Sam Cater

Latest — Jul 22, 2026

Samsung Phones - What is causing extreme polling to 'mobile.pipe.aria.microsoft.com'?

Noticed a sea of requests to 'mobile.pipe.aria.microsoft.com' from my phone thanks to Pi-Hole. I did some digging with an App called 'ReThink DNS', which allows you to see which Apps are making which DNS requests (very good tool). Turns out it is

More issues

IPv6 and IPv4 Addresses, and LetsEncrypt Client Connection Issues

When adding IPv4 connectivity to a previously IPv6-only server, I noticed that the LetsEncrypt client fails to connect to the ACME servers. This in turn resulted in an error: `An unexpected error occurred: requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: ('Connection aborted.', ConnectionResetError(104, 'Connection reset by peer'))` The reason

Fixing USB-C on Dell XPS randomly stopping working....

Symptoms: * After a sleep/hibernate, USB-C will totally stop working on 1 or more ports. Some may continue to work, others may not (e.g. two on the left side of laptop don't, but one on the right does). * Plugging devices in doesn't bring anything up

Using ARGON2 password hashing with copyparty in a Docker container

It's easy, just takes a second. In order to do this, run the Docker container once with any old plaintext password assigned to your user in the config file. This causes copyparty to generate a file in the ./copyparty/ cache folder which lives adjacent to your copyparty.conf

Fix for Audio Stuttering in VLC when using EasyEffects and PulseAudio - Streaming audio or video

Symptoms: * Playing any audio from a remote source such as a file server causes stuttering and jumping, unless rewinding a few seconds and letting VLC 'catch up'. * Same applies to films, opened either locally or also from a remote source. * Other audio players like Audacious or Clementine work

Mistakes made when trying to get LetsEncrypt Certs with IPv6-only domain.

This website now loads on IPv6. Both from the root, https://samcater.com, but also now from https://v6.samcater.com. The second domain only has AAAA IPv6 records, no IPv4 ones. This means free TLS tools like LetsEncrypt will only go for the v6 address. Getting it to work

Dynamic DNS and IPv6 breaking scripts

Just noting, if you have self-made scripts to perform Dynamic DNS with a Nameserver/Provider of your choosing, the following sequence of events happens: * Curl or WGET a page such as https://ifconfig.io/ip to get your external WAN IP. * Parse the response (if needed) * Shunt it up to

Using OpenWRT as a Docker Host (in 2023)

TL;DR: Install docker AND dockerd Unfortunately the Wiki documentation appears out of date for installing Docker as a container host in OpenWRT. The majority of the documentation is fine. However, the instructions tell a user to download 'docker-ce' with opkg, which is no longer possible and presumably

Fix for slow OnePlus 6 after upgrading to Android 11 (Oxygen OS 11.1.2.2)

If you're reading this your phone has started to chugg hard. The fix for me was to go to Settings -> System -> Ram Boost Disable it. Whatever it is, it aggressively attacks the performance of apps and causes the slow down and lagginess you'

Fix/Workaround - libseccomp2 and Alpine 3.13 - Installing Raspbian Docker 19.04+ on Raspberry Pi 4 Buster

If you're reading this you're probably dealing with the hell I've just been through trying to get apps like Nextcloud, Redis and all sorts of other things in Docker to run on a Raspberry Pi4, which suddenly seemed to stop working overnight. The reason?