Daily blurbs May. 2021

Plans

daily blurbs


24 May 2021 (Mon)

08:46:51 # Life memtest86+ did not work on my machine. Looking at the changelog the version was last updated in 2014. Checked their website and apparently there was a new version last year. Might be worth a try. I saw at least some code to handle memory modules with memory more than 32GB.

23 May 2021 (Sun)

11:33:56 # Life Last weekend I had Debian meeting. I presented how Golang packages work. I don't really know how they work and I learnt how they work along with preparation for the material. I noticed that I couldn't present a window from Chrome browser. After playing around a little bit more Filed a bug, seems like unable to capture the display or the wayland window, only X11 windows, but I wonder what will come out of it. I have issues with IME keybindings not reliably working, and this. Wayland is not dependable for me yet.

Same thing happens for OBS Xcomposite capture.

16 May 2021 (Sun)

10:24:38 # Life Memo on using a KVM switch with my Debian desktop and ChromeBox. KVM these days mean Kernel virtualization things but before it used to mean KVM switch; where PS/2 and DSUB15 pin was a popular interface. These days it's USB + HDMI; USB-C with dP alt mode would make connections simpler including power supply, but that doesn't exist as much. This ends up 3 cables each for PC and display, with 2 USB cables and 1 HDMI cable per endpoint. I bought a cheap manual switcher. Automatic switcher can be annoying especially when suspend-resume case, there's no rational behavior, especially when I want to wake devices through keyboard. Having a wired remote control was good because although the device itself is compact, the 9 or so cables running out of it is bulky and I moved it under my desk to hide it from my view. Sometimes suspending / resume causes issues with the USB hub, it's recognized as SuperTop USB Hub, and from Linux kernel it seems like hub is disconnected and reconnected, however on reinitialization sometimes USB hub fails to be initialized. That results in keyboard not working, but re-connecting the USB cable fixes the issue. Sound is recorded via USB mixer, and played back via HDMI audio, video is recorded via USB camera. These things didn't exist back in the old KVM days, maybe they used audio cables.

[105071.287587] usb usb3-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
[105072.187749] usb usb3-port2: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
[105072.187836] usb usb3-port2: attempt power cycle
	

15 May 2021 (Sat)

08:57:14 # Life pomodoro timer in elisp. I put up my current configuration here if you're interested. Not that I recommend this to anybody but this is tightly integrated with my daily notes taken in markdown format, so that I have a new entry for my notes every pomodoro. I don't time my break time because my water heater takes 5 minutes to boil and that's a good enough timer for me. I tried using notifications-notify to make sound but it turned out some environments I use don't forward this correctly, maybe someone already could have done the integration with OSC9/OSC777 to make sound work but not quite sure, so I make sound via sshing to my local raspberry pi and making it trigger chrome cast commands in my room to play sound.

15:38:29 # Life Waiting for network to be up from a service on Debian. I've noticed that when I observed in journalctl that many services were starting before dhclient started running and configured DHCP. They are waiting for network-online.target, however network-online.target seems to be triggered before networking is available. After a few internet searches, ifupdown is the default network manager for Debian, and it seems like there's a specific systemd target for ifupdown. /usr/lib/systemd/system/ifupdown-wait-online.service contains that service. So, I could do this to fix the situation. Now, should this have been the default? filed a bug: 988533.

	  $ sudo systemctl enable ifupdown-wait-online.service
	  $ systemctl list-dependencies network-online.target
network-online.target
● ├─ifupdown-wait-online.service
● └─networking.service

	

5 May 2021 (Wed)

09:29:24 # Life Wrote a pomodoro timer in elisp. Why? Because I try to keep my workflow simple, and to keep the simplicity I sometimes need to re-implement stuff. No this is a lame excuse. I have been living in emacs for the past week and felt like it. However writing elisp has been challenging, maybe because I haven't done it for a while. I noticed there's lexical-binding, but I didn't quite get it, my lambda isn't getting the function parameter in scope.

3 May 2021 (Mon)

09:07:46 # Life First email from my new machine. I didn't have my desktop Debian machine for a long time and now I have one set up. I rewrote my procmail/formail recipe, especially the part where I wrote complex shell script to generate my folder rules. I rewrote that 4 lines of shell script in 200 lines of Go, with unit tests. The part that took the longest time was finding out how to write unit tests in Go, and how to properly use go.mod to be able to import packages from subdirectories. I guess that's part of the fun.

I wonder if this set up is not what others are using anymore. My formatil/procmail/wanderlust set up is 20 years old.

1 May 2021 (Sat)

08:51:57 # Life May. Told my son about the months in English. The numbers are straightforward but couldn't remember what the other ones are. He was amused when I told him Septem is seven in Latin, and September is the ninth month. Octo, novem, decem are similar.


Junichi Uekawa