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Week 168: Software updates
I cultivated yeast from the bottom of a bottle of gueuze (a Belgian beer made with wild yeasts) and used it to make bread. I’ve made a couple of loaves so far, both of which have risen slightly better than my old home-grown starter. They taste good too, if a little less tangy than the other culture.
I renovated my old ThinkPad X220, last used some time in 2021, by dismantling it, cleaning out the fan, reapplying thermal paste to the CPU and replacing the thermal pad on the other chip under the heatsink. It seems to whine less.
I then used it as a testbed to see if I could resize an existing partition on an encrypted disk, which turned out to be fairly straightforward. I really like the flexibility of Linux’s LVM, now that I’ve used it a few times and understand what physical volumes, volume groups, and volumes are.
I replaced Ubuntu with Debian on my current laptop (a ThinkPad T470s) by
shrinking the existing root partition as above, creating a new root partition,
and using the old root partition (with a bit of directory housekeeping) as
/home
on the new system.
Installing Debian onto an encrypted volume isn’t obvious, and you have to use the “expert install” option and do a bit of work behind the scenes to get it to work.
Unfortunately, I forgot to mount the /boot
partition, so ended up
with a system that wouldn’t boot. It took me several hours of wee hours hacking
to fix that, with the eventual solution being booting to a live image, mounting
the root partition, bind-mounting several points including
/sys/firmware/efi/efivars
into there, running a chroot
and reinstalling
grub.
It worked in the end, though, and because I had the same home directory, all my
personal settings were exactly as before and I only had to install a few
packages. Even things like docker containers that I use for work were in
/home
and I could just bring them back up right where I left off.
Having succeeded on my laptop, I also replaced Ubuntu with Debian on my
desktop PC. I did exactly the same things (I take notes for this kind of
thing) except that this time I did not forget to mount /boot
and therefore
finished the install without any complications.
I’ll write a post from my notes to explain how to reproduce everything.
My Kensington Expert trackball stopped working. I’ve had it for 22 years, so it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. At first, I thought it was a software problem, but another mouse worked, and it wouldn’t work on my laptop either. I resigned myself to consigning it to the great e-waste pile in the sky.
However, today, while idly trying it one last time, I noticed an error in the system logs:
fwupd ... failed to load BOS descriptor from USB device
Which led me to an issue describing exactly this problem, and a Debian bug report mirroring my experience:
I have a Kensington Expert Mouse (trackball) connected by USB. Today I installed the update to fwupd 1.9.14 that
apt upgrade
offered me. Soon afterwards, my trackball stopped working.
You can probably guess exactly which version of fwupd
I have on both my
desktop and laptop. Now that I think about it, it happened when I rebooted
after moving the computer from Bookworm to
Testing, which is what brought in the
errant version.
The good news is that it has been fixed in fwupd
. The bad news is that I
had already bought a replacement trackball, an Elecom
Huge. It’s not necessarily a
bad thing to have some variety, and to see what’s new in the past couple of
decades, and it wasn’t very expensive, but it was unnecessary. For now, I’m
going to see how I get on with this new trackball.
I remapped the buttons according to a helpful blog post written by past me. Thanks, Paul.
A “broken” Crybaby wah in excellent condition came up on eBay recently at a cheap price, so I grabbed it. They’re simple devices, and there’s not much to go wrong electronically, so when I read the description
Sound comes through only in bypass mode. When the pedal is switched on, there is NO SOUND whatsoever.
I thought it had to be an easy fix. And it was: the footswitch wasn’t connecting one of the throws. A £3 replacement later and it’s back and working perfectly.
Modern microelectronics can be unforgiving, but many guitar pedals are straightforward analogue circuits, and it’s often the mechanical parts, like switches, sockets, and potentiometers, that break. It’s satisfying to fix them.
I went to an excellent short concert performed by musicians from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Music on Thursday night. It was organised by Sam Meredith as part of his studies and featured pieces written by Purcell, Beethoven, Bruckner, and Meredith himself, played on several trombones and (in a couple of pieces) one trumpet.
I hadn’t really listened to much trombone on its own, but it turns out to be a wonderfully warm and mellow sound (at least, when played by good musicians) that deserves to be heard more.
Currently reading: Vitre vite by Brigitte Giraud.
This week’s links:
- Introducing lcl.host, “The fastest & easiest way to get HTTPS in your local development environment.”
- delta is a better diff for git.
- Japanese Unicode Fonts is a gallery of free Japanese font links including interesting and unusual styles.
- Oldham water quality improved by volunteers planting moss. Volunteers have just planted their one millionth sphagnum moss, as part of a scheme to restore the landscape around the reservoir, which has suffered from humans cutting vegetation since Neolithic times.
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Week 167: One for his nob
We have (mostly) finalised the plans for the kitchen and bathroom. It’s not easy. There are so many decisions to make, and so little concrete information on which to base them, and it all costs so much money. At least we’re starting from such a low point that anything will be an awful lot better than the current facilities. Our current kitchen is poorly lit and laid out in a way that provides little useful preparation space. The bathroom is ugly, awkward, and dilapidated, and features a lot of the worst fake wood I’ve ever seen in my life.
Week 166: Improve your memory with this one simple trick
The missing section of Cycleway 4 has finally opened, which means there’s now a segregated route from Tower Bridge to Greenwich. As we live near the section that was just finished, it’s now a bit easier for me to get onto the route in either direction.
Week 165: Building a bridge
In a small pub basement near Barons Court, we saw a performance of Japanese folk tales from the village of Hinohara, performed by Doubtful Sound and, just a little bit, us. We had chosen some seats at the front, so we were asked to sit in on one scene as extras and drink some sake. It was a fun and intimate performance of stories I’d never heard before. The sake was nice, too.
Week 164: Under the Dome
I made a small accidental discovery that will improve my life: my waterproof Bluetooth speaker will send the forward command if I double-tap the play button. This means that when I’m in the shower and some irritating ad comes on (which is most of them, but especially Shopify ads with their repeated dinging antediluvian cash register sounds, and anyway I’m not interested in setting up an online store selling white supremacist merchandise at this time) I can skip right ahead past the annoyance.
Older entries can be found in the archive.