction is digital sovereignty via the old paths with a goal of writing at least one article per week. The complexity of the articles will change because many projects are planned for the long term, but getting started on them takes a very long time..

I setup a RAID 5 in my old computer using new Western Digital 2 TB drives. In this case, the old machine is a Hewlett Packard Z600. The computer is very old in computer years. It has 12 Cores via dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPUs of model X5675 at 3.07GHz. [1] The prices on these on eBay have gone through the roof for old desktops computers of many types. One can easily find conversations about hard drives from three or four years discussing prices of $15 per terabyte. Now they are over $30 per terabyte.

I had purchased a used 2TB drive to use as Samba share space in the machine, and it went bad and locked into read-only mode within about a year. In deciding whether to buy used or new drives, I came to the conclusion that on an annual basis, one ends up spending the same or more via used drives than they do with new drives. Were one to purchase used drives, twice as many need to be acquired which eliminates the financial benefit while increasing one’s stress.

I could not remember my Vivaldi sync password despite creating the account only a couple of days ago. I tried several times to remember it, and then connections to vivaldi.net started timing out. It seems to me that they blocked me. If that had happened with the ability to access my email, it would have been a real issue. Because of this, I need to work on a more digitally sovereign approach here.

The extensions I use for Vivaldi include the Obsidian Web Clipper, Joplin Web Clipper, Zotero Connector, floccus bookmarks sync, SingleFile, and uMatrix.

For LibreWolf, my extensions are Obsidian Web Clipper, SingleFile, Copy PlainText, floccus bookmarks sync, Joplin Web Clipper, Search by Image, Tree Style Tab, uMatrix, Undo Close Tab, and Web Archives.

1. https://www.ebay.com/sch/179/i.html?_nkw=z600. Reviewed 11/1/2025, (Prices ranged from a single poorly described one for $160 with free shipping to $250 and 300 plus almost triple digit shipping costs. There were two pages total, and the entire last page was filled with $800 or $900 or even $1200 systems advertising things like 4 monitors for trading, 8 monitors, for trading and the like. The second best of all was 249.95 with free delivery.)

Chromium:

Joplin Web Clipper, Zotero Connector, floccus bookmarks sync, uBlock Origin, Quick Javascript Switcher, SingleFile, uMatrix

Firefox:

floccus bookmarks sync, Joplin Web Clipper, Search by Image, uMatrix, Undo Close Tab, Zotero, uBlock Origin

[x]  Removed some Firefox/LibreWolf extensions

[+] Added Zotero and uBlock Origin, which have been long used, but neglected with regards to appearing in this list.

This document contains some notes on .bashrc for use with Linux systems.

alias ll=’ls -alF’
alias la=’ls -A’
alias l=’ls –CF’

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
. ~/.bash_aliases
fi

The preceding two blocks come standard on Ubuntu as of version 2022.04. One tweak for WSL2 on Windows might be the addition of this line.

sudo bash “/etc/rc.local”

and in the rc.local follow, add the following.

#!/bin/bash
rm -f /etc/resolv.conf
echo “nameserver 1.1.1.1″ >> /etc/resolv.conf
echo “nameserver 8.8.8.8″ >> /etc/resolv.conf

This is because WSL2 may place non-routable IP addresses using 172… in resolv.conf. As of this writing, following steps recommended to disable the generation of the file fails to resolve the issue where the file is newly generated with every new terminal launched in Windows terminal. Having this run with each new Bash login ensures success with network communications.  The location /etc/rc.local may seem like an odd location for this.

The crontab to ensure to check each minute to ensure a virtual machine is running in VirtualBox is as follows.

*/1 * * * * VBoxManage startvm “VMNAME” –type headless
*/1 * * * * VBoxManage startvm “VMNAME2″ –type headless

If the virtual machine is already running, then it will not start a new copy of it. This is better than attempting to run the script via a system wide script after a reboot.  Running it this way allows a simple crontab for the user for whom the machine needs to run under. To run a script every five minutes, add the crontab as follows:

*/5 * * * * /home/USERNAME/nextcloudcron

In this example, the nextcloudcron script will run every five minutes.  This particular script is one for use contacting my Nextcloud instance for webcron.  It does not contain a .sh on the filename, because some implementations may disallow crontab scripts with file extensions.

The following checks inside a subdirectory and pulls in the files therein as bash sources. This is useful for breaking aliases, variables, and other items into different files.

if [ -d ~/.bashrc.d ]; then
for rc in ~/.bashrc.d/*; do
if [ -f "$rc" ]; then
. “$rc”
fi
done
fi

The following uses nano as the crontab editor.

export VISUAL=nano

On Oracle Linux 9 on AWS, it is necessary to install Cronie to enable cron jobs.  To ensure this starts after reboots, add the following to /etc/rc.local.

bash /sbin/crond

To create a date line for a log file, use the following:

echo $(date) >> /home/USER/FILENAME

The Shebang for the top of bash files is

#!/usr/bin/env bash

To auto-update via DNF and leave a log of what was accomplished, use the following script.  The script will write a list of the updates to the systemupdates.log file, and then update the system with details of that process written to the dnfupdates.log file.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo $(date) >> /home/USER/systemupdates.log
sudo dnf check-update >> /home/USER/systemupdates.log
echo $(date) >> /home/USER/dnfupdates.log
sudo dnf update -y >> /home/USER/dnfupdates.log 2>&1