Kev’s Blog – Page 2 – Kev's Development Toolbox

October 13, 2025October 13, 2025

Proxmox inplace upgrade – v8 to v9

I have Proxmox 8 installed on my Mac Pro 2008 which I’ve run for a few years. Noticing that there was recently an update to 9, I followed the inplace upgrade instructions here, followed all the prompts during install as per the guide and everything went well.

Before:

After upgrade and reboot:

The only question I ran into was this prompt about updating an UEFI boot loader:

Removable bootloader found at '/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi', but GRUB packages not set up to update it!
Run the following command:

echo 'grub-efi-amd64 grub2/force_efi_extra_removable boolean true' | debconf-set-selections -v -u

Since I’ve tried installing OCLP on this Mac Pro before, I assumed this was something to do with that … so ignored it, rebooted…. and everything was ok …

October 12, 2025October 12, 2025

Env vars with Python and Django: environ vs django-environ

One of the struggles when learning new languages and tech stacks is knowing if you’re doing ‘the right thing’ because you don’t know enough yet to know any better. I’m working on a personal Django project and need to externalize some properties, so I need to read some environment variables.

I was following this article but instead of adding a dependency for ‘django-environ’ I somehow miscopied and pasted ‘environ’, which initially didn’t give any errors until I tried to run my app, and ran into this unintelligible error:

raise ValueError, "No frame marked with %s." % fname
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I’m not too sure at this point what this means, but a quick Google found this article which luckily points out that ‘environ’ is for Python 2 and I shouldn’t be using that.

‘django-python’ apparently also needs a later python version than I’m using, so changing to python-environ and I’m up and running.

September 26, 2025September 26, 2025

Raspberry Pi “Temporary failure in name resolution” errors every couple of days

I have a Raspberry Pi running PiAware headless (no monitor/keyboard/mouse) that I moved from wired ethernet to wifi, and every few days it becomes unreachable over wifi, but the activity lights appear to show it’s still up.

Looking through the syslog entries, around the time it appears to drop off the network there is this error that starts repeating:

Aug 31 00:00:09 piaware ntpd[14162]: error resolving pool 3.debian.pool.ntp.org: Temporary failure in name resolution (-3)

This post appears to see the same thing, and there’s a suggestion to turn off the power save function on the wifi:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off

I’ve given this a go and will monitor over the next few days.

September 16, 2025September 17, 2025

MS Flight Simulator 2024: Around the World update 7: Continuing North-west through mainland Alaska

Following on from update 6, I continued heading north-west along the coast of mainland Alaska. I’ve gained an appreciation for how vast Alaska is. Most of my other legs flown so far I’ve easily passed through a couple of states or even countries in a single leg, but it’s going to take a few more hours to make it west to Russia and then on to Japan.

I’ve also been having a hard time keeping track of my inflight screenshots and matching where they were taken. A quick Google and I found the Geoshot add-on for MSFS, which automatically geo tags your screenshots, so I’ll be using that from this point onwards (once I’ve caught up with my backlog of the last couple of legs).

For this update I’m covering 2 legs:

Port Hardy CYZT – PAVD Valdez

PAVD Valdez – PAHO Homer

First leg: