passthejoe with the Hugo ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear theme on passthejoe https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/ Recent content in passthejoe with the Hugo ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear theme on passthejoe Hugo en-US Copyright © 2025, Steven Rosenberg. Fri, 02 May 2025 03:00:00 -0700 Evangelina Mascardi plays Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major BWV 998 on the Baroque lute https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/evangelina-mascardi-plays-bachs-prelude-fugue-and-allegro-in-e-flat-major-bwv-998-on-the-baroque-lute/ Fri, 02 May 2025 03:00:00 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/evangelina-mascardi-plays-bachs-prelude-fugue-and-allegro-in-e-flat-major-bwv-998-on-the-baroque-lute/ <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H4rd3tV5fb8?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> When installing ufw closes all the ports https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/when-installing-ufw-closes-all-the-ports/ Thu, 23 Jan 2025 03:00:00 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/when-installing-ufw-closes-all-the-ports/ <p>There comes a time in my setup of a Linux/Unix system where I want to tinker with the firewall. And I usually install <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UncomplicatedFirewall">ufw — the &ldquo;Uncomplicated Firewall&rdquo;</a> to do it. It&rsquo;s not complicated, and I like that.</p> <p>But if you have existing services running on your server or workstation that you installed with a Linux package manager such as apt or dnf/yum, you have to remember to reopen all the ports you need, because the installation of ufw on most systems closes all of those ports.</p> <p>I installed ufw on the Raspberry Pi, and after first locking myself out of the computer by forgetting to open Port 22 for ssh, I inadvertently also locked myself out of the Samba server, since I forgot to open Port 445.</p> <p>I used <a href="https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/security/open-a-port-in-ufw/">this tutorial</a> to open Port 445 for Samba:</p> <pre tabindex="0"><code>$ cat /etc/services | grep 445 $ sudo ufw allow microsoft-ds $ sudo ufw enable </code></pre><p>Why did this happen? When the services were installed on the Pi, the proper ports were opened up by the package manager. But when I installed ufw, it closed everything. I had to reopen ports 22 (ssh), 80 and 443 (http and https), and 445 (samba).</p> <p>This system is no longer a web server, so I can close 80 and 443, but since the local network isn&rsquo;t forwarding traffic through those ports to the Pi, I can leave them open and continue to experiment with web servers on the LAN.</p> <p>More than once I&rsquo;ve installed ufw and forgotten to open Port 22. And the next time I ssh into the system, I can&rsquo;t get in until I log in another way and use ufw to reopen Port 22. This is a big one, especially if it&rsquo;s difficult to access the system through a directly connected keyboard and monitor.</p> GNOME Software was pretty much freezing in Debian 12. Here's how I fixed it https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/gnome-software-was-pretty-much-freezing-in-debian-12.-heres-how-i-fixed-it/ Sat, 28 Dec 2024 03:45:00 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/gnome-software-was-pretty-much-freezing-in-debian-12.-heres-how-i-fixed-it/ <p>My 2011 iMac 27-inch running Debian 12 (upgraded since 10) was having an issue with GNOME Software. The app would start, but it would &ldquo;spin&rdquo; forever, never allowing me to add, remove or update software.</p> <p>A quick search produced <a href="https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/03/fix-gnome-software-stuck-with-software.html">this fix</a>, which worked immediately:</p> <blockquote> <p>To fix Gnome Software getting stuck with &ldquo;Software catalog is being loaded&rdquo; being shown, kill the application and remove its cache using these two commands:</p></blockquote> <pre tabindex="0"><code>$ killall gnome-software $ rm -rf ~/.cache/gnome-software </code></pre><p>Then restart GNOME Software. It works!</p> After self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, I'm back on a free VPS https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/after-self-hosting-on-a-raspberry-pi-4-model-b-im-back-on-a-free-vps/ Tue, 10 Dec 2024 07:45:00 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/after-self-hosting-on-a-raspberry-pi-4-model-b-im-back-on-a-free-vps/ <p>My time hosting a web server on a Raspberry Pi in the coat closet has come to an end. I&rsquo;m not unhappy. I don&rsquo;t need to be inviting ports 80 and 443 into my home network. It was just an experiment. One that went really well.</p> <p>But I&rsquo;m OK moving on.</p> <p>When the self-hosting experiment began with my first Raspberry Pi (a Zero W that was not up to the task), I was surprised to find out that I could use my Spectrum-supplied Arris cable modem/router to open ports 80 and 443 and forward them to a computer on my local network.</p> <p>None of my sites likely ever got enough traffic for anybody to notice, and I never tried to measure it anyway. I write what I want, and the relative popularity of one entry over another isn&rsquo;t important to me.</p> <p>Once I upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, the experiment really began. Using Raspberry Pi OS and the Caddy web server, I was able to host content for a few domains with automatic certificates. All I had to do was lay it out in <code>/etc/caddy/Caddyfile</code>, and the Caddy executable took care of the rest.</p> <p>Whether or not Spectrum was <em>looking the other way</em> when I was running the web server, it all ended about a week or so ago when the cable provider offered to &ldquo;upgrade&rdquo; us from 300 Mbps to 400 Mbps with new equipment — a separate modem and WiFi 6 router.</p> <p>I accepted the offer, and the gear arrived a few days later. I hooked everything up and made the switch. It was indeed a lot faster. Before the switch, I never got close to 300 Mbps. I&rsquo;d be lucky to get 100. But with this new setup, the connection is at or above 400 Mbps all the time. Still only 10 Mbps up, and since I do a lot of work at home with photos and video, it&rsquo;s not the greatest. But the download speed is amazing.</p> <p>I <em>would</em> buy my own router and save the $7 extra a month that I&rsquo;m paying Spectrum for the WiFi portion of my connection, but the range of the router is so much better than the old box that I&rsquo;m worried I&rsquo;ll spend $150 and not have as good of a connection.</p> <p>The new Spectrum router is weird. You don&rsquo;t &ldquo;control&rdquo; it on the local network like a normal router. Instead, you manage it through the Spectrum mobile (phone) app.</p> <p>Through this app, I set an address on the local network for the Raspberry Pi, then I forwarded ports 80 and 443 to it. After changing my DNS, I verified that the Pi could be reached at both ports, but nothing was coming out of the web server — no HTML at all. For whatever reason, it didn&rsquo;t work.</p> <p>Rather than beat my head against the wall, I figured I can live without running a web server from home. I have a couple of VPSes in the Oracle Cloud Free Tier, and I added the Caddy web server to one of them and began moving the sites over.</p> <p><strong>Aside:</strong> <em>Say what you will about Oracle and evilness, and I&rsquo;m probably at the point where I should be paying for servers (and I have in the past). But it&rsquo;s hard to turn down the two free-forever VPSes I&rsquo;m getting under the Free Tier. Sure there are stories about them disappearing, but I&rsquo;ve had these two for over a year, everything is backed up, and it&rsquo;s been smooth and consistent.</em></p> <p>Moving the certificates for https from the Pi (Debian 12-based Raspberry Pi OS) to the VPS (AlmaLinux 9) was a bit of work. I did some significant Googling to figure it out.</p> <p>Turns out I couldn&rsquo;t just wholesale move the entire directory over like some Caddy forum posts suggested. I had to download everything, upload to it all the new server, and then do a lot of <em>cp/chown/chmod</em> to get things right, only moving certs and not other config files. I only figured this out after moving everything and not being able to start Caddy. I had to roll back and move little by little, making sure permissions and ownership were right. This should be easier.</p> <p>It was a stumbling block, but I got it done, switched my DNS to the VPS, and I was indeed off to the races, moving site by site.</p> <p>The next part was changing all my rsync deployment scripts so they pointed to the VPS and not the Pi. There are always stumbling blocks. It turns out I hadn&rsquo;t previously used rsync with the Oracle servers.</p> <p>I had to make some tweaks. Of course OpenBSD and Fedora Silverblue handled rsync differently. In Fedora, the rsync lines only worked without pointing to the special key that Oracle creates for you. In OpenBSD, I had to call for the key in the rsync line.</p> <p>So I did get the rsync script working on both of the OSes I run on my laptops.</p> <p>My <em>next</em> move is figuring out a way to back up my <em>GoToSocial</em> server with a lighter file load. Martin &ldquo;Wimpy&rdquo; Wimpress mentioned on Linux Matters that he wrote a script to back up GtS and SQLite in such a way as to only &ldquo;keep&rdquo; my local users&rsquo; media files and not every file on the system (which is a LOT of files). My GtS uses PostgreSQL, but maybe I can appropriate the part of his script that backs up the media files and make it so I can continue backing up from my GtS server to the Web server, which has a significantly smaller file load.</p> <p>I have been thinking about getting my own router that will offer WiFi 6 and hopefully have as good or better coverage as Spectrum&rsquo;s $7/month router. Then I could save that $7 and also likely return to self-hosting with the Raspberry Pi.</p> <p>But for now this is a workable situation: The Raspberry Pi is still on the local network, where I&rsquo;m continuing to play with the Samba server I installed on it. I might also try the Pi as a backup server, though the speed of its USB flash drive could be a limiting factor.</p> <p>And the two AlmaLinux 9 Oracle servers are set up, stable and reliable. And very much free (as in beer).</p> A tribute to the Chicago Manual of Style (while mostly mentioning the AP Stylebook) https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/a-tribute-to-the-chicago-manual-of-style-while-mostly-mentioning-the-ap-stylebook/ Thu, 19 Sep 2024 07:46:46 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/a-tribute-to-the-chicago-manual-of-style-while-mostly-mentioning-the-ap-stylebook/ <p>I&rsquo;m not a <em>Chicago Manual of Style</em> editor, though <em>I could be</em>.</p> <p>Coming up in the world of journalism, the bible is the <em>AP Stylebook</em>, and I probably used it 20 times a day at one point. Eventually you remember what&rsquo;s in there and can quote passages from memory. This was in the days before the Web took over, and we had reference books, physical clips of old newspapers and a telephone. (When we couldn&rsquo;t figure something out, <em>we&rsquo;d make a call</em>.)</p> <p>I have never owned a copy of CMOS, though I should. I have an AP Stylebook and a Merriam Webster&rsquo;s Collegiate Dictionary (though AP recommends the Webster&rsquo;s New World), and I never open them. It&rsquo;s all on the Web now. And my employer has a subscription to the online AP Stylebook.</p> <p>The thing to remember is that <em>style</em> means here is <em>one way to do a thing,</em> and there is more than one way you <em>could</em> do it. But we are picking <em>one</em>. For <em>consistency&rsquo;s sake.</em></p> <p>When AP changes a style — and they <em>do this fairly often</em> — I&rsquo;m almost always <em>slightly offended</em>. It&rsquo;s like the King James Version vs. the New International Version. (Admittedly I&rsquo;m shaky on <em>modern</em> bible versions, so feel free to insert <em>New Revised Standard Version</em>, or something I&rsquo;ve never heard of. Notice how I can end a sentence with a preposition and not give a fuck? <em>You can do it too!</em>)</p> <p>I should pick up a Chicago Manual of Style. I use plenty of em dashes but no en dashes. I could be persuaded.</p> <p>What brought this up? <a href="https://lithub.com/a-very-smart-and-accessible-friend-why-the-chicago-manual-of-style-remains-essential/">This nice article</a> from LitHub.</p> Feed https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/feed/ Tue, 03 Sep 2024 11:08:12 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/feed/ <p>If I knew how to directly add an RSS link to the menu in the Hugo Bear Blog theme, I would do that.</p> <p>Until I figure it out, find the RSS for this site at:</p> <p><a href="https://passthejoe.net/index.xml">https://passthejoe.net/index.xml</a></p> This is a test entry https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/this-is-a-test-entry/ Tue, 03 Sep 2024 07:56:01 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/this-is-a-test-entry/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/rpi4.jpg" alt="Raspberry Pi 4 in the case"></p> <p>Can you see this blog entry?</p> <p>There is a picture of a Raspberry Pi 4 in the case above.</p> About https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/about/ Tue, 03 Sep 2024 12:00:00 +0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/about/ <h1 id="about-steven-rosenberg-and-the-passthejoe-blog">About Steven Rosenberg and the passthejoe blog</h1> <p><strong>Note:</strong> This <em>about</em> file is too damn large and rambling. I need to move MOST of this to a separate entry or three.</p> <p>I am a journalist, programmer, husband, father and weed-puller. Back in the days before Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, I thought blogging was revolutionary and world-changing. I still do. The ability to write what you want for the whole world to read is powerful and profound.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s even better when you own and control your content.</p> <p>For me, a big part of this is running a blog using free software on a server that I either own or pay for.</p> <p>Is what I write here worth reading? I leave that to you.</p> <p>I am experimenting with writing using git both locally and on remote, hosted sites like <a href="https://codeberg.org">https://codeberg.org</a> and <a href="https://github.com">https://github.com</a>. I&rsquo;m thinking I should move the GitHub sites to Codeberg. Here are some things I have worked on:</p> <ul> <li> <p><a href="https://codeberg.org/passthejoe/zen-of-debian">The Zen of Debian</a> — A philosophical look at Debian, Linux and Unix and how I got here.</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="https://github.com/passthejoe/pujol_variations_on_aguado">The Emilio Pujol project</a> — I began this as a way of putting the great classical guitar performer, composer and educator&rsquo;s 17 variations on a study by Dionoso Aguado in Book 4 of his &ldquo;Escuela Razonada de la Guitarra&rdquo; into some kind of context. Now it&rsquo;s more of a look at the overall &ldquo;Escuela,&rdquo; and the life of Pujol and his impact on the guitar.</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="https://codeberg.org/passthejoe/guitar_string_reviews">Guitar string reviews</a> — Reviews of acoustic steel, nylon classical, and roundwound and flatwound electric guitar strings.</p> </li> <li> <p><a href="https://github.com/passthejoe/yamaha-fg403s">Yamaha FG403S</a> — A long-term review of the 2003 Yamaha FG403S acoustic guitar, which I purchased for $199 in early 2004.</p> </li> </ul> <p>Here are the other places my content appears:</p> <ul> <li>I haven&rsquo;t posted on Twitter/X in a long time. I don&rsquo;t plan to start again. Instead, I do my &ldquo;microblog&rdquo;-style posting on Fediverse/Activity Pub sites: <a href="https://ruby.social/@passthejoe">https://ruby.social/@passthejoe</a> and <a href="https://gts.passthejoe.net/@steven">https://gts.passthejoe.net/@steven</a>.)</li> <li>My goal is to consolidate all of my past blog posts at <a href="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/">this site</a>.</li> <li>My WordPress.com blog is at <a href="http://passthejoe.wordpress.com">http://passthejoe.wordpress.com</a>. It has a lot of posts. As of 2020, all of my <a href="http://blogs.dailynews.com/click">Click</a> and <a href="http://blogs.dailynews.com/feelthenuys">Feel the Nuys</a> posts are mirrored over there. The process was easier that I thought it would be — The WordPress import even took care of the images. I think if you export from one WP blog and import to another, as long as the original blog is still live, the import process mirrors the image files and rewrites the URLs so it all works out.</li> </ul> <p><strong>2024 update:</strong> I didn&rsquo;t expect the server running Click and Feel the Nuys to last anywhere near as long as it did. Right now it&rsquo;s offline, broken or dead. Don&rsquo;t trust corporations with your content. Always keep a backup (or many).</p> <p>Old Blogger sites (I can&rsquo;t belive I was so <em>all in</em> on Blogger. I also can&rsquo;t believe that Google keeps these sites alive. I must have created these before WordPress caught on):</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://thisoldmac.blogspot.com">This Old Mac</a></li> <li><a href="http://thisoldpc.blogspot.com">This Old PC</a></li> <li><a href="http://thisoldbrowser.blogspot.com">This Old Browser</a></li> <li><a href="http://thectrlfreak.blogspot.com">The CTRL Freak</a></li> <li><a href="http://valleydays.blogspot.com">2,000 Days in the Valley</a></li> <li><a href="http://jazzguitarjourney.blogspot.com">My Jazz Guitar Journey</a></li> <li>As of mid-2020, I have been checking, and I think I imported most of the posts from these Blogger sites into <a href="http://passthejoe.wordpress.com">my WordPress.com blog</a>. Here are the ones I checked: Jazz Guitar Journey (yes), 2,000 Days (yes)</li> </ul> <h2 id="about-this-blog">About this blog</h2> <p>This blog is a static site generated by <a href="http://gohugo.io">Hugo</a>. It currently uses the <a href="https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/hugo-bearblog/">Hugo Bear Blog</a> theme, which I installed on Sept. 8, 2024.</p> <p>In 2019, this site was hosted on a <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero-w-joins-family">Raspberry Pi Zero W</a> in the coat closet. My ISP didn&rsquo;t seem to mind. I never set up dynamic DNS. Luckily my IP didn&rsquo;t change during the time I was hosting like this.</p> <p>Yes, there are coats in the coat closet.</p> <p>The Pi served this Hugo site a lot more seamlessly than it did my Perl CGI site, but it did an acceptable job on both.</p> <p>Starting in early 2020, I began hosting at <a href="https://nearlyfreespeech.net">https://nearlyfreespeech.net</a>. They have a unique pay-what-you-use pricing model that <em>can</em> end up being very inexpensive. It doesn&rsquo;t work like any other shared hosting you might be familiar with. There is no cPanel. It&rsquo;s a homegrown interface, and the relationship between users, sites and billing is unique. But it works, and if you have any experience at all with running websites (or want to learn), it&rsquo;s a great service.</p> <p><a href="http://nearlyfreespeech.net">NearlyFreeSpeech.net</a> runs on <a href="http://freebsd.org">FreeBSD</a>, and not the usual Linux (which these days seems to be <a href="https://almalinux.org/">Alma</a> or <a href="https://rockylinux.org/">Rocky</a> for the most part). Every site includes shell access, and NFSN offers many programming languages, utilities and other software. They even have Hugo, should you want to do server-side builds (which I did for my <a href="https://passthejoe.tilde.institute/centos">almost-dead-and-gone CentOS blog</a>.</p> <p>The fact that NearlyFreeSpeech offers so much — and does all the maintenance and security — makes the service very compelling. If you don&rsquo;t need a full VPN (and all the headaches that go along with configuring, maintaining and securing your own server), it&rsquo;s hard to deny how good the service really is.</p> <p>And you have to dig a little to tease it out, but NearlyFreeSpeech.net says <a href="https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting">they won&rsquo;t charge you for using bandwidth in excess of their stated cap</a>. That takes away the worry about unexpected charges for traffic spikes that is always present with the &ldquo;major&rdquo; cloud providers.</p> <p>I had a few issues with NFSN that drove me to host elsewhere. None of these concerns will necessarily prevent me from returning to the service, where I still maintain an account. For the sake of clarity, those issues are:</p> <ul> <li> <p>You need to start — and pay for — each web site individually. Even subdomains. You can fudge it with <code>.htaccess</code>, since NFS uses the Apache web server, but that is a bit of an ugly hack. The policy is great if you have one or very few sites. It&rsquo;s not so great if you are experimenting with subdomains and spinning up new sites all the time. The per-site costs can add up.</p> </li> <li> <p>You don&rsquo;t get your own static IP. Instead, you are required to let NFS manage the DNS for your domains, even if you don&rsquo;t host the domains with them (though they do offer domain registrar/hosting service as well). Even though I knew the quirky NFS dashboard well, I prefer to manage the DNS for my domains through my domain registrar.</p> </li> <li> <p>And then there&rsquo;s <code>https</code>. NFS has a pretty cool script that gets you a Let&rsquo;s Encrypt certificate and then renews it for you. Of course it doesn&rsquo;t work that well if you are using <code>.htaccess</code> to run multiple subdomains while only paying for one site. You have to do another hack where you &ldquo;turn off&rdquo; the multiple subdomains in <code>.htaccess</code>, run the cert update script, then turn the subdomains back on. It&rsquo;s hacks upon hacks. But it&rsquo;s not worth paying 3x or 4x as much when none of your sites are doing that much traffic. Of course you can get around this by hosting sites in <em>subdirectories</em> instead of <em>subdomains</em>. But why do this if you don&rsquo;t have to?</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Note on 12/29/2024:</strong> While I have a number of subdomains set up on my VPS right now, I&rsquo;m not really using them, so my multi-domain argument for not hosting with NearlyFreeSpeech.net doesn&rsquo;t hold quite the water it used to. Despite present circumstances, I <em>could</em> spin up as many subdomains as I want on the VPS and not incur any additional costs. And for now $0 is my basic cost, so it&rsquo;s hard to justify a move back.</p> </li> <li> <p>I maintain accounts on two <a href="https://tildeverse.org/">tilde sites</a>, and I can always host web content there for free.</p> </li> <li> <p>Beginning in early 2024, I got a new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, and I returned to hosting this site with the <a href="https://caddyserver.com/">Caddy web server</a> in my coat closet.</p> </li> <li> <p>I love Caddy because it&rsquo;s <em>so easy</em>. Adding domains and subdomains is just a few lines in the config file, and it handles the certs for you like magic.</p> </li> <li> <p>In December 2024, after a Spectrum equipment upgrade (new modem, new router, speed boost from 300 Mbps to 400 Mbps), the Pi Web server stopped working, and rather than fight it, I moved this site and others to an AlmaLinux 9 VPS in the Oracle Cloud Free Tier.</p> </li> </ul> <h2 id="license">License</h2> <p>The content in this blog is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0</a> license, which means you are free to share it under the same license. You must attribute it to me and not use it for commercial purposes.</p> <p>If you would like me to write something for you that you <em>can</em> use for commercial purposes, <a href="mailto:stevenhrosenberg@gmail.com">let&rsquo;s talk about it</a>.</p> Bear https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/bear/ Tue, 03 Sep 2024 12:00:00 +0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/bear/ <h1 id="bear">Bear</h1> <p>Website: <a href="https://bearblog.dev">https://bearblog.dev</a></p> <p>There is a website obesity crisis. Bloated websites are full of scripts, ads, and trackers slowing your readers down every time they try to read your well-crafted content.</p> <p>Bear is all you need to build a fantastic and optimized site or blog. It works perfectly on <strong>any</strong> viewing device. All you need to focus on is writing good content.</p> <p>Bear makes it simple to publish content online and grow an audience while keeping pages tiny, fast, and <strong>optimized for search engines.</strong></p> <p>Each page is ~5kb.</p> <p>Learn more and contribute on <a href="https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog">GitHub</a>.</p> Hugo https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/hugo/ Tue, 03 Sep 2024 12:00:00 +0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/hugo/ <h1 id="hugo">Hugo</h1> <p>Website: <a href="https://gohugo.io">https://gohugo.io</a></p> <p>Written in Go, Hugo is an open-source static site generator available under the <a href="https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/LICENSE">Apache Licence 2.0.</a> Hugo supports TOML, YAML, and JSON data file types, Markdown and HTML content files, and uses shortcodes to add rich content. Other notable features are taxonomies, multilingual mode, image processing, custom output formats, HTML/CSS/JS minification, and support for Sass SCSS workflows.</p> <p>Hugo makes use of a variety of open source projects including:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://github.com/yuin/goldmark">https://github.com/yuin/goldmark</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma">https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/muesli/smartcrop">https://github.com/muesli/smartcrop</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/spf13/cobra">https://github.com/spf13/cobra</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/spf13/viper">https://github.com/spf13/viper</a></li> </ul> <p>Hugo is ideal for blogs, corporate websites, creative portfolios, online magazines, single-page applications, or even a website with thousands of pages.</p> <p>Hugo is for people who want to hand-code their own website without worrying about setting up complicated runtimes, dependencies, and databases.</p> <p>Websites built with Hugo are swift, secure and can be deployed anywhere including, AWS, GitHub Pages, Heroku, Netlify, and any other hosting provider.</p> <p>Learn more and contribute on <a href="https://github.com/gohugoio">GitHub</a>.</p> A new Ruby-based static-site generator from Shinobi creator Bradley Taunt https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/a-new-ruby-based-static-site-generator-from-shinobi-creator-bradley-taunt/ Fri, 02 Aug 2024 07:56:01 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/a-new-ruby-based-static-site-generator-from-shinobi-creator-bradley-taunt/ <p>I wasn&rsquo;t expecting a new static-site generator from Bradley Taunt, who created Shinobi, but I should have expected it because he has written a lot of short blog-generating scripts, as he details in <a href="https://btxx.org/posts/seven-years/">Blogging for 7 years</a></p> <p>He left Shinobi behind a few years ago. I don&rsquo;t begrudge him that — it remains good to use and will continue to be so. Shibobi has issues for sure — the biggest being that it doesn&rsquo;t support inline links or other HTML because it uses XML for web display.</p> <p>He wrote <a href="https://phpetite.btxx.org/">PHPetite</a> before <a href="https://shinobi.btxx.org/">Shinobi</a>, and <a href="https://pblog.btxx.org/">pblog</a> and <a href="https://barf.btxx.org/">barf</a> after that.</p> <p>And now we have <a href="https://wruby.btxx.org/about">wruby</a>.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m interested. It&rsquo;s Ruby, something I already use, and which theoretically makes it more portable than <em>a shell script</em>. It can be harder to write a simple program in Ruby than in the Linux shell, but that portability — <em>it can run in Windows</em> — is something.</p> <p>On the subject of <em>portability</em>, even though Bradley is a user of OpenBSD, I had to figure out how to modify Shinobi in order to work in a BSD environment. <a href="https://stevenrosenberg.net/posts/shinobi_on_openbsd.txt">My changes</a> will allow the Shinobi script to work in OpenBSD, which I tested, and FreeBSD, which I did not. The original script should work fine in NetBSD because the <code>date</code> utility in that system works more like it does in Linux.</p> <p>My interest in Bradley&rsquo;s programs remains high because I&rsquo;m a big fan of blogging, especially with static sites and minimal, understandable software that can be hacked by mortals. That drew me to Shinobi.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s time for me to try this new site generator.</p> <p>The rest of Bradley&rsquo;s blog about wruby <a href="https://wruby.btxx.org/">lives here</a>. <a href="https://btxx.org/">His main blog</a> is also using this script.</p> <p>Take a look at <a href="https://git.sr.ht/~bt/wruby">the wruby repo</a>, which like all of Bradley&rsquo;s projects is on Sourcehut.</p> <p>I have already brought the repo down to my laptop and have started <a href="https://wruby.passthejoe.net">an experimental wruby blog</a>.</p> Hugo in OpenBSD in 2024 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/hugo-in-openbsd-in-2024/ Mon, 13 May 2024 19:19:14 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/hugo-in-openbsd-in-2024/ <p>Am I playing with lukewarm fire by syncing my Hugo blog files across Linux and OpenBSD systems and attempting to publish from both?</p> <p>Maybe it&rsquo;s my aging theme, but the Hugo binary in OpenBSD threw a whole bunch of errors when I created the file for this post.</p> <p>If you see this, call the experiment <em>cautiously successful</em>.</p> OpenBSD seems to run even better in the 7.5 release https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/openbsd-seems-to-run-even-better-in-the-7.5-release/ Wed, 10 Apr 2024 21:32:34 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/openbsd-seems-to-run-even-better-in-the-7.5-release/ <p>I am not sure if I&rsquo;m imagining it, but OpenBSD seems to run better on my 2017 HP Envy laptop on the 7.5 release than it did on 7.3 and 7.4.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t know if the project made improvements in the way it runs on my Intel Core i7 7th Gen CPU (and the on-chip Intel GPU), but it <em>seems</em> like things are quieter in terms of the CPU load as seen in <em>htop</em>, the frequency with which the fans spin up and how cool (to the touch) the laptop feels.</p> <p>This laptop has two 1 GB hard drives. Fedora Silverblue runs on a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and OpenBSD is on a SanDisk SD Ultra SATA SSD.</p> <p>This is the only way I dual-boot — one OS per drive.</p> <p>I finally figured out how to make Syncthing run well in OpenBSD on the 217 GB of data that I&rsquo;m syncing across OpenBSD, Fedora and a third system running Debian.</p> <p>With the help of OpenBSD users/experts in the Fediverse (where you can follow me at @steven@gts.passthejoe.net and/or @passthejoe@ruby.social), I really have gotten everything working: Wi-Fi, audio, video, camera, printing, scanning, suspend/resume.</p> <p>Being a longtime Linux and BSD user is a lot of help. Things that you don&rsquo;t have to configure in modern Linux — but once did — do have to be configured in OpenBSD, though a whole lot is automatic. Still, having the experience of manually adding and configuring printers, scanners and Wi-Fi networks makes it less of a shock to get things up and running.</p> <p>This isn&rsquo;t my first OpenBSD rodeo. But it <em>has</em> been a long time <em>in between rodeos</em>, let&rsquo;s say.</p> <p>Way back in the 4.4 days, I ran OpenBSD as my primary OS on a castoff Gateway laptop, and the difference between then and now is very much night and day.</p> <p>So many more things work today. The improvements are slow and steady, but they do come. I think a lot of it is due to OpenBSD developers using the OS on their laptop/desktop workstations — dogfooding it. They are NOT using MacOS or even Linux to do their development. They use OpenBSD. They want it to work.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m going to save the <em>why</em> of running OpenBSD for another post, but for now just <em>wanting</em> to do it — to do something different and learn new things — is enough for me. It might be enough for you, too.</p> Terminal — the Hugo theme used by this blog — is no longer being maintained https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/terminal-the-hugo-theme-used-by-this-blog-is-no-longer-being-maintained/ Sun, 14 Jan 2024 16:43:43 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/terminal-the-hugo-theme-used-by-this-blog-is-no-longer-being-maintained/ <p>Every time I come back to Hugo as a static-site/blog generator after a long layoff, I look at all the themes available at <a href="https://themes.gohugo.io">https://themes.gohugo.io</a>, and since I&rsquo;m thinking about starting some new sites, I went back to see how my <a href="https://github.com/panr/hugo-theme-terminal">current favorite theme</a>, Terminal (used by this site), was doing.</p> <p>It still looks great but was &ldquo;retired&rdquo; by its developer Radosław Kozieł about 7 months ago.</p> <p>Since I don&rsquo;t update the Hugo binary very often (I tend to download it to my working directory instead of using &ldquo;distro&rdquo; Hugo), I didn&rsquo;t notice any problems — mostly because there aren&rsquo;t any.</p> <p>But with new sites, I might want to use Fedora&rsquo;s Hugo (or a new downloaded binary, which applications in Golang make <em>so easy</em>) and definitely want a currently supported/developed theme.</p> <p>One of the features of Terminal that I really liked was the ability to set one of many colors, so different sites would have a slightly different look but share the same bones.</p> <p>So I&rsquo;ll be searching the theme directory to see what looks good for my Hugo-blogging future.</p> <p><strong>Update on Nov. 5, 2024:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/panr/hugo-theme-terminal">The Terminal theme</a> did return to Hugo. I tried it, and it threw a few errors, though the site still did build. Additionally, there are at least a couple of Terminal-like themes in <a href="https://www.getzola.org/">Zola</a>, which I&rsquo;ve been looking at as a possible Hugo replacement.</p> <p>For now I&rsquo;m using the <a href="https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/hugo-bearblog/">Hugo Bear Blog theme</a>. I&rsquo;m not super crazy about having a home page that doesn&rsquo;t include any blog entries, but I am hopeful that is something I can work on in the future.</p> <p>As I say a couple of paragraphs above, I&rsquo;m kicking the tires on Zola, and that static-site generator also has a <a href="https://www.getzola.org/themes/bearblog/">Bear Blog</a> theme.</p> Standard Ebooks runs everything on a 2 GB VPS with no database and almost no JavaScript https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/standard-ebooks-runs-everything-on-a-2-gb-vps-with-no-database-and-almost-no-javascript/ Thu, 04 Jan 2024 09:38:16 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/standard-ebooks-runs-everything-on-a-2-gb-vps-with-no-database-and-almost-no-javascript/ <p><a href="https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech">How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web</a></p> <p>They&rsquo;re keeping the tech simple. They build ebooks and then distribute them.</p> <p>One single-core server hosts all of their Git repos, builds their ebooks and serves their web site.</p> <p>Alex Cabal says the web site runs on a &ldquo;classic LAP stack.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s missing the &ldquo;M,&rdquo; meaning no MySQL — and no database at all.</p> <p>And the tech is based on PHP. No frameworks.</p> <p>And it runs fast because all (at the time of the post&rsquo;s writing) 630 ebooks could fit in memory:</p> <blockquote> <p>It turned out that for our small data set and very basic data processing requirements, this approach is perfectly performant. Of course, we’ll eventually reach a point where we’ll need a real database, but we’ll probably reach that point first because we want our website to do more complex things, not because the size of our ebook corpus calls for one.</p></blockquote> <blockquote> <p>And in the meantime, we’re still serving millions of page views just fine.</p></blockquote> <p>Also: No JavaScript:</p> <blockquote> <p>JS frameworks do make sense for some larger, very complex apps. But so few websites are legitimately very complex apps. More often than not, they’re just another CRUD app—the kind of document-based, asynchronous model that the classic web was designed and built for.</p></blockquote> <blockquote> <p>And while it may seem faster to develop a new project by starting with a JS framework, it may be just as fast to develop a new project starting from a server-side framework for your language of choice.</p></blockquote> <p>And: No cloud:</p> <blockquote> <p>The big benefit of running a basic Linux box on our own VPS is that everything is just files on a generic, well-understood platform. For the most part, Ubuntu at one host is going to be the same as Ubuntu on another one, and Ubuntu is Linux so jumping to (say) CentOS isn’t a huge leap. These skills are highly transferable, making it much easier to move a project somewhere else, or upgrade a server if our needs outgrow its muscle.</p></blockquote> <blockquote> <p>Lots of people also choose a cloud service because their CDNs can improve request speed. While that’s certainly true, SE’s classic-web approach makes that much less important. Modern web apps have grown to be so bloated in asset size, and spend so much time processing JS, that using a CDN to shave a few milliseconds off of fetching a static asset becomes a lot more valuable to them. But since we carefully control the size and amount of static assets we serve, and just send complete pages back to the client instead of relying on JS to render a page, shaving milliseconds all of a sudden seems much less important. And if the website’s a touch slower at geographic locations far from our host, well, we’re serving free ebooks here—it’s not life-or-death.</p></blockquote> What's the difference between blogging and a longer social post? https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/whats-the-difference-between-blogging-and-a-longer-social-post/ Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:53:53 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/whats-the-difference-between-blogging-and-a-longer-social-post/ <p>There&rsquo;s a certain lack of permanence to social media posts &ndash; in my mind, anyway.</p> <p>In some cases that&rsquo;s a feature, but due to the ease of writing in this medium, it&rsquo;s so easy to just open an app window, write a few lines and hit send. I haven&rsquo;t published a &ldquo;real&rdquo; blog post in months.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve written before about how I would create blog posts more often if doing it was as easy as creating a social post. I even have a script that makes it easy-ish to rsync my Hugo blog, but the Fediverse has such great tools (like <a href="https://tusky.app">Tusky</a>, <a href="https://semaphore.social">Semaphore</a> and the new <a href="https://elk.zone">Elk</a>.</p> <p>I looked into the <a href="https://gohugo.io/tools/front-ends">GUI front-ends</a> that can create Hugo blog posts, but that gets complicated really quickly because they rely on a setup that originates on a Git server with CI/CD. If I started the blog on Netlify or GitHub, that would be easier. But right now I don&rsquo;t think I need or want version control for these blog posts (though maybe I should revisit that).</p> <p>GUI front-ends that appear to be open source and under current development (as of late 2023) include <a href="https://tina.io">TinaCMS</a>, <a href="https://decapcms.org">Decap CMS</a> and <a href="https://github.com/sveltia/sveltia-cms/">Sveltia CMS</a>. Can these projects accommodate writing/editing from desktop/laptop and phone? I&rsquo;ll be looking into it.</p> <p>An alternative for Visual Studio Code users (not me yet) is <a href="https://frontmatter.codes">Front Matter</a>.</p> <p>Maybe I just need to tune up my Hugo scripts and start writing there again. Since I first wrote this post, I have already started.</p> <p>When it comes to blogging or social media, sometimes — either ironically or counter-intuitively — the bigger commercial services can be more compelling in terms of long-term availability. I don&rsquo;t know if Automattic&rsquo;s WordPress or Google&rsquo;s Blogger have ever killed an old blog.</p> <p>And even though I&rsquo;m not posting to Twitter, my thousands of posts are still there. I downloaded a giant file of them, though I&rsquo;m not quite sure what to do with it.</p> <p>Will Twitter ever really &ldquo;shut down&rdquo; for good (literally, figuratively) without another company/entity taking it over and preserving every post as a historical record? I do worry about Twitter killing inactive accounts.</p> <p>Even though Google loves to start services and then kill them, there has never been an inkling about Blogger being on the chopping block — and it has been around (and way under the radar) for decades at this point.</p> <p>I run <a href="https://gts.passthejoe.net">this #GoToSocial server</a>, but it&rsquo;s more an experiment than stable service, and I&rsquo;m unsure how long I can (or will) keep it running. It&rsquo;s currently hosted on an Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS, and there&rsquo;s no easy way (yet) to extract all the posts out of the database. Plus I need to figure out backups. Oracle is no Amazon, and that is a strange and ominous thing to say in more than a couple of ways. (The cloud for hobbyists is something I <em>should</em> be writing about. Oracle doesn&rsquo;t hold your hand and still has a pretty high degree of <em>evil</em> circling it — but they give you <em>so much free stuff</em>.)</p> <p>I do love the 5,000-character post length limit of GoToSocial, which I can set higher or lower.</p> <p>And these ActivityPub-based social services — self-hosted but on the Fediverse — offer built-in community and commenting, which is much harder to bring to traditional static site generators like Hugo.</p> <p>I haven&rsquo;t been keeping up with all the &ldquo;new&rdquo; ActivityPub software, but I&rsquo;m sure there are projects that encourage longer posts with more media. But if my current software can do it, why not just post directly to a Fediverse social media server?</p> <p>I&rsquo;m kind of already doing that.</p> <p>One problem that is easily overcome is the noise of the average social-media feed. Replies, links, cat pictures. It&rsquo;s pretty messy. To prevent long-form writing from getting lost, I am thinking about starting one or more separate social accounts on my instance that are dedicated to different topics of blog-length/level writing. That should provide for a nicer display and easier way to link to the posts (essays? article?).</p> <p><em><a href="https://gts.passthejoe.net/@steven/statuses/01HG6BY5S4C363X95SJB8S4MNN">This post originated</a> on my GoToSocial ActivityPub server.</em></p> How hard is it to move a Hugo setup from one computer to another? https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/how-hard-is-it-to-move-a-hugo-setup-from-one-computer-to-another/ Sun, 26 Nov 2023 20:48:34 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/how-hard-is-it-to-move-a-hugo-setup-from-one-computer-to-another/ <p>I&rsquo;ve done a lot of operating system switching over the past many months and not a whole lot of blogging. My question: Does this thing still work?</p> <p>It&rsquo;s not a terrible question. I&rsquo;m maybe four complete OS changes away from the last time I really used this system, and now I&rsquo;m on immutable/atomic Fedora Silverblue, yet the Hugo binary I stashed with this blog&rsquo;s source still seems to work.</p> <p>But will all of my scripts get this post to the live site? If you see this, it worked.</p> I love a quiet laptop https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/i-love-a-quiet-laptop/ Sat, 22 Apr 2023 13:02:19 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/i-love-a-quiet-laptop/ <p>I love a quiet computer. That&rsquo;s one of the great appeals of the Raspberry Pi. No fans, no spinning drives. If only they had enough power to really do <em>desktop things</em>.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve never experienced a Pi &ldquo;bigger&rdquo; than a Zero W version 1.1, so I don&rsquo;t have enough information.</p> <p>And like most people who still use &ldquo;real&rdquo; computers that aren&rsquo;t smartphones, I do most of my <em>computing</em> on a laptop. And that laptop has an x86_64 (in my case Intel) processor.</p> <p>So how do you run it quietly?</p> <p>Using a Linux system instead of Windows is a great help. I don&rsquo;t really understand Windows, except when I see it running on laptops, mine (in the past) included, the fans are often whirring like mad. And I haven&rsquo;t had a lot of experience with Windows 10/11 on an SSD-equipped laptop, but my wife&rsquo;s work computer is built like this, and the fans are pretty constant.</p> <p>My love of Unix goes back far. I can explain in another post on another day (or find one I wrote in the distant past). But I&rsquo;ve given Windows 8/10 a <em>fair</em> try, and I hate it. The slowness, the inability to open file managers or even create folders in an instant, the long and mysterious updates. I hate it all.</p> <p>Once I had all my free-software applications and utilities set up in Windows 10, I still had the productivity-killing updates, so I moved back to Linux and stayed there.</p> <p>Linux on the desktop can be very quiet. <em>Intense</em> web browsing always spins up the fans, but when I&rsquo;m writing or coding, this laptop — a 2017 HP Envy that is now 6 years old — performs very well and is very quiet.</p> <p>I replaced the 1 TB spinning drive with an NVMe SSD. First I tried a $50 HP-branded drive with 250GB. I ran Debian 10. Between the lack of updates (it&rsquo;s only security and bug fixes) and the speed of the desktop (GNOME is way faster than you might think), it was an immediate and total upgrade.</p> <p>When I ran out of space, I moved to a 1 TB Samsung SSD. The performance is great, and I don&rsquo;t have to think about the drive at all.</p> <p>Plus it&rsquo;s silent. I think I <em>hear</em> the screen making a noise here and there. And when I have 40 browser tabs open, the CPU fan starts to blow.</p> <p>But right now, writing this blog post in Gedit, it&rsquo;s just the sound of me typing. What could be better?</p> <p>An SSD — especially an NVMe type — is the best thing to happen to computing since WiFi. Truly fanless CPUs and motherboards are the next big thing. I don&rsquo;t want to hear the hardware. It&rsquo;s even better if it runs cool. Laptops should be like phones and tablets — quiet. And I give bonus points for cool.</p> <p>All of this makes me think about my <a href="https://codeberg.org/passthejoe/zen-of-debian">Debian book project</a> and how I need to get back to it.</p> Friction in the Hugo composition process — Part 1 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/friction-in-the-hugo-composition-process-part-1/ Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:11:00 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/friction-in-the-hugo-composition-process-part-1/ <p>I would write more, I say, if it was easier to start, write and publish a blog entry.</p> <p>I have a Bash script that allows me to easily write and publish microblog-style entries. Maybe I should come up with something similar for Hugo. It&rsquo;s been on my to-do list.</p> <p>I can write tweets quickly. But a Hugo blog entry is a different thing.</p> <p>There&rsquo;s a bunch of metadata at the top of the post. You need a title, time and date, author name and Twitter handle field. I guess I can forget about that last one in the Elon era. And then there are tags. And I can choose, post by post, whether to show the full post in the index, or not. There&rsquo;s an optional description that makes the blog listing pages look much better. You have to come up with a file name.</p> <p>Then you need to build your Hugo site and upload the output to a server. Much of this can be automated. Some do it &ldquo;professionally&rdquo; with git and some kind of continuous integration setup.</p> <p>For my microblog, I do things the &rsquo;90s way. With scripts. When I fire up my Ruby-scripted command-line program called blogPoster, I can compose a short (or longer) entry, edit it with Vim (or many other text editors) and then send it to a customized blog that displays microblog-style entries (i.e. no title, just text) and optionally sends that post to Twitter and Mastodon. Again, my life just got simpler because Elon&rsquo;s Twitter kicked me (and many, many others) out of the site&rsquo;s API, which my program relies on to post from Ruby.</p> <p>I kicked it up a notch with my CentOS update sites. I have two, and they are identical, except <a href="https://centos.passthejoe.net/">one runs on</a> the FreeBSD-based NearlyFreeSpeech.net shared host, and <a href="https://passthejoe.tilde.institute/centos/">the other is</a> on the OpenBSD-based Tilde.institute free Unix shell and web space service.</p> <p>Both use scripts, one written by me, another by now-former CentOS community manager Rich Bowen (an all-around great and helpful person) to take XML on updates generated by the CentOS project and turn that into Hugo blog posts. I don&rsquo;t do anything. The blogs runs themselves.</p> <p>In this case, feeds and scripts take out all the friction. I even automatically post to Twitter and Mastodon. when a post is created. (And it&rsquo;s time to turn off Twitter on account of the turn it has taken.)</p> <p>But how can the friction be removed from human-created (i.e. <em>normally written</em>) posts? That&rsquo;s what Part 2 will be about.</p> You really need to set rsslimit in your Hugo config file https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/you-really-need-to-set-rsslimit-in-your-hugo-config-file/ Wed, 04 Jan 2023 17:02:27 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/you-really-need-to-set-rsslimit-in-your-hugo-config-file/ <p>I use Hugo to automatically build two sites that pull XML feeds from the CentOS project whenever there are updates to the Stream 8 and Stream 9 Linux distributions. The entries tend to be long, but they are all text, and the great thing is that the blog tends to run itself.</p> <p>I was having trouble with IFTTT, which I use to post the new entries to Twitter, and I found that the XML out of Hugo was <em>sluggish</em>.</p> <p>It was then I learned that the Hugo binary was running out of memory on my servers right in the middle of building the XML page. And that XML file was running about 100 MB in size.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s a little big for a single XML file.</p> <p>I was able to build it on my desktop, where I have a lot more memory at my disposal.</p> <p>Looking at the XML, it appears that the default behavior of Hugo is to put the full text of every entry in the blog into the <code>index.xml</code> file.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s too big.</p> <p>But there&rsquo;s a way to keep the XML file size manageable, quicken the build and make everything work — including IFTTT.</p> <p>There&rsquo;s <a href="https://gohugo.io/templates/rss/#configure-rss">a Hugo config parameter called <code>rssLimit</code></a>. Just set it in your <code>config.toml</code> (or <code>config.yaml</code> or <code>config.json</code>), and Hugo will only put the number of entries you want in your <code>index.xml</code>.</p> <p>In my <code>config.toml</code>, it&rsquo;s:</p> <pre><code>rssLimit = 10 </code></pre> <p>Ten entries is way more manageable than <em>all the entries</em>, and now my Hugo sites are running better than before. And also building without running out of memory.</p> You need a good wire stripper https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/you-need-a-good-wire-stripper/ Fri, 14 Oct 2022 03:00:01 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/you-need-a-good-wire-stripper/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2022_1014_wire_stripper_22774.jpg" alt="Wire cutter/stripper with spring return, Catalog No. WS-150, from All Electronics"></p> <p>I&rsquo;ve never had a good wire stripper. Yes I&rsquo;ve used my teeth, which I don&rsquo;t recommend.</p> <p>I picked <a href="https://www.allelectronics.com/item/ws-150/wire-cutter/stripper-spring-return/1.html">this one</a> up for $7.20 at All Electronics and quickly set the screw for the 22 gauge wire I&rsquo;m working with.</p> <p>It really works. It can even strip the <a href="https://www.stewmac.com/electronics/components-and-parts/wires/single-coil-hookup-wires---12-inches/">cloth wire</a> I bought from StewMac.</p> <p>This makes working with wire so much easier. The comments at All Electronics say the tool hard to adjust, but I had no trouble loosening the screw with a flat-head screwdriver and setting it. And at around $7, if if ever loses its sharpness, I won&rsquo;t hesitate to get a new one.</p> <p>While I&rsquo;m here, let me put in a plug for <a href="https://www.allelectronics.com/">All Electronics</a>. They do a mail order business but also have a store in Van Nuys. There are shelves and walls filled with all kinds of electronic parts. I imagine that it&rsquo;s like the radio-supply stores that used to exist maybe until the 1960s or &rsquo;70s. They have a lot of odd items of the &ldquo;we buy surplus and sell it to you cheap&rdquo; variety.</p> Playing the guitar — no pressure https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/playing-the-guitar-no-pressure/ Sat, 16 Jul 2022 17:16:17 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/playing-the-guitar-no-pressure/ <p>If things don&rsquo;t get too crazy on any given day, I get back to our garage-turned-office and play the guitar a bit. It could be 15 minutes. Sometimes a half-hour.</p> <p>And I <em>want</em> to get back there. I think I&rsquo;ve built a habit. Like I said in <a href="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/posts/2021_1227_practicing/">my last post on this topic</a>, I don&rsquo;t have a lot of structure or focus. I play what I want.</p> <p>Often that&rsquo;s working my way through standard tunes. Lately it&rsquo;s been &ldquo;Waltz for Debby,&rdquo; &ldquo;A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,&rdquo; and &ldquo;All the Things You Are.&rdquo;</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not killing it on these tunes. By any stretch. But I think learning tunes is the key to learning jazz music. And <em>music</em> music.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m doing a lot of work out of Ted Greene&rsquo;s Jazz Guitar: Single Note Soloing, Volume 1. It&rsquo;s a bit of a deep dive, dropping you into the world of arpeggios, scales and lines across the various chords you will encounter (major, minor, dominant) when improvising over jazz tunes. I haven&rsquo;t been dipping into Volume 2 quite as much. There&rsquo;s a density to Volume 1 that keeps me in it.</p> <p>In contrast, I&rsquo;m all over the three volumes of William Leavitt&rsquo;s A Modern Method for Guitar, though these days mostly volumes 2 and 3. I also recently acquired his other reading-oriented books, Melodic Rhythms for Guitar, Reading Studies for Guitar and Advanced Reading Studies for Guitar. While these other three books offer some good note-reading material, I think A Modern Method really does the job well.</p> <p>Leavitt has you reading all over the neck in all keys. Right now I&rsquo;m working on major and melodic minor scales in all 12 keys in the fourth position, which is in Volume 3. I think it&rsquo;s really valuable to play across keys <em>in position</em> without relying on the same two scale forms up and down the neck.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m using both the Leavitt and Greene books not just for technique but to train my ears. I really need to work more with melodic minor, Especially with Ted Greene, you start to hear the chord qualities as you play through the runs and hear the target notes like the 3rd, 7th and 9th.</p> <p>Learning tunes is still slow going. How can you ever really play this music if you don&rsquo;t know the tunes you play inside and out? I mean playing the melodies and chords in any key. Right now I&rsquo;m &ldquo;settling&rdquo; for one key. While looking to the far future, I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s possible to get there without doing what you can <em>in the now</em>.</p> Debian 11 on a Mid-2011 Apple iMac 27-inch https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/debian-11-on-a-mid-2011-apple-imac-27-inch/ Tue, 28 Jun 2022 16:59:21 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/debian-11-on-a-mid-2011-apple-imac-27-inch/ <p>An Apple <a href="https://everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-core-i5-2.7-27-inch-aluminum-mid-2011-thunderbolt-specs.html">Mid-2011 iMac 27-inch &ldquo;Core i5&rdquo; 2.7</a> fell into my lap some time around 2017, and even though it had a few years of MacOS support ahead, it was slow — never mind the 20 GB of RAM I added when supporting it for an Adobe Creative Cloud workflow.</p> <p>Booting took forever. Updates took forever. Saving an inDesign document took &hellip; you guessed it. A lot of spinning beach balls. (You know when I get spinning beach balls in Linux? NEVER.)</p> <p>Once the iMac was replaced with a newer model, the old one came to me. I spent a bit of time trying to re-create my Linux-based workflow in MacOS.</p> <p>I added things like gVim and Homebrew. I&rsquo;m sure Homebrew is great, but if you&rsquo;ve ever used a real Linux package manager, it&rsquo;s a <em>no</em>.</p> <p>I am not a Mac person. The Finder? <em>You have got to be kidding me.</em> Maybe it&rsquo;s OK. But it&rsquo;s not for me.</p> <p>The OS is now unsupported by Apple — which happened for this iMac after a reasonable (in my opinion) nine years. Still, this computer is pretty much <em>mint</em>. It looks like it did when it came out of the box. Why junk it?</p> <p>Even before Apple ended OS support, I suspected this Intel-based Mac might be better as a Linux workstation.</p> <p>And it is.</p> <p>I went for my go-to distribution — Debian Stable, which at the time was Buster (aka Debian 10) and is now, via upgrade, Bullseye (Debian 11).</p> <p>Things might have been easier with Ubuntu — and I do recommend Linux distros that make it easier to get the Radeon graphics card working out of the box. I didn&rsquo;t want something as dynamic as the upgrade-every-six-months Fedora, which I am running on my newer laptop.</p> <p>When I want serious, boring stability, I go for Debian. I&rsquo;ve probably done more Debian installs than I have of any other Linux or BSD, and I&rsquo;ve spent a whole lot of time using Debian. It&rsquo;s like comfortable old slippers.</p> <p>But if you like Ubuntu, it&rsquo;s definitely a great way to go, or to get started with Linux on the 2011 iMac.</p> <p>Still, due to the hardware&rsquo;s age — 11 years at this writing — it pays to go with a distro that doesn&rsquo;t demand the use of (presumably) heavy Snap packages. I still should try it with the latest Ubuntu LTS and see how I feel about Snaps. But since I&rsquo;m a Debian user, I haven&rsquo;t gone that route. I stuck with Debian.</p> <p>That being said, I always recommend trying all of your favorites on a new (to you) computer. This iMac has a DVD drive, but it also boots off USB, and that&rsquo;s how I did my live testing. I&rsquo;ve run Ubuntu, Fedora and AlmaLinux from live images.</p> <p>When I did the original install, which I&rsquo;m still running, I did a dual-boot using <a href="http://refit.sourceforge.net/">rEFIit</a> with the original MacOS. But once my laziness wears off (and I sure hope it does), I plan to devote the entire 1 TB drive to Linux.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s just not worth dual-booting, especially with an unsupported MacOS that I almost never used, even when it was still getting security patches. Why would I? ANY Linux beats MacOS for speed.</p> <p>And then there&rsquo;s software availability, the package management, the desktop environments I already know.</p> <p>Truthfully, I am pretty sour on dual-booting with Windows, MacOS, or even other Linux distros. It&rsquo;s a complicated and brittle process. I like to run one OS at a time and give it the whole drive.</p> <p>Sure, this iMac is old, but it runs GNOME 3 very well. There&rsquo;s no need to use Xfce or other &ldquo;lighter&rdquo; desktop environments unless you prefer them. I&rsquo;m a big GNOME 3 fan, and the fact that the DE seems to run great on even my oldest hardware keeps me using it.</p> <p>I do recommend getting a Debian Live image and booting it up along with Ubuntu, Fedora and whatever else you like that has a live environment.</p> <p>But when I do a Debian install, I generally use the <a href="https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/">non-free firmware amd64</a> netinstall image, though as I remember it I still had to add some firmware after the installation. If I do a reinstall and it turns out I don&rsquo;t need to sneak firmware onto the box, this tutorial will get a lot shorter. I <em>hope</em> that happens.</p> <p>Debian doesn&rsquo;t make it easy to find the right image. <a href="https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/11.3.0+nonfree/amd64/iso-cd/">Here&rsquo;s what I would use for 11.3</a>.</p> <p>So let&rsquo;s get to it. First of all, remember:</p> <ul> <li> <p>To run Debian 11 on a mid-2011 iMac 27-inch, you will very likely need to add some firmware and make a tweak in the GRUB settings.</p> </li> <li> <p>I don&rsquo;t recommend dual-booting with rEFIit, and while you can hook up the original Mac wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard, It&rsquo;s better to have a &ldquo;real&rdquo; USB (wired or wireless) keyboard. I use a cheap Logitech wireless keyboard-mouse combo with a single USB receiver to save a port.</p> </li> </ul> <p>I already had the 20 GB of RAM from the iMac&rsquo;s MacOS days, but it still had — and has — its original 1 TB drive.</p> <p>It would be great to replace that spinning hard drive with an SSD, but the procedure for replacing the disk drive is a bit too difficult for me. It involves suction cups for lifting out the screen, detaching and reattaching some kind of thermal sensor connected to the drive, and other things I&rsquo;d rather not deal with. WHO WANTS TO DEAL WITH <em>SUCTION CUPS</em>?</p> <p>The iMac is a little slower with a traditional hard drive but still very usable. Mostly it just boots slower. Once you&rsquo;re up and running in Debian, I barely notice the drive slowing me down.</p> <p>And another bonus of not doing a dual-boot is that you can encrypt the entire drive and add a good measure of security. If the system powers down, nobody can get to your data without the passphrase.</p> <p>One caveat: The 2011 iMac runs &ldquo;hot.&rdquo; Literally. I mean the top back side of the computer throws off a lot of heat. It is the same whether you run MacOS or Linux. It&rsquo;s <em>designed</em> this way. The 2017 iMac that replaced this runs super cool, has way more screen resolution and also cost $3,000+. Again, it&rsquo;s hard to beat $0 for a sweet Linux workstation with a giant screen and decent (2560x1440) resolution.</p> <p>When I got the 2011 iMac, the original mouse was long dead. The stock Bluetooth Mac keyboard was worn but 100% working. It was a bit of a nightmare to pair it in Linux, but I managed to do it. However, I soon replaced it with a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-MK235-Wireless-Keyboard-Mouse/dp/B01AROOL12">$25 Logitech wireless keyboard-and-mouse combo</a>. In Linux you need a USB keyboard (wired or wireless) around anyway because it takes the Bluetooth keyboard longer to be recognized by Linux during the boot process than in MacOS.</p> <p>Also, the original Mac keyboard has a backspace key but <strong>no delete</strong>. What the hell? I spent $25 to end the frustration. I still have the original keyboard, but I pulled the batteries and put it in a box.</p> <p>The tutorial I used to pair the original Mac Bluetooth keyboard in Linux has disappeared, but <a href="https://techtips.easycloudsolutions.com/2020/04/28/how-to-setup-apple-wireless-keyboard-on-ubuntu/">this post</a> looks pretty much the same. Still, for Linux use I wouldn&rsquo;t bother.</p> <p>I almost forgot to mention that suspend and resume work perfectly, and the screen brightness adjusts automatically depending on room light.</p> <p>Before you install, here are some things you should know and prepare for. Either print out this post, or look at it on another device.</p> <p>My iMac has the following firmware packages installed:</p> <pre><code>firmware-amd-graphics/stable,now 20210315-3 all [installed] firmware-linux-free/stable,now 20200122-1 all [installed,automatic] firmware-linux-nonfree/stable,now 20210315-3 all [installed] firmware-misc-nonfree/stable,now 20210315-3 all [installed,automatic] </code></pre> <p>The Debian installer should take care of <code>firmware-linux-free</code>.</p> <p>I recommend downloading <a href="https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/all/firmware-amd-graphics/download">firmware-amd-graphics</a>, <a href="https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/all/firmware-linux-nonfree/download">firmware-linux-nonfree</a> and <a href="https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/all/firmware-misc-nonfree/download">firmware-misc-nonfree</a> as .deb packages and putting them on a FAT-formatted USB drive that can be mounted from the command line so you can install them from there if you don&rsquo;t have the network working.</p> <p>Yep you need some command-line experience to make this happen — unless the non-free firmware Debian ISO manages to work the way it&rsquo;s supposed to. More on that after my next install.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s likely the system will boot without a working GUI, and installing this firmware should make it work.</p> <p>Once you&rsquo;ve done your Debian install and gotten the GUI to work by installing the three nonfree firmware packages from your USB drive, use your superuser (sudo or su) powers and add this line to <code>/etc/default/grub</code>:</p> <pre><code>GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=&quot;quiet radeon.dpm=0 acpi_backlight=vendor&quot; </code></pre> <p>Here is an example portion of <code>/etc/default/grub</code>, so you see what I&rsquo;m talking about. <em>Just add the line above like so</em>:</p> <pre><code>GRUB_DEFAULT=0 GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2&gt; /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=&quot;quiet radeon.dpm=0 acpi_backlight=vendor&quot; GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=&quot;&quot; </code></pre> <p>Then reboot, and it should work like butter.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s pretty much <em>all</em> there is to it. I&rsquo;ve had the iMac running Debian long enough to have done one in-place upgrade, which went perfectly. I use a few Flatpaks here and there for things like Spotify and Zoom, but it&rsquo;s mostly standard .deb packages.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t do a lot of development on the Debian iMac — yet. I certainly could. I love the big screen. It&rsquo;s not as nice as the screen on a 2022 iMac, but you can&rsquo;t beat the price ($0) and the ease at which Linux goes on one of these older Macs.</p> <p>What I do use the Debian iMac for are tasks that include Web production on the newspaper sites I work on (writing, editing, heavy WordPress posting, photo editing), playing audio — the speakers are awesome — and recording it via Audacity. I am using the real-time kernel, and I rely on Carla Schroder&rsquo;s excellent <a href="https://nostarch.com/audacity.htm">The Book of Audacity</a> for my recording know-how.</p> <p>For reference, here is the output of <code>lspci</code> on my mid-2011 iMac 27-inch:</p> <pre><code>00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller (rev 09) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port (rev 09) 00:02.0 Display controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Universal Host Controller #5 (rev 05) 00:1a.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b5) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b5) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev b5) 00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev b5) 00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Universal Host Controller #1 (rev 05) 00:1d.7 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Z68 Express Chipset LPC Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port Desktop SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Whistler [Radeon HD 6730M/6770M/7690M XT] 01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Turks HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 6500/6600 / 6700M Series] 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme BCM57765 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 10) 03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR93xx Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01) 04:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): LSI Corporation FW643 [TrueFire] PCIe 1394b Controller (rev 08) 05:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010] 06:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010] 06:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010] 06:04.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010] 06:05.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010] 06:06.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010] 07:00.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation CV82524 Thunderbolt Controller [Light Ridge 4C 2010] </code></pre> <p><strong>Discuss this post on <a href="https://twitter.com/passthejoe/status/1541926606372933633">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://ruby.social/web/@passthejoe/108620953898299809">Mastodon</a>.</strong></p> Goodbye CentOS Stream 8. I guess we didn't click. https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/goodbye-centos-stream-8.-i-guess-we-didnt-click./ Mon, 09 May 2022 04:25:16 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/goodbye-centos-stream-8.-i-guess-we-didnt-click./ <p><strong>Writer&rsquo;s note on March 3, 2024:</strong> <em>I think I took this post off my CentOS blog at some point because it might have been too &ldquo;mean,&rdquo; or maybe just too &ldquo;critical.&rdquo; I felt bad. Being the bull in Red Hat&rsquo;s CentOS china shop wasn&rsquo;t a fun role. Since this post was first written, CentOS 9 has been released and feeding into RHEL 9 for some time. I think the way it still goes is that development happens in Stream 9 and then moves to RHEL 9. But critical security patches begin in RHEL 9 and eventually make their way to Stream 9. I&rsquo;m not sure if there is a regular cadence, but the evidence of patches — especially to Stream&rsquo;s Linux kernel — really only exists in the changelogs on commits in the CentOS Stream Gitlab.</em></p> <p><em>As I&rsquo;ve shouted into the Cheeto bag, all I wanted for CentOS — the project — was for it to be run like Fedora. Like the four F&rsquo;s — maybe a little less &ldquo;first,&rdquo; but just as much/many &ldquo;friends,&rdquo; &ldquo;freedom&rdquo; and &ldquo;features.&rdquo; I asked on the Fediverse if there is an active CentOS Stream community somewhere. I suppose there are SIGs. <a href="https://CentOS.org">https://CentOS.org</a> is pretty dead. The mailing lists <a href="https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo">are thin</a>. Nothing much <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CentOS/">on Reddit</a>. Very little <a href="https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/neighbors/centos/71">on Fedora Discussion</a>.</em></p> <p><em>At the time, I thought I was advocating for users. I was just pissing off (vocal) Red Hatters. Who&rsquo;s advocating for CentOS users now? I&rsquo;d love to find those people, or person. I think Red Hat did a pretty good job of killing the CentOS user community. I&rsquo;m not sure if that&rsquo;s what they wanted to do. To the best of my knowledge, it happened.</em></p> <p><em>It does trouble me that Fedora is so good. It is excellent technically, and it encourages the participation of a wonderful community. I think about all the stuff that has happened at Red Hat in the past few years: The troubles with the end of CentOS Linux, the beginnings of CentOS Stream and (possibly worst of all) the restrictions on RHEL source code and patch announcements. Is it enough to put me off of Fedora? It&rsquo;s rough. I do love the distro and the community. But are we right, as Fedora users, to &ldquo;help&rdquo; make a RHEL that&rsquo;s not anywhere near the open-source exemplar that it was in years&rsquo; past? I can&rsquo;t answer.</em></p> <p><strong>Writer&rsquo;s note on May 9, 2022:</strong> <em>I wrote most of this post in January 2022, but held off on publishing due to my respect for Rich Bowen, then the community manager for CentOS. Maybe I was a little hot-headed. But things got a bit worse for me in terms of things not improving in Stream 8 and Red Hatters who weren&rsquo;t Rich pretty much telling me to shut the fuck up. Long story short, I moved to Fedora Silverblue and have been there for a few months. But I felt it was time to publish the post. I added bits, mainly Red Hatter Carl George&rsquo;s Twitter thread basically outlining the shortcomings in the Stream 8 workflow that prompted me to begin complaining about the distro&rsquo;s processes in the first place.</em></p> <p><em>I thank Rich for his understanding and patience, but now it&rsquo;s time for this post to appear.</em></p> <p>I&rsquo;ve started to see the <em>promised improvements</em> in security patches for CentOS Stream 9, which I <em>don&rsquo;t think</em> is technically a <em>beta</em> release, though RHEL 9 still <em>is</em> a beta at the time of this writing (May 2022). So all is not lost, and I may very well give CentOS Stream 9 a try. I&rsquo;m running it in a VM right now, as a matter of fact.</p> <p>Before this gets tl;dr, here are the highlights:</p> <ul> <li>I decided to try CentOS Stream 8 to see if it could work on the desktop</li> <li>I noticed that updates began appearing for RHEL 8 that didn&rsquo;t make it to Stream 8 for multiple weeks</li> <li>Red Hatters defended, denied, gaslit and made future promises</li> </ul> <p>What I learned is that Red Hat proper doesn&rsquo;t really know how to deal with users who aren&rsquo;t paying customers. They are contemptuous of those who aren&rsquo;t spending with them. Fair play, but DON&rsquo;T HALF-ASS A MAJOR OPEN-SOURCE PROJECT as a result. Just say you&rsquo;re uninterested and stop doing it. They did that with CentOS Linux. I imagine that when CentOS Stream 9 is well underway and has a better workflow from a security standpoint, Stream 8 will fade into irrelevance. Or that won&rsquo;t happen. Who knows?</p> <h3 id="the-original-post-with-some-new-bits">The original post (with some new bits)</h3> <p>I stopped running CentOS Stream 8.</p> <p>I can see myself returning to CentOS Stream 9 after RHEL 9&rsquo;s release, but I&rsquo;m done with Stream 8.</p> <p>In large part my decision to stop running CentOS Stream 8 was motivated by CentOS and Red Hat culture. It&rsquo;s pretty obvious: I don&rsquo;t fit. Also, Red Hat — despite its dominance in the paid-Linux space ­— is a little broken from a cultural standpoint.</p> <p>The situation with the CentOS Stream 8 kernel has puzzled me ever since I began running the system. Was the kernel adequately patched, often vulnerable, or do kernel patches <em>not matter as much as people say they do</em>?</p> <p>I really don&rsquo;t know, but as I would post on Twitter about the quixotic processes at work on the Stream 8 kernel, I got a lot of pushback.</p> <p>This is how <em>I felt</em> the responses broke down:</p> <p><strong>20%:</strong> &ldquo;Trust us, we are doing this right, even though it doesn&rsquo;t look that way&rdquo;</p> <p><strong>40%:</strong> &ldquo;CentOS 8 Stream&rsquo;s processes are kind of messed up, and we will get <em>everything</em> right in CentOS Stream 9&rdquo;</p> <p><strong>40%:</strong> &ldquo;Please shut up. We like to handle things quietly, and you are not quiet.&rdquo;</p> <p>My contention was — and is — that CentOS is fighting for its life. It is <em>bleeding</em> users to Alma, Rocky, Ubuntu, Debian and just about every other server-friendly distribution.</p> <p>Red Hat&rsquo;s decision to &ldquo;replace&rdquo; CentOS Linux 8 with Stream 8, a system with opaque processes and a upstream &ldquo;lead&rdquo; over RHEL on most packages but <em>definitely not the most important one</em> — the Linux kernel — was playing with fire.</p> <p>The more I looked at updates in Stream 8, the more I saw that just about every patch that had to do with security was not just days but weeks behind RHEL. And there is no errata, no e-mail, NOTHING to tell users what&rsquo;s going on. <em>Just wait for the patches and trust us</em> seems to be the way.</p> <h3 id="an-interlude-in-which-carl-george-berates-me-one-month-then-de-facto-agrees-with-me-in-another">An interlude in which Carl George berates me one month, then de facto agrees with me in another</h3> <p>I don&rsquo;t know if I&rsquo;d call it <em>surprise</em>, <em>confirmation</em>, <em>grudging admission</em>, or something else, but one of the Red Hatters who was very unhappy with me <em>questioning Red Hat&rsquo;s motivations or processes</em>, finally did tweet <em>pretty much</em> what I have been saying since I figured it out. It&rsquo;s Red Hat&rsquo;s Carl George, who blocked me on Twitter over this very issue:</p> <p><a href="https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1515064280185552897">https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1515064280185552897</a></p> <p><a href="https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1515064522163343369">https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1515064522163343369</a></p> <p><a href="https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1515065010166374402">https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1515065010166374402</a></p> <p><a href="https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1515065570844024835">https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1515065570844024835</a></p> <p><em>(Note: I think the above tweets can only be seen by &ldquo;approved followers,&rdquo; of which I am not one)</em></p> <p>I&rsquo;d have preferred that Carl George had not blocked me on Twitter. I&rsquo;d have preferred that the legendary Johnny CentOS had not told me to piss off.</p> <p>But those things did happen.</p> <p>I&rsquo;d also prefer that Carl George not soft-pedal the fact that the &ldquo;least common&rdquo; packages that fall under his &ldquo;Scenario 3&rdquo; in the tweets above are all the packages that generally get critical security patches, including the LINUX KERNEL.</p> <p>Red Hat is a strange place. It&rsquo;s seems <em>paternalistic</em> in its way. What I got was: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t question, don&rsquo;t complain, trust but don&rsquo;t verify, you&rsquo;re lucky to get these free bits, stay quiet.&rdquo;</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve tweeted about security issues in other distros — primarily Debian — before. And while I&rsquo;ve gotten fanboy apologists telling me I&rsquo;m wrong to question why a web browser hasn&rsquo;t been updated in half a year (a situation that has since been rectified), I never got project members aiming to bully me into silence. Only with Red Hat.</p> <h3 id="from-a-whisper-to-a-stream">From a whisper to a Stream</h3> <p>Killing off the traditional downstream CentOS and only offering Stream put a heavy, self-imposed burden on Red Hat. With <em>old</em> CentOS, users could rely on the RHEL security advisories because the patches <em>were the same as RHEL&rsquo;s</em>. But now <em>much of the time</em> (who really knows?) Stream 8 updates <em>first</em>, except for those times <em>when RHEL does</em>.</p> <p>Should you equip a production server with a Linux distro that can&rsquo;t — or won&rsquo;t — publish security alerts <a href="https://lwn.net/Alerts/">that appear on Linux Weekly News</a>? For me the answer is no.</p> <p>Red Hat <em>has</em> to get this right. And NOW. CentOS Stream 8 should be fixed. Eventually CentOS Stream 9 will have a full EPEL, and RHEL 9 will be released, and I have to <em>hope</em> that all will be right when those things happen.</p> <p>Seen from the outside, Red Hat has a dysfunctional culture, especially when it comes to CentOS. From what I can infer, a lot of Red Hatters would rather put the CentOS Project in a burlap sack with a bunch of heavy rocks and throw it into a deep lake.</p> <p>Yet CentOS Stream 8 had enough juice to both happen in the first place as well as be positioned as the upstream to RHEL, even though it&rsquo;s not an upstream at all for things that matter — like security patches for critical packages.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t work for Red Hat. I am not a Linux system developer. I am not a packager. I&rsquo;m just a user who writes a bit. I have no skin in the game.</p> <p>What bothered me more than anything was that the few of us who brought up the issues with CentOS Stream updates pretty much stood alone.</p> <p>When Red Hat decided to end the traditional downstream CentOS Linux, there was a sea of pitchforks.</p> <p>But when its &ldquo;replacement,&rdquo; CentOS Stream 8, fell behind in security patches, those former pitchfork-holders fell silent.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m pretty sure they all just moved on. Smart move.</p> <p>I <em>hope</em> things change, but right now I can&rsquo;t recommend CentOS Stream 8 — for use on servers or desktops. If you want to stay in the <em>Enterprise Linux</em> world, &ldquo;real&rdquo; RHEL, or free downstreams Rocky and Alma are the way to go.</p> <p>In particular, Rocky and Alma are bending over backward to create community, develop infrastructure and give users what they want. For me that&rsquo;s speedy security updates.</p> <p>Outside of the EL world, there are Debian, Fedora, SUSE and Ubuntu.</p> <p>And I do think Stream 9 will be better. We&rsquo;ll have to wait (for RHEL 9) and see.</p> <p>Then there&rsquo;s Fedora. Hey, that&rsquo;s a Red Hat product <em>in some way</em>. How do they <em>get it so right</em>?</p> <p>Fedora probably had growing pains aplenty in the years after free Red Hat Linux was hammered into paid RHEL. Now Fedora has a clear purpose, solid technical processes and an excellent security record. It also embraces its contributors and users — and wants everybody to be involved.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s where I went. I decided to give Fedora Silverblue a try. It&rsquo;s a whole new way to build a Linux distribution, with an immutable base, Flatpaks for most GUI applications and Toolbox containers for CLI development. So far it&rsquo;s working great. And I don&rsquo;t have to worry about security because I&rsquo;m getting new kernels <em>all the time</em>, and I can go to LWN.net — or follow <a href="https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/">Fedora&rsquo;s Package Announce mailing list</a> to find out what&rsquo;s going on.</p> <p>Silverblue is new and novel — kind of like Stream 8, just more so.</p> <p>CentOS says it&rsquo;s looking for community. I suspect their idea of <em>community</em> is a bunch of companies like Facebook with seas of developers, some of whom are eager to contribute back to RHEL via Stream. I hope it works out for them. I&rsquo;m pretty sure that pushing back on users who find serious issues is not the way to build that community.</p> I try to play the guitar every day https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/i-try-to-play-the-guitar-every-day/ Mon, 27 Dec 2021 19:59:59 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/i-try-to-play-the-guitar-every-day/ <p>I didn&rsquo;t make a New Year&rsquo;s resolution. I just wanted to get my hands on the guitar. I didn&rsquo;t set any goals, though I do have them. I just want to play.</p> <p>I split my time between classical music, jazz standards and improvisation. I want to learn standard tunes — the melody and harmony — and be able to play over them. I work on my classical technique. If I really concentrated, I could develop something resembling a classical repertoire.</p> <p>The thing is to keep picking up the guitar. It&rsquo;s not a chore. I want to do it. That makes it easy. I just have to carve out somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes a day. That&rsquo;s doable. If I said, &ldquo;I need to spend 3 hours a day,&rdquo; not only would that not happen, but I would probably not enjoy it either.</p> <p>So my goal is the routine. Pick up the guitar every day.</p> <p>If I were more focused and worked on the same things every day, I&rsquo;d probably make &ldquo;better&rdquo; progress. For now I do what I want. Sometimes I play through &ldquo;All the Things You Are.&rdquo; I really need to work on the harmony. I need to memorize how it modulates. I also work on &ldquo;A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.&rdquo; It doesn&rsquo;t change keys with the frequency of &ldquo;ATTYA,&rdquo; but there&rsquo;s plenty to learn from just about any standard tune.</p> <p>Other times I play exercises from Emilio Pujol&rsquo;s books. The etudes at the end of the books are fairly difficult, but the exercises from the text are easier and very much like workouts, you don&rsquo;t think playing through them is going to pay off, but they really do develop your right- and left-hand technique.</p> <p>I just picked up a piece by Miguel Llobet after reading an article about his Bach transcriptions in the new Soundboard magazine. It wasn&rsquo;t Bach. I chose <a href="https://imslp.org/wiki/Can%C3%A7%C3%B3_del_lladre_(Llobet%2C_Miguel)">&ldquo;Cançó del Lladre (Song of the Thief)&rdquo;</a>. It&rsquo;s within my capability, sounds great with the low E string is tuned down to D, and has some interesting harmonics.</p> <p>I could shed a month on this piece and have something to play.</p> <p>I could also play a standard tune for a couple of months and try to figure out a way to play it solo with chords here and there. Despite not having goals, I do have a goal: To figure out how to play standard tunes in the way that I &ldquo;hear&rdquo; them. Not with crazy stretches and heavily arranged harmony, but something more like what a pianist would do with a lead sheet: Play it solo with the melody and simple chords. I would love to be able to do this with 10 or 20 tunes, but first I have to begin with one. I know what I want, but the chords on the lead sheets seem &ldquo;wrong&rdquo; a lot of the time.</p> <p>As aimless as my approach has been, I can feel myself playing better. I decided to play without right-hand fingernails — even on classical guitar — and I have become much more comfortable doing that.</p> <p>Another part of my practice has been playing through William Leavitt&rsquo;s &ldquo;Modern Method for Guitar,&rdquo; the old Berklee books aimed at jazz players. They don&rsquo;t really teach much jazz, but you do learn a lot of jazz chords in between the books&rsquo; primary lessons on reading and playing in different keys all over the fingerboard. And all those scales can help you play just about anything: tunes and improvisation.</p> <p>Maybe a little planning (and playing the same things every day) would help, but for now I just play whatever strikes me, usually for a few minutes. I still really want to pick up the guitar, so I guess I&rsquo;m doing something right.</p> <p><strong>Discuss this post <a href="https://twitter.com/passthejoe/status/1476631554692550657">on Twitter</a>.</strong></p> Not a review of CentOS Stream 8 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/not-a-review-of-centos-stream-8/ Wed, 06 Oct 2021 12:00:12 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/not-a-review-of-centos-stream-8/ <p>I have so many notes. I started running CentOS Stream 8 five months ago, and I wanted to document every win, loss, setback and solution as I tried to make what isn&rsquo;t really a desktop distribution — Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its clones) — into <em>my</em> laptop operating system.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not going to look at my notes. This non-review won&rsquo;t write itself, and the notes aren&rsquo;t going to do it for me.</p> <p>In 2019, I was running Debian Buster and eventually Bullseye on my 2017 HP Envy laptop equipped with a 250 GB HP NVMe M.2 SSD.</p> <p>By early 2021, I wanted a bigger SSD and bought a 1 TB Samsung EVO NVMe M.2 SSD. I opened the laptop and swapped in the bigger drive.</p> <p>Since I had a new drive, it was a good time to try a new (to me) operating system. I had been following the controversy over IBM/Red Hat <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-shifts-from-red-hat-unbranded-to-red-hat-beta/">ending its CentOS Linux 8</a> distribution very early and &ldquo;replacing&rdquo; it with the rolling CentOS Stream 8.</p> <p>I am a big fan of Fedora, and CentOS/RHEL has always struck me as a kind of, sort of Fedora LTS.</p> <p>RHEL and its downstream clones are cut from Fedora releases. And they are supported for a much longer period of time — with five years promised for CentOS Stream users and the full 10 years for RHEL and its new downstreams, <a href="https://almalinux.org/">AlmaLinux</a> and <a href="https://rockylinux.org/">Rocky Linux</a>. (Nobody is suggesting you stick to <em>the same desktop system for 10 years</em>. I don&rsquo;t remember ever using the same Linux distribution for more than two years on a system I use every day. I only offer these support periods <em>as a point of reference</em>.)</p> <p>While various Red Hat employees have tried to <em>disabuse</em> me of thinking that CentOS (be it the dying <em>Linux</em> or the living <em>Stream</em>) is a Fedora LTS, at some level I wanted a Fedora-like system that didn&rsquo;t require a fairly major upgrade every six months to a year. And RHEL/CentOS, along with new clones Alma and Rocky, are certainly that.</p> <p>And working with an OS that is &ldquo;closer&rdquo; to the Red Hat mothership had a certain appeal.</p> <p>The CentOS team — meaning the Red Hat people who <em>work on CentOS</em> — have justified the replacement of CentOS Linux by CentOS Stream with two things that make it different:</p> <ul> <li>CentOS Stream is supposed to be slightly <em>upstream</em> of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (though in practice it&rsquo;s more complicated)</li> <li>CentOS Stream will have a real <em>community</em> of not just users but also <em>contributors</em> (My wish: Make the CentOS community as much like the Fedora community as possible.)</li> </ul> <p>These two points intrigued me, and with assurances that Stream is not anywhere near as far <em>upstream</em> as Fedora and includes packages that undergo testing in the bowels of Red Hat before they are pushed to possibly unwitting Stream users, I took the leap.</p> <p>I decided to download the 700 MB Boot ISO and not the 10 GB DVD ISO of CentOS Stream 8. (Point of order: Even though nobody is using DVD-R discs any more, why continue calling it a <em>DVD</em> ISO if it&rsquo;s <em>too big to fit on a DVD?</em>)</p> <p>At the time, the Boot ISO had a bug that prevented it from offering users a working mirror to do the installation. I figured out how to manually enter a mirror and complete the installation, and one of my first <em>participatory</em> acts as a CentOS Stream user was filing a bug on the installer.</p> <p>Filing that bug was more than a little complicated. CentOS systems that aren&rsquo;t Stream have their own repos. But Stream&rsquo;s development happens inside Red Hat. You file bugs through the Red Hat Bugzilla. I already had a Fedora account, and it works in the RH Bugzilla, so I was off to the races.</p> <p>The bug was fixed. It was the first inkling that CentOS Stream might be like Fedora in that broken things <em>do</em> get fixed in a reasonable time frame.</p> <p>But something bothered me. I saw messages in forums here and there about this bug, but there weren&rsquo;t very many people running into it. From what I could tell, that meant very few were using the 700 MB installer — and I don&rsquo;t think it was because the 10 GB installer was so overwhelmingly popular.</p> <p>Still, I can&rsquo;t think of <em>any other</em> Linux distribution that would release an ISO without testing it. How could even <em>a single tester</em> have missed this?</p> <p>My contention — then and now — is that CentOS Stream 8 is not being used by very many people, and definitely not <em>actively</em> in an &ldquo;I&rsquo;m excited about this distribution and want you to know it&rdquo; way.</p> <p>You don&rsquo;t see a lot of tweets from users. The <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CentOS/">CentOS subreddit</a>, which <em>actively insults</em> Stream in its description, is nearly dead. The CentOS Forums aren&rsquo;t terribly busy overall, and there are very few posts about Stream.</p> <p>Red Hat/CentOS people say theirs is a mailing-list culture.</p> <p>So I joined the CentOS mailing lists. Not a lot is happening there either. Maybe things will get more busy.</p> <p>What CentOS Stream needs is some good word of mouth. Today this happened:</p> <p><a href="https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1445598349789306880">https://twitter.com/carlwgeorge/status/1445598349789306880</a></p> <p><em>(Note: I think the above tweet can only be seen by approved followers, of which I am not one)</em></p> <p>If CERN is OK using CentOS Stream on thousands of mission-critical computers, it&rsquo;s probably OK for you and me.</p> <p>A half-dozen more of these, and Stream will have some momentum.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not here to talk about whether CentOS Stream 8 is drawing a large user base. I wish it was. Overall I&rsquo;ve been pretty happy with Stream, and I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s necessary for almost all users to opt for &ldquo;real&rdquo; RHEL or &ldquo;true&rdquo; RHEL clones like the new AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux.</p> <p>One thing Alma and Rocky are doing is making <em>the community</em> the center of what they do. Just as CentOS — the project — should take its cues from the Fedora Project, it should also see what Alma and Rocky are doing and <em>do more of that</em>. Much more.</p> <p>I worry that Red Hat and IBM&rsquo;s idea of &ldquo;community&rdquo; for Stream is largely centered around the giant corporations like Facebook who are eager to get their patches into RHEL and don&rsquo;t at all mind <em>dogfooding</em> Stream as part of that process. What about the <em>individual user and contributor</em>? I hope the CentOS team doesn&rsquo;t ignore that part of the Linux community in favor of the large enterprises who are very keen to contribute directly to RHEL.</p> <p>Have I been a <em>complainer</em> in the CentOS community? Yeah, probably. A lot of that has to do with a lack of understanding on my part — and lack of explanation on the project&rsquo;s part — of how CentOS Stream 8 is developed.</p> <p>I like the idea of Stream being the <em>upstream</em> to RHEL. I am very happy to get updates a few days or a week earlier than RHEL.</p> <p>But the kernel — the most important part of any and every Linux system — is more of a mystery. I started seeing kernel updates for RHEL, and five, 10, 15 days would go by with nothing for Stream 8. Did all those <a href="https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/security/what-is-cve">CVEs</a> get fixed a week or two <em>earlier</em> than that?</p> <p>I have been looking at <a href="https://git.centos.org/rpms/kernel/commits/c8s">CentOS Stream kernel source</a> (yeah, this has driven me to <em>that</em>) and comparing the CVEs cited there with <a href="https://lwn.net/Alerts/Red_Hat/">Red Hat update messages published on LWN.net</a>. So far it looks like at least some (but by no means all) <em>are</em> being fixed a couple of weeks earlier in the Stream kernel. What would be better? Letting users know it&rsquo;s happening. Emails or web sites that detail security and bug fixes? CentOS needs them. I&rsquo;ve heard that the Red Hat connection makes this <em>difficult</em>. They need to find a way.</p> <p>And what <em>isn&rsquo;t</em> getting fixed in Stream in a timely manner? It&rsquo;s hard to tell.</p> <p>Hint to Red Hat managers and CentOS developers: CentOS Stream should absolutely be on the <a href="https://lwn.net/Alerts/">LWN.net Security page</a>.</p> <p>Still, I&rsquo;ve gotten to the point where I trust Red Hat to deliver — or at least <em>hope they will deliver</em> — a decent kernel to Stream. Red Hat people have gone out of their way to say that this and all other <em>problems</em> in CentOS Stream&rsquo;s workflows should be ironed out in the Stream 9 cycle. <em>EVERYTHING</em>, they say.</p> <p>Maybe it&rsquo;s just me, but I&rsquo;ve noticed in recent months that Red Hatters have backed off of their campaign to get everyone to switch to Stream 8.</p> <p>Since the announcement was made about CentOS Linux 8&rsquo;s EOL, both Alma and Rocky have built up their infrastructures and communities. They are pretty much ready to give whoever still wants a downstream RHEL clone <em>exactly that</em>.</p> <p>I have <em>no evidence supporting this whatsoever</em>, but I get this feeling: Now that Alma and Rocky are here, Red Hatters are <em>very much OK</em> with CentOS Linux users going directly to the new downstream distributions and skipping Stream altogether.</p> <p>There&rsquo;s a path to contribute to RHEL and its downstreams, and that is CentOS Stream. They have that. Even if Alma or Rocky is your system of choice, you would still file a bug or submit a patch for Stream.</p> <p>Maybe Red Hat doesn&rsquo;t care if very few CentOS Linux users switch over to CentOS Stream. Maybe they&rsquo;re OK with it being a piece of the RHEL development pipeline that for the first time allows &ldquo;outsiders&rdquo; to contribute directly to the company&rsquo;s flagship product.</p> <p>CentOS, Alma and Rocky are all working on developing SIGs — special interest groups — to help fill in the gaps in RHEL and its clones. While I&rsquo;ve heard rumblings, I haven&rsquo;t yet seen a Desktop SIG. <a href="https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/">EPEL</a> fills in many gaps, and <a href="https://flathub.org">Flathub</a> fills in more.</p> <p>But there are still missing pieces that the community can fill in. I hope it happens and that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Stream and all of the RHEL downstreams become better distributions for desktop use as the result of that work.</p> <p>The beauty of an effort to create a comprehensive desktop repository for these distributions is that it — or <em>they</em> — can exist independently of RHEL and Stream and be added to all of these systems just like any other repo.</p> <p>As for Red Hat and Stream, there is always time for them to get it right. Or at least <em>get it more right</em>. I hope it happens, and I&rsquo;m willing to help.</p> <p>And a few more positive reviews from CERN-sized users wouldn&rsquo;t hurt, either.</p> <p><strong>Discuss this post <a href="https://twitter.com/passthejoe/status/1445963044249485316">on Twitter</a>.</strong></p> The 2021 Linux laptop rebuild https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/the-2021-linux-laptop-rebuild/ Sun, 11 Apr 2021 14:59:33 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/the-2021-linux-laptop-rebuild/ <h4 id="centos-stream-8--a-controversial-yet-boring-linux--would-be-my-new-operating-system">CentOS Stream 8 — a controversial yet boring Linux — would be my new operating system</h4> <p>After holding up due to <a href="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/posts/2021_0328_pausing_the_linux_rebuild/">indecision</a>, I went ahead with the Linux laptop rebuild.</p> <p>I decided to give <a href="https://www.centos.org/">CentOS Stream 8</a> a try. It&rsquo;s a &ldquo;hot&rdquo; Linux distro. But for all the wrong reasons. I can say now that it&rsquo;s technically excellent, with the extremely notable exception of an error in the Boot ISO (yes, I filed a bug) that makes it impossible to proceed before figuring out and manually entering a URL for a working mirror and then a regression in Mutter that killed Files/Nautilus for a day or so until I figured out a workaround. (Developers sent a new package soon thereafter.)</p> <p>Once the installation is done and the Flathub, EPEL and RPM Fusion repos are added, it&rsquo;s very much a &ldquo;like butter&rdquo; experience.</p> <p>It remains buttery until you need an application that isn&rsquo;t in the main CentOS repos, isn&rsquo;t packaged for CentOS in EPEL and isn&rsquo;t a Flatpak. That&rsquo;s where you either do without, package it yourself, or turn to Fedora/Red Hat&rsquo;s <a href="https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org">Copr</a> repos, which is where I found my main photo-editing app <code>gThumb</code> and the program that generates this blog, <code>hugo</code>.</p> <h4 id="backup-tools-and-parts">Backup, tools and parts</h4> <p>Before I say more about the operating system and other software, let&rsquo;s talk hardware.</p> <p>I didn&rsquo;t touch the hardware until I made an <code>rsync</code> backup of the <code>/home</code> files on my Debian Bullseye SSD, an HP-branded 250 GB NVMe M.2, and put them on a USB-connected portable backup drive.</p> <p>I had my hand tools ready:</p> <ul> <li>#0 Phillips screwdriver</li> <li>T5 Torx screwdriver</li> <li>Plastic guitar pick (as &ldquo;spudger&rdquo; to crack the case)</li> </ul> <p>And my parts:</p> <ul> <li>$50 replacement battery, made in China, from Amazon</li> <li>1 TB Samsung EVO 970 NVMe M.2. SSD drive</li> </ul> <h4 id="2019-new-drive-new-os">2019: New drive, new OS</h4> <p>I&rsquo;ve had this laptop&rsquo;s case open before, in 2019, to see if a $40 M.2 SSD would work with my HP Envy 15 as133cl laptop. It did, and I installed Debian Buster — then (and now) the stable release.</p> <p>Going from Windows 10 on a spinning hard drive to Debian on an M.2 SSD brought a tremendous performance boost.</p> <p>With Windows on a magnetic drive, it took multiple minutes to boot and then a half-hour to an hour for the Windows desktop to &ldquo;stabilize&rdquo; and be usable. One time, a series of Windows updates went horribly wrong, and I couldn&rsquo;t use the laptop for at least three days due to something that was overwhelming the disk. That&rsquo;s what drove me back to Linux — and a Linux with very minimal updates. Even Fedora, which I ran for years on an older HP laptop seemed like <em>too much</em> in terms of continual updates and twice-yearly upgrades.</p> <p>Debian on the SSD meant booting to a working GNOME desktop in under a minute. The desktop was ready as soon as I logged in. Updates were transparent and quick. Everything was faster.</p> <p>I stayed with the 250 GB SSD and Debian Buster for about a year and a half. I ran out of space on the drive after the first year and kept many GB of data on a couple of other computers and a 64 GB USB flash drive.</p> <p>Maybe a month or two ago, I tried to do an in-place upgrade from Debian Buster (10) to Bullseye (11). Bullseye is still the Testing distribution, but a routine Debian upgrade from one version to the next should have worked. It didn&rsquo;t. I had some issue with GCC that prevented the upgrade from going through, and I was left with an unbootable system.</p> <p>I had a backup of my user files, and I did a fresh install of Debian Bullseye. It&rsquo;s a great distribution. Even more things worked without issue than in Buster. In addition to <em>automagic</em> printing, I also had <em>automagic</em> scanning. That meant I didn&rsquo;t need HPLIP to use my HP all-in-one printer/scanner. I didn&rsquo;t have to configure anything to print and scan.</p> <p>But I still had the problem of the SSD being too small.</p> <p>I planned my upgrade.</p> <h4 id="new-ssd-new-linux-new-battery-new-problem">New SSD, new Linux, new battery, new problem</h4> <p>I chose the Samsung 970 EVO M.2 NVMe SSD. It&rsquo;s pretty much the <em>industry standard</em>. Users have fewer bad things to say about it than the less-expensive alternatives. The SSD is the &ldquo;strongest&rdquo; part of my computer, and I wanted something that would be fast, reliable and robust. It&rsquo;s not worth saving $20 on such a critical part. This is one of the ways users who upgrade their own hardware — while that is still possible — end up with better systems. Vendors often <em>cheap out</em> on SSDs while charging you <em>more</em> than you would pay for a better drive you could buy on your own.</p> <p>And now back to the laptop &hellip;</p> <p>I did another <code>rsync</code> backup. Bare-metal backups like those done with <a href="https://clonezilla.org">Clonezilla</a> make a restore of the entire disk possible, but I was replacing my SSD with a bigger one and changing the operating system. I only needed my user files. <code>Rsync</code> is what I know, and it&rsquo;s perfect for this.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve had this laptop&rsquo;s case open before. The long, thin rubber strips on the bottom, meant to keep the laptop from &ldquo;wandering&rdquo; across the table, look like they cost $5 but really sell for $60 from HP were long gone. Years earlier, one fell off. Since the laptop &ldquo;moves&rdquo; when you open it, it eventually loosened. The sticky stuff failed, and I replaced the rubber strip with those little silicon &ldquo;dots&rdquo; you use to make cabinet doors close without banging. Those are a couple bucks per package. Not $60.</p> <p>The last time I opened the laptop, I had to remove the <em>other</em> rubber strip to get to a couple of screws. Why screws are <em>under</em> a rubber strip that otherwise steadies the laptop, I don&rsquo;t know. It&rsquo;s stupid.</p> <p>I kept both strips but wasn&rsquo;t eager to put either back. I found more silicon dots for the other side of the laptop, and that&rsquo;s what keeps it from scratching tables and traveling around the table when I use it.</p> <p>Using the Phillips and Torx screwdrivers, I removed all the screws from the bottom. Then I used the guitar pick-turned-&ldquo;spudger&rdquo; (that is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spudger">a real word</a>, in that people use it) to pry the bottom of the laptop case from the motherboard.</p> <p>Then I could see everything.</p> <p>Replacing an M.2 SSD is easy. You take out the screw, lift out the stick, put a new one in and put the screw back. It takes maybe 2 minutes.</p> <p>Replacing the battery took longer. I had more Phillips screws to remove. Then I had to pry off the connecting cable and lift out the battery.</p> <p>I reversed the procedure to put the &ldquo;new&rdquo; battery in. I say &ldquo;new&rdquo; because after I had the whole thing together, I noticed that the laptop was holding a charge no better than before.</p> <p>I ran the HP battery diagnostics, and not only was my &ldquo;new&rdquo; battery 816 days old, it also had a dead cell. Just like the &ldquo;old&rdquo; battery I replaced.</p> <p>After I had CentOS Stream 8 running, I had to open up the laptop again, swap the batteries and send the &ldquo;new&rdquo; one back to Amazon.</p> <p>The no-name replacement battery cost about $50 and came from an anonymous Chinese company. I should have known better.</p> <p>Luckily Amazon&rsquo;s return policies and procedures are reasonable and easy. I packed up the battery, got the OK from Amazon and took it to my local Amazon Locker. A day or so later, I had my refund.</p> <p>I could buy a real HP battery, but that&rsquo;s more $100, less $50, so I&rsquo;ll hold off for now.</p> <p>Since I&rsquo;d been inside this laptop to add an SSD before, I didn&rsquo;t run into any surprises. While I was inside the case, I blew out the dust around the CPU fan with a can of air. I pondered getting an electric air blower and found a bunch of good ones on Amazon. I might get one in the future. It&rsquo;s got to be better than that canned air that makes the can super cold when you use it.</p> <p>Aside from the bad replacement battery, everything went fine. I considered removing the spinning hard drive, which still has Windows 10 on it, but I decided to leave it in. Maybe in the future I&rsquo;ll pull it. I couldn&rsquo;t <em>exactly</em> see how to get the drive out, but there are a couple of screws, and maybe that&rsquo;s how you do it. In any case, I do have the service manual for my laptop (thanks, HP!), and I&rsquo;m sure the instructions are in there.</p> <h4 id="good-thing-i-didnt-remove-the-windows-drive">Good thing I didn&rsquo;t remove the Windows drive</h4> <p>It turns out I might need Windows for a class next semester. So I&rsquo;m leaving this laptop as a dual boot with one OS per drive.</p> <h4 id="installing-a-new-linux-os">Installing a new Linux OS</h4> <p>As I say above, I decided to go with CentOS Stream 8 as my new Linux OS. I didn&rsquo;t want to download the HUGE 10 GB DVD image, mostly because I had a free 8 GB USB flash drive I wanted to use for the ISO, so I got the 700-or-so MB Boot ISO image. While installing, I ran into a problem with the Anaconda installer not offering any mirrors.</p> <p>I decided to start a bug — much like I have done in the past with Fedora — to see if I could &ldquo;help&rdquo; get the ISO fixed.</p> <p>I started a CentOS account and soon learned that Stream bugs need to be filed in Red Hat&rsquo;s Bugzilla. I already had a Fedora contributor account and was able to log into Bugzilla and file my bug. Within a few weeks, the bug was fixed and the CentOS Stream 8 Boot ISO now offers the &ldquo;closest mirror&rdquo; by default.</p> <p>At the time I did my installation, the fix was pretty easily found on the Internet. It consisted of finding the right CentOS mirror URL and entering it in the Anaconda installer. Now the mirror is picked up automatically.</p> <p>To make a long story short, I successfully installed CentOS Stream 8 and eventually installed all of the applications I need. I have more Flatpaks than I thought I&rsquo;d use, and they all run <em>pretty</em> well. There are slight problems with access to some system bits for <code>Chromium</code> and <code>Dropbox</code>, but everything works.</p> <p>I needed to use Copr repositories for two apps — Hugo and gThumb. The static blog generator Hugo — which powers this site — is easy enough to download from the project web site and run on any system since it&rsquo;s a Go-generated binary.</p> <p>But gThumb is <em>absolutely</em> a problem. It is CRITICAL to my editing workflow and isn&rsquo;t in the CentOS/RHEL AppStream or EPEL repositories. It also isn&rsquo;t in the Flathub repo of Flatpaks. Somewhere I saw an explanation about why gThumb can&rsquo;t be a Flatpak, but I don&rsquo;t remember where I saw that (probably in a bug report) or what it said. Suffice it to say that gThumb is hard to come by.</p> <p>As it was, I had to install gThumb from the proper <a href="https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/">Copr</a> repo and then disable that repo because it was causing conflicts with other packages.</p> <p>(<strong>Update on Nov. 6, 2021</strong>: Since this entry was written, Carl George was nice enough to package gThumb in <a href="https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/">EPEL — the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux</a> repo that is an offshoot of the Fedora Project. And finally, gThumb is now also <a href="https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.gThumb">available as a Flatpak</a>.</p> <p>I also had a problem with the Hugo Copr repo, but I got some help with the configuration from Fedora/RHEL/CentOS developers.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s the biggest thing about using Stream 8. Contributions are encouraged, and the distro&rsquo;s users and developers are VERY HAPPY to help.</p> <p><strong>Summing it up:</strong> I did get my laptop opened up and back together, and now I have a full TB of SSD storage. I&rsquo;m not happy that the battery swap failed. I have looked for another battery, but all the suppliers seem <em>extremely</em> dodgy.</p> <p><strong>Update on Nov. 6, 2021:</strong> I bought a new battery from <a href="https://www.hplaptopbattery.us">another third-party supplier</a>, this time directly instead of through eBay. I haven&rsquo;t pulled the laptop apart just yet, but I&rsquo;m hopeful.</p> <p><strong>Update on Jan. 25, 2025:</strong> Until now, I didn&rsquo;t provide a source for the laptop battery I ended up buying. After returning the bad Amazon battery, I ordered from <a href="https://www.hplaptopbattery.us">https://www.hplaptopbattery.us</a>. They shipped quickly, the battery fit perfectly, and it&rsquo;s still running today, nearly four years since I installed it on this laptop, which continues to be used daily.</p> <p>The laptop is still running pretty well after almost eight years. As I mention above, the original rubber strips on the bottom of the case are long gone. When headphones are plugged in, I can only hear out of one side, though both speakers still work. I&rsquo;m surprised the keyboard and screen have kept going this long.</p> Pausing the Linux rebuild https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/pausing-the-linux-rebuild/ Sun, 28 Mar 2021 16:48:56 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/pausing-the-linux-rebuild/ <p>I was all ready to crack open the HP Envy 15 laptop this afternoon, pull the 250 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and replace it with a 1 TB model. While in there, I planned to replace the battery, which has a dead cell.</p> <p>But I decided to press &ldquo;pause.&rdquo;</p> <p>I started running Linux on this particular laptop in 2019 (??) with Debian Stable (then Buster), replacing it with Testing (Bullseye) maybe a couple of months ago.</p> <p>Debian has been good to me. But I thought that maybe it&rsquo;s time to try something new.</p> <p>CentOS Stream 8 is newish, and even though many users think the end of CentOS Linux in favor of Stream is <em>the end of the world</em>, I&rsquo;m excited by it becoming more of a community project while still offering more stability than a lot of other operating systems.</p> <p>While there are a lot of applications available for CentOS/RHEL, one of my must-haves is <a href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gthumb">gThumb</a>, which I use for most of my photo editing. Linux in general is VERY poor at handling the captions in JPG images, and gThumb is a true lifesaver for Linux-running journalists who have to work on photo captions. GIMP has promised full IPTC functionality for years, but it&rsquo;s not there yet, and I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;ll ever <em>be there</em>.</p> <p>Fedora has gThumb, but the EPEL project hasn&rsquo;t built gThumb since RHEL/CentOS 7. There is no Flatpak either.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m sure I could somehow <em>make it work</em>. I&rsquo;ve used old RPM packages before and had decent results, and maybe it&rsquo;ll work this time. But there&rsquo;s no CentOS or RHEL live image I can use to test this before I commit to an install.</p> <p><em>You can install and test quite a few things in live environments before the whole thing goes <strong>pear shaped</strong>. I just confirmed that the Vivaldi browser works in Fedora 34 Beta with this &ldquo;technique&rdquo;.</em></p> <p>While running the Fedora 34 Beta live environment, the fan was spinning up a bit. I could do an install, and it would probably resolve itself one way or another, but I really don&rsquo;t know.</p> <p>There is no live image for Debian Bullseye yet, though I&rsquo;m running it right now, and it&rsquo;s as cool and fan-quiet as any Linux I&rsquo;ve ever used. Debian is a known quantity. And it works.</p> <p>So I&rsquo;m taking some time to think before I decide on a Linux distro for my 1 TB M.2 SSD. It could honestly go either way. There are a lot of <a href="https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-34-beta/">interesting features in Fedora 34</a>, I&rsquo;d love to see how CentOS performs for my use cases (development and writing/editing), and Debian has been rock solid. Even Testing.</p> <p>What should I do?</p> <p><strong>Next:</strong> Decision time. And drive/battery installation time.</p> Backups in Linux: I keep it simple https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/backups-in-linux-i-keep-it-simple/ Sun, 28 Mar 2021 15:55:35 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/backups-in-linux-i-keep-it-simple/ <p>The next step in putting a new hard drive into my laptop is to make a full backup of the <code>/home</code> files. I haven&rsquo;t done a full-image Clonezilla-style backup in a long, long time, and I do recommend it it you have a spare drive and a lot of spare time.</p> <p>Instead I just back up my user files. I have two working Linux computers right now, and if I need to rebuild one, I can do a reinstall and get my preferred applications set up fairly quickly.</p> <p>There are a LOT of excellent backup tools available for free in Linux. I&rsquo;ve meant to try many of them, but I stick with what I know, which is <code>rsync</code>.</p> <p>Normally I have a <em>hefty</em> <code>exclude</code> file to make my rsync backups go more quickly. I have that set up on my old Fedora 32 system, but I haven&rsquo;t bothered to do it on my current Debian Bullseye laptop.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m just doing the full <code>/home</code> directory. I <em>could</em> use <code>sudo</code> to collect the few config files here and there that seep to crop up, but I&rsquo;m NEVER going to need those files, so it&rsquo;s not necessary. I would need to use <code>sudo</code> if I had more than one user and wanted rsync to backup all user files and not just those under my account.</p> <p>I set up a 1 TB spinning USB backup drive with an ext4 filesystem and the drive name <em>backup</em>. I used GNOME Disks to do this. Years ago, I used gParted for this, but nowadays I&rsquo;m not doing very much partitioning, and I like how Disks works.</p> <p>Then I use GNOME Files (aka Nautilus) to make sure the backup drive is mounted. I might back up more than one computer to the 1 TB drive, so I created a folder/directory named <code>debian</code> for this backup.</p> <p>I already have <code>rsync</code> installed (<code>sudo apt install rsync</code> in a terminal if you don&rsquo;t), and I run the following:</p> <pre><code>$ rsync -av --delete /home /media/steven/backup/debian/ </code></pre> <p>I let that run. It takes awhile for the first backup and is shorter after that.</p> <p>I think it&rsquo;s a good idea to create an <code>exclude</code> file that lists directories you DON&rsquo;T want to back up and to then reference that in the scrip with the <code>--exclude-from</code> switch. There are tons of configuration files and caches in hidden directories that you really don&rsquo;t need, and putting them in an <code>exclude</code> file makes your backup go much more quickly — and makes it smaller, too.</p> <p>The <code>exclude</code> switch looks something like this: <code>--exclude-from'/path-to/exclude-file'</code>.</p> <p>I also recommend setting up your rsync line as a shell script and running the script instead of typing the <code>rsync</code> line with all your switches and file locations. That way you don&rsquo;t have to think about having the right drives in the right order and making a mistake that nukes your good files. I&rsquo;m lazy and have been going into my Bash history to remember the working <code>rsync</code> line. I&rsquo;ll get it together soon and create a shell script.</p> <p>I also recommend using the <code>--dry-run</code> switch when you are &ldquo;developing&rdquo; the rsync line for your particular setup. That way nothing &ldquo;bad&rdquo; will happen while you are figuring things out. I did</p> <p>I make an rsync script so infrequently that I generally do a bit of searching and find a tutorial to make sure I&rsquo;m doing it the right way. <a href="https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-use-rsync-for-local-and-remote-data-transfer-and-synchronization/">This one at Linuxize</a> is pretty good. I also like <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-rsync-to-sync-local-and-remote-directories">this one from DigitalOcean</a>.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t just use <code>rsync</code> for backups. I also use it over the network to send these <code>hugo</code> blog files to my shared host. I have <code>ssh</code> set up, and I have a simple rsync script that syncs my <code>hugo</code> <code>/public</code> directory with my shared hosting account&rsquo;s <code>/public</code> directory. It&rsquo;s much quicker and more foolproof than using a GUI FTP client.</p> <p><code>Rsync</code> is good for situations where the files only &ldquo;change&rdquo; on one side of the transaction. For situations where the server is more dynamic and the files on it change, I use <a href="https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/">Unison</a> to keep two (or more) filesystems in sync. But for situations where I have everything local and it just needs to go one way to the server or backup drive, <code>rsync</code> remains my go-to.</p> <p><strong>Next:</strong> Pressing &ldquo;pause&rdquo; on the rebuild</p> <p><strong>Discuss this post <a href="https://twitter.com/passthejoe/status/1376329508547072001">on Twitter</a>.</strong></p> Reinstalling a Linux computer system: Step by step https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/reinstalling-a-linux-computer-system-step-by-step/ Thu, 25 Mar 2021 09:39:10 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/reinstalling-a-linux-computer-system-step-by-step/ <p>I&rsquo;m about to put a new hard drive and battery in my main laptop, a 2017 HP Envy 15.</p> <p>Whenever I make a change like this, I like to be ready with backups, Linux install images on USB drives and whatever tools and parts I might need.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not as worried about running into problems because I now have a very decent second computer — the 2011 27-inch iMac running Debian Buster — if the laptop isn&rsquo;t ready right away, I&rsquo;ll still be able to work.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m putting a 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO M.2 SSD in the laptop, and since the battery barely holds a charge, I will be changing it while I have everything opened up.</p> <p>Very few laptops these days allow you to swap the battery without taking the bottom cover off. It&rsquo;s not user-friendly at all because the rechargeable battery is the first thing to go on a laptop. Mine rarely last more than two years.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve been inside this laptop before. A couple of years ago, I wanted to try an M.2 NVMe SSD in the HP after I discovered in its repair manual that there&rsquo;s a slot for one on the motherboard.</p> <p>At the time I didn&rsquo;t want to invest a lot. I spent about $30 for a 250 GB HP-branded M.2 SSD. In order to get the laptop opened up, I had to remove the last remaining rubber-foot strip (the other fell off a year previously) to get at a few of the screws needed to get the bottom half of the case off.</p> <p>This is a horrible design feature/flaw. It costs about $60 to replace the two rubber-foot strips. Instead, I used those little silicone-rubber circles that are sticky on one side that you buy at the hardware store.</p> <p>Once I got the laptop, I inserted the M.2 SSD, secured it with its plastic screw, put the laptop back together and installed Debian Buster immediately.</p> <p>It worked perfectly, and I&rsquo;ve been using it that way ever since.</p> <p>The only problem is that 250 GB is not enough space. I could probably get by with 500 GB, but since I&rsquo;m not opening the laptop every week, month or year, I decided to match the laptop&rsquo;s spinning hard drive (which I NEVER use) and get the 1 TB SSD.</p> <p>So I&rsquo;ll be pulling out a bunch of screws, putting in the new SSD and hopefully replacing the battery, which has a bad cell.</p> <p>BEFORE I start, these are the things I need to have in place:</p> <ul> <li> <p>I need to make a full backup of my /home files. I have a drive ready. I need to run rsync to get everything up to date on the backup drive.</p> </li> <li> <p>I also need a backup of my old 2012 HP Pavilion g6 laptop that runs Fedora. That laptop has a 640 GB spinning drive, and I was never able to transfer all the files to the 2017 HP laptop due to the small size of the current SSD. A big part of this project is getting all of my files on one laptop:</p> </li> <li> <p>2017 HP Envy /home backup</p> </li> <li> <p>2012 HP Pavilion /home backup</p> </li> <li> <p>I need USB flash drives with install images for all the operating systems I might want to use:</p> </li> <li> <p>Debian Bullseye</p> </li> <li> <p>CentOS Stream 8</p> </li> <li> <p>Ubuntu 20.04</p> </li> </ul> <p>I really don&rsquo;t know exactly what I&rsquo;m going to install, and it&rsquo;s pretty much between Debian Bullseye and CentOS Stream.</p> <ul> <li> <p>For Debian I need a FAT-formatted USB flash drive with .deb packages of all the firmware I might need to use during the install:</p> </li> <li> <p>firmware-linux</p> </li> <li> <p>firmware-linux-nonfree</p> </li> <li> <p>firmware-misc-nonfree</p> </li> <li> <p>firmware-iwlwifi</p> </li> <li> <p>firmware-realtek</p> </li> <li> <p>firmware-intel-sound</p> </li> </ul> <p>That&rsquo;s &ldquo;all&rdquo; I need. As long as I have the <code>/home</code> backups, I can deal with any issues that might crop up.</p> <p><strong>Next:</strong> Doing the backups</p> The new Debian Bullseye desktop background just moved onto systems https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/the-new-debian-bullseye-desktop-background-just-moved-onto-systems/ Fri, 26 Feb 2021 04:48:45 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/the-new-debian-bullseye-desktop-background-just-moved-onto-systems/ <p><a href="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2021_0225_debian_bullseye_desktop_background.png"><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2021_0225_debian_bullseye_desktop_background.png" alt="The new desktop background for Debian Bullseye/Testing"></a></p> <p>The new desktop background image for Debian Bullseye/Testing (the future Debian 11) appeared on my system last night in the updates.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s another in the hundreds (and probably thousands) of steps leading up to Bullseye becoming Debian GNU/Linux&rsquo;s stable release later this year — sometime around July if the recent pattern holds.</p> If you're worried about losing Google Sync in Chromium, you might as well use Chrome https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/if-youre-worried-about-losing-google-sync-in-chromium-you-might-as-well-use-chrome/ Sun, 24 Jan 2021 16:43:50 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/if-youre-worried-about-losing-google-sync-in-chromium-you-might-as-well-use-chrome/ <p>I&rsquo;m a hypocrite.</p> <p>I use the Chromium browser packaged by the Debian Linux distribution.</p> <p>I also use Google&rsquo;s sync service for my bookmarks.</p> <p>By using the open-source (yet Google controlled) Chromium instead of the proprietary Chrome (which is based on Chromium), I fool myself into thinking I&rsquo;m adhering to some kind of software freedom principles.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t want Google &ldquo;spying&rdquo; on me, so I don&rsquo;t use Google Chrome, which could be a black box doing all sorts of horrible things for Google&rsquo;s benefit.</p> <p>Yet how spy-free is Chromium? Am I auditing the Chromium source code? Is someone else doing it for me? (No and no).</p> <p>I make it worse by using Google&rsquo;s sync service to keep my bookmarks and passwords the same across the many instances of Chromium (and a few of &hellip; horrors &hellip; Chrome) I use across a number of computers.</p> <p>The trouble continues. I use Gmail. My employer uses Google Apps. I&rsquo;m up to my neck in Google.</p> <p>Even though Chromium has always been a Google project, the browser is open source. Developers for Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc., take the Chromium source code and compile it for use in their Linux distributions.</p> <p>Even the BSDs offer ports and packages of Chromium.</p> <p>What if Google really does pull its syncing services from users of Chromium? What can we do? How about:</p> <ul> <li>Sync our Chromium bookmarks using a third-party service via a Chrome extension.</li> <li>Run &ldquo;real&rdquo; Chrome, which Google offers from its own repository for Linux (but not BSD) users.</li> <li>Use another browser like Firefox, <a href="https://vivaldi.com">Vivaldi</a>, Brave, Opera, Epiphany/Web, etc.</li> </ul> <p>I&rsquo;m already using as much Firefox as I can, even though almost all of Firefox parent Mozilla&rsquo;s revenue comes from a single source: Google.</p> <p>It seems like a dirty business, right?</p> <p>Without Google&rsquo;s multimillions, Mozilla folds like a cheap card table.</p> <p>But now I use a lot of Firefox, a little <a href="https://tutanota.com/">Tutanota</a> for email.</p> <p>I could see Microsoft offering its Edge browser on Linux. I seem to remember this being a possible thing. Is Microsoft better or worse than Google? Lately it seems like the answer is &ldquo;much better.&rdquo; The browser they release won&rsquo;t be open source, that&rsquo;s for sure.</p> <p>And Microsoft has already been taking over the free-software development ecosystem (Github, VS Code, NPM).</p> <p>Does that mean Microsoft <em>cares</em>, or that it just wants to own all the things?</p> <p>So we&rsquo;ve established that one (or I) can have issues with Google, Mozilla and Microsoft.</p> <p>At least with Mozilla&rsquo;s Firefox and Google&rsquo;s Chromium, we can see the source code before it is compiled to run on our Linux and BSD systems. I&rsquo;m not sure how (or if) you can run Chromium on Windows and MacOS.</p> <p>Vivaldi is part open source, part not. <a href="https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source">It&rsquo;s complicated</a>. But the company behind it is very much not a Google, Microsoft or Mozilla. Maybe this is a path forward.</p> <p><strong>Update on March 21, 2021:</strong> We have blown past the Chromium team&rsquo;s alleged March 15 &ldquo;deadline&rdquo; for sync services to end, and they are still intact.</p> <p>I am still using Chromium for my day job. I use Firefox for everything else.</p> I'm not opposed to nonfree firmware in Debian, but I removed it, and my laptop still runs fine https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/im-not-opposed-to-nonfree-firmware-in-debian-but-i-removed-it-and-my-laptop-still-runs-fine/ Sat, 23 Jan 2021 12:18:29 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/im-not-opposed-to-nonfree-firmware-in-debian-but-i-removed-it-and-my-laptop-still-runs-fine/ <p>The debate over whether to include nonfree firmware in the Debian installer has emerged from <a href="https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/01/msg00151.html">the depths of the debian-devel mailing list</a> under the title &ldquo;Making Debian available.&rdquo;</p> <p>The gist of this extremely long e-mail thread (and Debian is a mailing list culture, despite attempts to <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/817668/">pull it into the 21st century</a> is that the Debian Project is hostile to new users because its standard install images do not include nonfree firmware, and installations on most laptops will go poorly because the Linux kernel and free firmware might not support their WiFi or display systems.</p> <p>Images with nonfree firmware are available, but they are hard to find and aren&rsquo;t linked on <a href="https://www.debian.org/">the main</a> <a href="https://www.debian.org/distrib/">Debian</a> web site.</p> <p>Even a search for <em>nonfree firmware</em> on the Debian web site isn&rsquo;t much help.A Google <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=debian+nonfree">search for <em>debian nonfree</em></a> takes you right <a href="https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/">where you</a> <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware">need to</a> go.</p> <p>I use the nonfree-firmware Debian images almost all the time. After my attempt at an in-place upgrade from Buster to Bullseye failed a week or so ago, I downloaded a nonfree image and used it to install Bullseye. I restored my user files from a backup (ALWAYS have a backup) and everything is now working.</p> <p>Experienced users know they can <em>try</em> the standard Debian image, and if it works, they are home <em>free</em>, so to speak. New (and experienced) users should also know that they need to experiment around a bit before committing to an installation. It can&rsquo;t be a one-shot deal, or the chances of disappointment are very, very good.</p> <p>When I&rsquo;m looking to install a system, I get live images for Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu and see what works — and what works well.</p> <p>If I have a newer laptop, and nothing works all that great, I lean toward Fedora because of the constant stream (pun intended) of new kernels that bring new hardware compatibility at fairly regular intervals.</p> <p>I like Debian for its independence and release cadence. The installation is conservative bordering on sleepy.</p> <p>Fedora is the opposite. Even though you can &ldquo;skip&rdquo; a Fedora release and do a major upgrade once a year (which sounds very reasonable), the pace of updates is extremely fast. Every time you turn around, another 500 MB is ready for you in <code>dnf</code>.</p> <p>In contrast, I turn to Debian Stable because I can usually hang for the two years between releases — or at least <em>close to that</em>, and I like the &ldquo;quiet&rdquo; of the infrequent updates that are generally only done for security reasons.</p> <p>This time, I made it maybe a year and a half, and that&rsquo;s why I wanted to upgrade early to Bullseye on my laptop. Now that I&rsquo;ve done it on the HP laptop, my Buster-running iMac is staying where it is until Bullseye goes stable. I just need that machine to work (and it does).</p> <p>Back to nonfree firmware. If the installer boots at all, you&rsquo;re already getting somewhere, even if your GUI desktop or networking don&rsquo;t work right away. For an experienced <em>installer</em> of Linux, this might be enough. What it also is: a pain in the ass.</p> <p>If you need nonfree firmware to run a GUI display or use wired or wireless networking, you NEED it. Otherwise the system is pretty much unusable. Debian shouldn&rsquo;t only be for Thinkpads or laptops that are old enough to have the <em>full embrace</em> of the Linux kernel.</p> <p>I think the Debian installer does some kind of detection on your system that tells you whether or not you might need nonfree firmware and instructs you to have a USB drive containing that firmware at the ready. I&rsquo;ve never been able to make this work.</p> <p>In OpenBSD, the installer (another GREAT one that never changes) detects that you need the firmware, and <em>actually fetches it over the network if it can</em>. That&rsquo;s what the Debian installer <em>should</em> do. But it still wouldn&rsquo;t help in situations where you don&rsquo;t have a working internet connection.</p> <p>It is nice for the nonfree firmware to <em>be there</em> in the installer image. Ideally, if you <em>need</em> it, the installer can use it and provide an explainer on what&rsquo;s actually happening and what your options as a user are. That&rsquo;s pretty much what happens with the Debian nonfree images, and that&rsquo;s why I use them and encourage others to do the same. Why not set yourself up for success?</p> <p>My question remains: Do the nonfree Debian images actually INSTALL the nonfree firmware, or do they just use it for the purposes of the installation? I know I&rsquo;ve done installs with the nonfree image and had to add the nonfree firmware after the fact. That I don&rsquo;t know <em>exactly how this works</em> should tell you that the process isn&rsquo;t what it should be.</p> <p>That said, we should all try to document our difficult installations and configurations so others can benefit. I&rsquo;m sure that is how I got my 2011 iMac working with Debian Buster. In that case, I needed to:</p> <ul> <li>Do the Debian installation</li> <li>Use another computer to download the nonfree firmware .debs (including one for the Radeon graphics card) and put them on a USB flash drive</li> <li>Boot into Debian on the iMac in a console (which was all I could do) and su to root</li> <li>Mount the USB drive (which, when done from the command line, is a tutorial in itself)</li> <li>Use <code>apt</code> or <code>dpkg</code> to install the firmware .debs</li> <li>Add a line to <code>/etc/default/grub</code> so the AMD Radeon video will work</li> <li>Reboot into a working Debian system</li> </ul> <p>It&rsquo;s not a lot for someone who has been in this game for a few years. But it is way too much for a new user.</p> <p>What I usually say to &ldquo;defend&rdquo; this state of affairs is that you should start with Ubuntu. Even though a lot of the &ldquo;help&rdquo; out there is of the &ldquo;RTFM&rdquo; and &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s a link to something super generic that won&rsquo;t help you,&rdquo; variety, there&rsquo;s <em>so much</em> help that you&rsquo;re bound to succeed.</p> <p>And the other thing I usually say is that unless somebody is maintaining your computer for you, problems that require solutions will happen. You will start searching for answers and gaining experience. You will be &ldquo;ready&rdquo; for Debian (or Arch, or whatever distro you want to use) before you know it.</p> <p>While this is <em>more</em> true for Linux (and BSD), it&rsquo;s still <em>true</em> for other operating systems like Windows and MacOS. There are no trouble-free computer OSes. You either find (and pay) experts, or you figure things out.</p> <p>One way or another, this is the equation:</p> <p><code>Linux/BSD use + time = You're an expert</code>.</p> <p>The way we can all help each other is to document the solutions we&rsquo;ve found and share what we&rsquo;ve learned. I try to do this, and I encourage the rest of you to do the same.</p> <p>I didn&rsquo;t see a lot of posts on how to upgrade from Debian Buster to Bullseye, and the ones I did were not as helpful as they needed to be. (That means they didn&rsquo;t work for me.) The Debian documentation for this upgrade isn&rsquo;t ready yet. As the release of Bullseye gets closer, I hope it will be.</p> <p>Remember the title of this post: &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not opposed to nonfree firmware in Debian, but I removed it, and my laptop still runs fine&rdquo;?</p> <p>I did this. I removed <code>firmware-linux-nonfree</code>, <code>firmware-misc-nonfree</code>, <code>intel-microcode</code> and <code>amd-microcode</code>. I also stashed copies of the .debs on a USB drive in case I needed them.</p> <p>I rebooted. My Debian system still works. I did get a line of output during the boot sequence that said some <code>i915</code> firmware is missing, but everything seems to be working just as well as it did before I removed the nonfree firmware packages.</p> <p>So a 2017 HP Envy laptop with an Intel Core i7 7th Gen CPU using Intel video can run Debian Bullseye in 2021 without nonfree firmware.</p> <p>Again, I&rsquo;m not opposed to the use of nonfree firmware. Fedora includes it without giving it a second thought. So does Ubuntu. I have it on my Debian-running iMac.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t expect Debian to run without this firmware on newer laptops, and I don&rsquo;t think everyone should wait <em>years</em> for Linux compatibility that might never come without nonfree firmware.</p> <p>Being able to <em>try</em> my system both with and without nonfree firmware and then decide what to do — that&rsquo;s the kind of <em>freedom</em> I want.</p> Ruby gems: Using Linux/BSD packages vs. gem install https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/ruby-gems-using-linux/bsd-packages-vs.-gem-install/ Tue, 29 Dec 2020 16:06:15 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/ruby-gems-using-linux/bsd-packages-vs.-gem-install/ <p>As a Ruby user and programmer, I thought that Linux distributions and BSD projects offered packaged versions of Ruby gems to add sanity and stability to a computer.</p> <p>The problem is that every distribution and project packages a different subset of all the Ruby gems available.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve always tried to use as many &ldquo;packaged&rdquo; gems as possible in the systems I run — chiefly Debian and Fedora Linux, along with OpenBSD.</p> <p>If you only need a couple of gems, distribution packages might be the way to go. But once you start to pile up the gems and get one or more with a LOT of dependencies on other gems, the whole thing can get a bit tangled.</p> <p>The documentation to <a href="https://github.com/passthejoe/blogPoster">my blogPoster project</a> has included a lot on how to install gems with package managers like <code>apt</code>. I&rsquo;m about to pull all of that out in favor of recommending that all Ruby gems be installed with Ruby&rsquo;s own <code>gem install</code> program.</p> <p>I asked about it on Twitter, and everybody who responded said DON&rsquo;T use distro packages and instead use <code>gem install</code> for everything.</p> <p>I believe them.</p> <p>The consensus is that the reason Linux distributions and BSD projects package Ruby gems is to satisfy the dependencies for other Ruby software they package. It&rsquo;s so you can install a <code>.deb</code> or <code>.rpm</code> package of a Ruby program and then get all the dependencies via <code>apt</code>, <code>dnf</code> or <code>yum</code>. It&rsquo;s not so you can use <code>apt</code> instead of <code>gem install</code>.</p> <p><strong>Let&rsquo;s go back:</strong> <em>What are Ruby gems? They are little programs/extensions that add functionality to Ruby. You can process files better, do more with networking, and thousands of other things without reinventing any wheels. Somebody else has pre-programmed many of these things and packed them into Ruby gems. Just about any Ruby program can probably be packaged as a gem, though gems are generally Ruby utilities that make it easier to write other programs. Other programming languages like Perl, Python, Node, Golang and Java have similar ways of packaging libraries to help programmers do more with less work.</em></p> <p>It gets complicated when I bring in things like <a href="https://rubygems.org/gems/twitter">the Twitter gem</a>. Very few operating system projects packages it. The Twitter gem has LOTS of dependencies — <a href="https://rubygems.org/gems/twitter/versions/7.0.0/dependencies">10 to be exact </a>. It&rsquo;s better to use <code>gem install</code> (or <code>sudo gem install</code> in Unix-like systems that use <code>sudo</code> for rootly privileges). Using <code>gem install</code> helps keep the dependencies from getting too thorny.</p> <p>I just used <code>apt</code> to uninstall all of my Debian-packaged Ruby gems and <code>sudo gem install</code> to bring them all back.</p> <p>For Ruby developers, there is a utility called <code>bundler</code> that makes sure your application brings in the right gems. I know almost nothing about it. There&rsquo;s also something called a <code>gemfile</code>. I need to figure these things out and incorporate them into my programs.</p> <p>Until then, I will be rewriting the blogPoster documentation to remove instructions for installing Ruby gems from distro packages and instead encouraging users to do that with <code>(sudo) gem install</code>.</p> Why CentOS Stream and the end of CentOS Linux doesn’t really matter https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/why-centos-stream-and-the-end-of-centos-linux-doesnt-really-matter/ Wed, 23 Dec 2020 17:18:25 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/why-centos-stream-and-the-end-of-centos-linux-doesnt-really-matter/ <p>There were clones of — or more accurately downstream projects based on — Red Hat Enterprise Linux before Red Hat bought CentOS in 2014.</p> <p>CentOS started in 2006, and there have been other distributions based on RHEL. (My favorite is still <a href="http://li.nux.ro/">Nux</a>&rsquo;s <a href="http://li.nux.ro/stella/">Stella</a> from the CentOS 6 days.)</p> <p>There are many (many!) other Linux distributions and BSD projects that can supply a server or desktop operating system. Most of them are not owned by corporations that can limit their distribution on a whim. CentOS was a big deal before Red Hat acquired the project in 2014. New projects will now take its place.</p> <p>Red Hat is right about many things. But the one thing they are very right about is the importance of contribution and community to the health of an open-source software project.</p> <p>Stream will add those two things — contribution and community — to RHEL. It should just be called <em>RHEL Stream</em>. They could call it <em>Chocolate Chip Cookie Stream</em> for all I care.</p> <p>But the enterprise, high performance computing, academia, small businesses, startups and individual users have many alternatives. For many uses, CentOS Stream might even be better that downstream-from-RHEL CentOS . But it will be worse for many other things.</p> <p>Still, the software is open-source. Though Red Hat is a big contributor to the Linux kernel and many other upstream projects, that kernel and most of the rest of the bits in RHEL are not Red Hat’s to withhold. Red Hat knows that. The put it all together, and they do that well. But it’s a collaborative effort in the large.</p> <p>The reason CentOS and other clones were able to thrive in the first place was because Red Hat made the source of RHEL both available and usable. They go above and beyond. That will probably not change. I say “probably” because releasing a product, say CentOS 8, with a promise — implied or actual — of a certain level of support and then abruptly going back on that promise is a breach of trust.</p> <p>Red Hat has a lot of community reconciliation to do — for its own benefit, not just that of its downstream communities.</p> <p>Meanwhile, Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, FreeBSD and many others stand ready to run your things. In case you’re keeping score, two of these are run and owned by corporations, and two are not.</p> <p>And by the middle of next year, expect more than a couple new projects looking to be downstream RHEL clones. We know about <a href="https://rockylinux.org/">Rocky Linux</a> and <a href="https://blog.cloudlinux.com/announcing-open-sourced-community-driven-rhel-fork-by-cloudlinux">Project Lenix</a>. None of them will be owned by Red Hat. Maybe one or two of them will be able to deliver what users want.</p> <p>I’m fairly certain Red Hat didn’t think ending CentOS as we know it meant the end of downstream RHEL clones.</p> <p>But they will cost Red Hat nothing. Except lost business and reputation. They could always gain customers from this move, but I really don’t see it.</p> <p>And when those downstream projects appear and stick around, angry users around the world will be happier than they are right now. Take that one to the bank.</p> CentOS Stream and the end of the CentOS clone: perils, pitfalls, risks and opportunities for Red Hat https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/centos-stream-and-the-end-of-the-centos-clone-perils-pitfalls-risks-and-opportunities-for-red-hat/ Tue, 22 Dec 2020 17:06:24 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/centos-stream-and-the-end-of-the-centos-clone-perils-pitfalls-risks-and-opportunities-for-red-hat/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/centos_logo.png" alt="CentOS logo"></p> <p>Red Hat unleashed the kraken with its recent announcement that its CentOS 8 clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be shut down in 2021 instead of 2029, to be replaced by the newish CentOS Stream 8.</p> <p>What is CentOS Stream? It is a reimagining of CentOS as a continuously delivered yet version-constrained development distribution that tracks ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 yet stays within the RHEL 8 world from an ABI (Application Binary Interface)-compatibility standpoint.</p> <p>So instead of RHEL leading to an eventual CentOS build, CentOS Stream leads to an eventual RHEL build.</p> <p>Stream is also an upstream.</p> <p>Plus, as many Red Hatters have said, Stream welcomes contributors large (like Facebook) and small (like you and me) in a way that “old” CentOS and RHEL never could.</p> <p>In the rhetoric around the ending of traditional CentOS, RH employees have been saying the existing CentOS community is made up almost entirely of passive users and no contributors — mostly because it’s impossible to really contribute to CentOS or RHEL outside of filing bug reports. The only avenue, until now, for meaningful contribution to RHEL has been the very upstream and very welcoming Fedora.</p> <p><em>Here’s how the “flow” of code used to go:</em></p> <p><strong>Fedora ⟶ RHEL ⟶ CentOS</strong></p> <p><em>and here’s how it will go:</em></p> <p><strong>Fedora ⟶ CentOS Stream ⟶ RHEL</strong></p> <p>For those unfamiliar with what the Fedora distribution is all about, it’s free to all users and encourages contributions and involvement. It is where the community — including employees of Red Hat — tests and develops new technologies that may eventually be included in RHEL.</p> <p>Fedora is friendly and welcoming in a way few free software projects are. It’s a great community and a surprisingly great distro that gives users a years-ahead look at what mainstream Linux systems will eventually be doing.</p> <p>Fedora releases every six months, and every release receives updates for the duration of the next release plus about a month. That generally works out to 13 months, give or take, but it’s possible to upgrade every six months. And the distro doesn’t stand still. It gets new kernels all the time, and many other components are also updated on a continuous basis.</p> <p>A new version of RHEL is “cut” from a Fedora release every three years. It promises a certain level of stability and compatibility, has <a href="https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/">full support for five years</a>, maintenance support for another five years and “extended life cycle support” for another two years after that. Everybody talks about the 10 years — and they do so as if the 10 years were equivalent to the first five years, which is something to think about.</p> <p>One of the biggest differences between CentOS Stream and RHEL/old CentOS is the support period. RHEL is the only distro that patches for 10 years. By extension, so does CentOS and any other clone that can keep it going.</p> <p>But CentOS Stream comes with a promise of “only” 5 years of support. That puts it in line with Ubuntu and maybe Debian. It’s not a positive for many. It “takes away” one of the features that made CentOS stand out. Unless things change, after 5 years, you’ll have to upgrade from Stream 8 to Stream 9. I can think of worse things.</p> <p>I can’t see running any system for more than 5 years, but many can and want to do just that.</p> <p>Red Hatters have been saying the reason the company created Stream is to encourage users large and small to participate in the development of RHEL by submitting bug fixes — and ostensibly also actual code.</p> <p>CentOS Stream sounds good to me. For desktop use anyway. There’s no reason a desktop needs to track months behind RHEL. There is little downside — and potentially some upside — to being slightly ahead of it.</p> <p>For server use, it may be a different story. If you read the thousands of comments out there, the end of CentOS as we know it — with only Stream surviving — is open-source armageddon, a line in the sand, a crossed Rubicon, a breach of trust. You name the cliche, and I promise it has been invoked.</p> <p>Red Hat is saying that it either can’t or doesn’t want to split its effort between traditional CentOS and CentOS Stream. And as long as old-school CentOS remains on the table, nobody will want to switch to Stream in the first place.</p> <p>Forcing people to do something they don’t want to do? Sometimes it works out, other times it just makes everyone angry.</p> <p>The move to kill CentOS as it currently exists has been very unpopular. Very. Unpopular. Users are piling into threads to complain about how Red Hat has used its own Microsoftian form of “embrace, extend, extinguish” to first purchase the formerly independent CentOS Project and hire all its devs, wait while an “official” RHEL clone squeezed out competition like Scientific Linux, and then kill CentOS while keeping the name for what is now CentOS Stream.</p> <p>Is there any reason why they didn’t call it RHEL Stream? That would be a more appropriate name.</p> <p>The decision of Red Hat to purchase the clone project CentOS in the first place was curious. Why make a “free” version of your own product when you could just make that product free in the first place?</p> <p>We all say that free RHEL clones like CentOS and Scientific Linux help promote the RHEL ecosystem and funnel business to Red Hat. Maybe that’s true. But maybe it isn’t. If anybody really knows, it would be Red Hat.</p> <p>Why the uproar when there are Debian, SUSE and Ubuntu?</p> <p>There is something about the technical excellence in RHEL that makes it the overwhelming choice in the enterprise market. Plus everyone uses CentOS. Because it’s just like RHEL. That’s it in a nutshell. People want to use it because everybody else is already using it.</p> <p>I followed the CentOS project before it was acquired by Red Hat. Things could be dicey. Releases were generally VERY far behind RHEL. So were updates. But the ability to “play” with something just like RHEL is very powerful. It’s not just the price of $0. Being able to use a distro for free and without “registering” or otherwise being marketed to are table stakes in the Linux distribution world.</p> <p>Even Microsoft — which is very much not a Linux company — recognizes the value of “free” in particular situations. If users had to fork out even $10 for Windows 10, and the “price” wasn’t bundled into their hardware purchase, the system’s market share among home, business and enterprise users would plummet. Those who really, really needed Windows would pay, but the system — and Microsoft’s desktop OS business — would bleed users, mindshare and relevance.</p> <p>(While I’m on this Microsoft tangent, I will point out that the company does offer a Windows Server product and doesn’t appear to give it away for free. Maybe Red Hat is taking notes.)</p> <p>When Red Hat made its “ending CentOS as we know it” announcement, it said there would be new opportunities to run RHEL for low and no cost. But those plans would be revealed later. It’s not a good idea to pull the rug out from under users — even if they’re paying nothing — and promise them something in the indeterminate future. It doesn’t add to the trust.</p> <p>Here’s the deal. As I say above, for desktop users, CentOS Stream won’t just be fine, it’ll be better than the “old” CentOS. Stream will unfold comfortably within the confines of a RHEL/CentOS release. It won’t be “slow” Fedora. It will be much slower.</p> <p>We don’t know how Stream will work on servers. There are so many different server workloads and use cases. For some of them, Stream will be great, for others it will be not so great.</p> <p>What Red Hat isn’t talking about, but what’s happening as we speak, is the formation of new projects that aim to provide the “old” CentOS/Scientific Linux experience, taking the RHEL source and producing a downstream “clone” of the distribution.</p> <p>Unless Red Hat goes to extremes to prevent it — and there are no indications that it will, the source code for RHEL will be in good enough shape for the clone projects to do their work.</p> <p>And CentOS Stream will have competitors in the form of new RHEL clones.</p> <p>Red Hat won’t control those clones. It won’t have to pay for them, either. We all have to assume that <em>Red Hat is OK with that</em>. I’m 100% sure they didn’t think ending CentOS meant an end to all RHEL downstream clones.</p> <p>Even if they’re not based on RHEL, there are other Linux distributions capable of securely handling whatever server workload you throw at them. The scientific community, the high performance computing community, academic departments, corporations and companies — everybody could switch to Debian or Ubuntu. Life and computing will go on.</p> <p>At this point, Red Hat’s move carries a lot of risk with an uncertain reward. Making people unhappy almost never helps your cause.</p> <p>Linux users, academics and enterprises will survive. They’ll figure this out.</p> <p>For Red Hat, it’s a gutsy move, and I have no idea how it’s going to go.</p> How this Debian Stable user ended up with Google Chrome from Google’s repository https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/how-this-debian-stable-user-ended-up-with-google-chrome-from-googles-repository/ Sat, 19 Dec 2020 16:52:21 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/how-this-debian-stable-user-ended-up-with-google-chrome-from-googles-repository/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/Google_Chrome_logo.png" alt="The Google Chrome logo"></p> <p><strong>Update:</strong> <em>On Jan. 1, 2021, an updated Chromium package moved into the Debian Stable repository. Hopefully it will also become part of the Testing repo and appear in the next Debian release. The original post follows:</em></p> <p>I guess I knew that the Chromium web browser — the code from the open-source project that is still coded by Google people but isn&rsquo;t fully <em>Googled</em> — was <a href="https://packages.debian.org/buster/chromium">very out of date</a> in the Debian Stable repository.</p> <p>But I didn&rsquo;t know how bad it was <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/chromium">until I started digging</a>. Digging is easy in Debian.</p> <p>While the rest of the web-browsing world was on version 87, Debian users are stuck with version 83. And <a href="https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/c/chromium/chromium_83.0.4103.116-1~deb10u3_changelog">that version 83</a> hasn&rsquo;t been patched or otherwise updated since July 12. That&rsquo;s more than six months at this point.</p> <p>Whenever something&rsquo;s not right with a Debian package, the place to turn is <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=chromium;dist=unstable">the bug reports</a>.</p> <p>There have been problems. Chromium is notoriously hard to package. There are <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=973848">unresolved issues with dependencies</a>. Plus packaging of Chromium for Debian appears to be the responsibility of <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=973848#18">a one-man army</a>. I&rsquo;m not even sure if this guy Michael is the maintainer of the package. It doesn&rsquo;t look like he is. Others are trying to help, but Debian Stable is old, and Chromium needs some other, newer packages in order to run.</p> <p>It has gotten so bad that <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/news/1201057/chromium-removed-from-testing/">Chromium was removed from the Testing repository</a> that is slated to become the next Debian release sometime next year. That could be bad news if the situation isn&rsquo;t resolved before the &ldquo;freeze&rdquo; of Testing in anticipation of Debian 11/Bullseye.</p> <p>Debian has always done a great job with Firefox. It ships with Debian desktop ISOs, and it is a priority for Debian Developers. Chromium, with its Googly origins, is not.</p> <p>But many of us need Chromium/Chrome. It&rsquo;s the IE of the 2020s, and sometimes Firefox doesn&rsquo;t quite cut it. Like it or not, Google services run better on Chrome. And I use a lot of Google services in my day job. For my non-work browsing, I use Firefox, but when I&rsquo;m snatching chocolates off the belt and putting them in boxes, it&rsquo;s all Chromium.</p> <p>I have Flatpak enabled on my Debian Stable/Buster system, and I thought that might solve my problem. There is a Chromium Flatpak. There is also <a href="https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium">Ungoogled Chromium</a>, which I just learned exists.</p> <p>Neither of these Flatpaks would install. The error message said my version of the <em>flatpak</em> package is too old. Debian&rsquo;s Buster Backports repository has a newer version of <em>flatpak</em>, and I&rsquo;m already set up for Backports, so I got the new package.</p> <p>Chromium and Ungoogled Chromium still wouldn&rsquo;t install from <a href="https://flathub.org/">Flathub</a>.</p> <p>There were error messages, but I really don&rsquo;t care about them, so I didn&rsquo;t write down what they said.</p> <p>I just need to get this system working with a Chromium web browser that HAS ACTUALLY RECEIVED A SECURITY PATCH IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS.</p> <p>This is a huge problem.</p> <p>In many ways, the idea of a never-changing Stable operating system and a constantly changing web browser doesn&rsquo;t make sense. That&rsquo;s why Debian ships Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) instead of &ldquo;regular&rdquo; Firefox.</p> <p>So what did I do about Chromium?</p> <p>I used the nuclear option. Or in this case the tactical nuclear option. The nuclear option is wiping Debian Stable and installing a Linux distribution that includes an up-to-date Chromium and is committed to keeping it that way.</p> <p>The tactical nuclear option — for me anyway — is downloading the .deb of Chrome from Google and using <em>dpkg</em> to install it, knowing that the package adds the Google Chrome repository to my <em>sources.list</em>, and now Google is in charge of updating the browser for me.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m already logging into Google to sync my bookmarks and other settings, in addition to being logged into Google Apps, so insisting I have Chromium instead of Chrome is nowhere near a hill I need to die on.</p> <p>I just need a working, secure Chrome/Chromium browser. And now I have one.</p> <p>I considered moving to Fedora — or even the dreaded CentOS Stream (another topic for another day) — so I could get the up-to-date Chromium that the Fedora Project packages for its own distro as well as the RHEL/CentOS EPEL repo.</p> <p>(There was a time in the mid-level distant past when Chromium was a problem for Fedora as well. But the distro seems to have it under control now.)</p> <p>I could also move to Ubuntu, where that distro&rsquo;s decision to only offer Chromium as a Snap package has been controversial. The decision on Ubuntu&rsquo;s part was a labor issue. It&rsquo;s so hard to package Chromium that they can do it once for the Snap and use that on all their Snap-enabled releases.</p> <p>I could even try Snap in Debian Stable, but how much do I have to do to get a secure version of what for many people is <em>their most important, most used app</em>?</p> <p>Sometimes things are broken in Debian. Literally it could be a package that doesn&rsquo;t work. Sometimes it&rsquo;s philosophical: Is it <em>The Debian Way</em>? That often combines with developer attention or interest — and the lack thereof — to leave a gaping hole in the distro.</p> <p>For instance, it&rsquo;s hard to get a working IDE in Debian. That&rsquo;s why I turned to Flatpak in the first place. It&rsquo;s the easiest (to me) way to get NetBeans, IntelliJ and Eclipse. Yep, even Eclipse fell out of the Debian repo.</p> <p>Another think I&rsquo;ve learned over the past year or so is that while alternative packaging systems like Flathub, Snap and AppImage have their place in the Linux ecosystem, it&rsquo;s hard to beat traditional Linux packaging (.deb and .rpm).</p> <p>I have spent a few long periods of time running Debian Stable, just as I have Fedora. Those are the two distros I&rsquo;ve run the most. They couldn&rsquo;t be on more opposite ends of the spectrum. Debian stays the same throughout the release, and Fedora changes all the time. You always run into problems in both cases. Not too many problems. I always say there&rsquo;s about one mid-level problem per year in both distros.</p> <p>For my time running Debian 10, Chromium is my problem. At least I&rsquo;ve been able to solve it. You may not agree with using Google&rsquo;s Chrome repo, but it gets the job done. If I didn&rsquo;t use <em>any</em> Google services, that would be one thing, but since I use <em>many</em>, this makes the most sense for me right now.</p> <p>When I finally get around to buying a bigger NVMe SSD drive and reinstalling my operating system, this situation will factor into my choice of Linux distribution. No question about that.</p> <p><strong>Update:</strong> As of Sunday, Dec. 20, 2020, <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/news/1203594/accepted-chromium-870428088-02-source-into-unstable/">a new Chromium (version 87) is now in Debian Sid/Unstable</a>.</p> <p>Comment on this post on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25494728">Hacker News</a> or <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/khhisy/how_this_debian_stable_user_ended_up_with_google/">Reddit</a>.</p> Vim tip: Open the last file you closed with :e# https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/vim-tip-open-the-last-file-you-closed-with-e/ Fri, 13 Nov 2020 05:03:49 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/vim-tip-open-the-last-file-you-closed-with-e/ <p>I can&rsquo;t believe I didn&rsquo;t learn this earlier because now I do it all the time:</p> <p>If you close a file, as I often do with <code>:bd</code>, to open the last file you closed, type <code>e#</code> in command mode:</p> <p><code>:e#</code></p> <p>The last closed file opens in your current window.</p> <p>This is great for me because in my editing workflow, I have a story budget from one directory in one window, and I work on stories from a different directory in another. So my working directory is the story directory, and I would have to change it to reopen my budget file, which I often close when moving from one computer to another to do a Google Meet (aka Google Zoom) chat and not be too loud for everybody else in the house. (It&rsquo;s 2020, and we&rsquo;re quarantining.)</p> <p>How do I get my files on multiple computers? I use <a href="https://syncthing.net/">Syncthing</a> for that. And keeping the same file open simultaneously leads to conflicts and multiple file versions.</p> <p>So being able to close a file in Vim with <code>:bd</code> and then reopen it with <code>:e#</code> is something I do every day.</p> Running four sites on NearlyFreeSpeech.net should cost me $3.92 per month https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/running-four-sites-on-nearlyfreespeech.net-should-cost-me-3.92-per-month/ Sat, 07 Nov 2020 13:16:03 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/running-four-sites-on-nearlyfreespeech.net-should-cost-me-3.92-per-month/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2020_1107_nearlyfreespeech_costs.png" alt="My estimated monthly charges for NearlyFreeSpeech.net" title="My estimated monthly charges for NearlyFreeSpeech.net"></p> <p>NearlyFreeSpeech.net stands out among shared-hosting companies for many reasons, but its cost structure is one of the biggest.</p> <p>NFSN doesn&rsquo;t charge a flat fee for an &ldquo;unlimited&rdquo; number of web sites, or a smaller fee for one or two sites. Instead, NFSN charges for what you use.</p> <p>Before I committed to switching my sites from Hostgator to NearlyFreeSpeech.net, I needed to make sure I wouldn&rsquo;t be dinged for a Slashdot/Reddit/Hacker News-style traffic spike.</p> <p>Not that I&rsquo;ve gotten one. Still, I don&rsquo;t want a surprise $25 (or $1,025) bill just because a post somehow caught fire. That can happen with a virtual machine like <a href="https://cloud.google.com/compute">Google Compute Engine</a>, Amazon Web Services&rsquo; <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/ec2">EC2</a> or <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/">Lightsail</a>, or even a DigitalOcean <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/">Droplet</a>.</p> <p>I know that the 1 TB per month you get from DigitalOcean or AWS Lightsail pretty much covers all the traffic a &ldquo;normal&rdquo; blog will get, and most of us will never get close to that.</p> <p>The 1 GB per month that Google was giving me on my &ldquo;free&rdquo; VM, which turned out to be a lot more expensive than &ldquo;free,&rdquo; wasn&rsquo;t enough. For those playing along at home, 1 TB is about 1,000 GBs, so Google is really trying to lure in customers with a &ldquo;free&rdquo; product with very limited bandwidth. Never mind that the &ldquo;free&rdquo; Google VM suddenly started costing me $6 a month, and somewhere around 60 cents a month when it was offline. I had to kill it to stop the charges.</p> <p>A full terabyte is probably enough, and AWS Lightsail — starting at $3.50 a month — seems like a great deal, as does a $5 DigitalOcean Droplet.</p> <p>But I do place value on the managed environment of shared hosting as opposed to a VM where I have to install and configure everything — and then maintain it.</p> <p>The <em>tl;dr</em> answer is: <strong>NearlyFreeSpeech.net does have a bandwidth &ldquo;limit,&rdquo; but they are not enforcing it.</strong></p> <p>NFSN allows 10 GB per day in bandwidth for &ldquo;production&rdquo; sites (5 cents a day) and 1 GB per day for &ldquo;non-production sites&rdquo; (1 cent a day). Only half of your total sites can be &ldquo;non-production.&rdquo; I have four sites total, so that&rsquo;s two production and two non-production. Everything&rsquo;s pretty cheap at NFSN, but non-production sites are REALLY cheap. If you&rsquo;re running a real business site on NFSN, they recommend a &ldquo;Critical&rdquo; site, which costs 50 cents a day and allows for 100 GB per day of bandwidth.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ll probably never use 1 GB per day, though I&rsquo;ve used 1 GB per month many times, and that is why Google&rsquo;s VPS was a no-go. But if I should go over my bandwidth limit, NearlyFreeSpeech.net <a href="https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting">says the following</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>Currently we are not tracking (and hence not billing for) extra bandwidth usage. This is subject to change at any time.</p></blockquote> <p>Keeping that in mind, I&rsquo;m fairly confident I&rsquo;ll never get a surprise bill.</p> <p>For the four sites I&rsquo;m hosting on NFSN, my estimated monthly charges are $3.92. <em>That&rsquo;s for all four.</em></p> <p>I had a pretty good deal at Hostgator. I was paying somewhere between $10 and $12 a month for &ldquo;unlimited&rdquo; service. I had three sites there.</p> <p>At my current NFSN rate, hosting eight websites would cost me about $8. If I were hosting 20 sites, Hostgator would theoretically be a better deal. But if any of those sites drew significant traffic, I&rsquo;m sure they&rsquo;d be asking me to pay more.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not hosting 20 sites, and if I were doing that for clients, there would be revenue involved. My paying a few bucks a site for hosting would be a very small part of the cost of doing business.</p> <p>So I&rsquo;m saving money with NFSN. I like the interface, and I like the software mix. They have a lot of utilities installed — including things like Hugo and Unison that I use and would rather not install myself, like I did with Unison at Hostgator.</p> <p>NFSN encourages you to use SSH over the command line to manage your sites.</p> <p>One of the biggest differences between running WordPress on NFSN and other hosts is that you need to use SSH in the terminal to update the WP software, including core, plugins and themes. You can&rsquo;t just go into <code>wp-admin</code> and add plugins and themes in the WordPress web interface. All of that has to happen over SSH.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s different and not terribly painful, but you do have to be comfortable in a Unix command line environment. Especially for WordPress, doing so much via SSH really boosts the security of your site. (More on this in a separate post.)</p> <p>I like having NFSN&rsquo;s newer FreeBSD environment with tons of languages and utilities pre-installed as opposed to the older, bare-bones CentOS in Hostgator. Unlike Hostgator, you don&rsquo;t have to request shell access in NFSN. It&rsquo;s an integral part of the service, and you really need to be comfortable in a terminal. You can choose from all the major shells. I use <code>bash</code>, but I could have easily gone &ldquo;full&rdquo; BSD with <code>ksh</code> or <code>csh</code>.</p> <p>You can see a screen shot above from my NFSN account that shows how they estimate my monthly billing. Aside from the savings, they don&rsquo;t really &ldquo;bill&rdquo; you at all. You deposit money in your account, and they draw from that. When your balance it gets low, you deposit more.</p> <p>I never really liked cPanel and all those janky utilities that automatically install WordPress and other services for you on so many shared hosts, Hostgator included. If you don&rsquo;t know how to install a service the &ldquo;real&rdquo; way, you&rsquo;re going to run into problems. It&rsquo;s better to do a little reading and planning before you install a major service that you&rsquo;re going to use for anything real.</p> <p>So far I&rsquo;ve moved over a WordPress blog, two Perl CGI sites and a Hugo-generated static site. Everything works. I&rsquo;d say that NFSN&rsquo;s WordPress documentation is about 95 percent complete. I had to figure out a few things on my own, and that will be the topic of a future post.</p> Using rsync to update a Hugo blog https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/using-rsync-to-update-a-hugo-blog/ Mon, 12 Oct 2020 15:11:24 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/using-rsync-to-update-a-hugo-blog/ <p>The one disadvantage of a static-site generator like Hugo is that after you create an entry and build your blog locally, you then have to figure out how to update your site on the server. And Hugo seems to change a whole lot of files with every run of the command <code>hugo</code>, even if you are only creating a single entry.</p> <p>There&rsquo;s a heavy amount of encouragement to use GitHub to manage the blog and some kind of build utility to transfer the files to the web server.</p> <p>While I&rsquo;m using Git (and GitHub and also Gitea-based Codeberg) for some projects, I don&rsquo;t want to use version control on my blogs. For now anyway.</p> <p>So how do I get the files from my Hugo <code>/public</code> directory to the <code>/public</code> directory on my web host? I&rsquo;m using shared hosting now, but this would be the same for a VPS like DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, etc.</p> <p>For the past many months, I&rsquo;ve been using <code>sftp</code> with a password. Not all hosts allow password access. Some insist on <code>ssh</code> with public-private keys. My host (NearlyFreeSpeech.net) allows passwords, and that&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;ve been doing until now:</p> <p>I use the <code>FileZilla</code> FTP client and transfer files from laptop to server. That works, but it&rsquo;s slow and a bit cumbersome.</p> <p>My local operating system is Debian Linux (the current stable release, Buster). The method I describe below will work on pretty much any Linux, BSD or MacOS system that has <code>rsync</code> installed. I can&rsquo;t remember if MacOS ships with <code>rsync</code> or not. On Debian, you generally have to use the package manager to add it.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve used <code>rsync</code> in the past, mostly for backups over USB-connected hard drives, but sparingly for network file transfers.</p> <p>I decided to set up an rsync script to do the transfer. I&rsquo;m going from a local <code>/public</code> directory to a remote <code>public</code> directory, though the names of the directories don&rsquo;t really matter.</p> <p>The first thing I did was set up ssh on my shared host. They all do it differently, so find out from your host&rsquo;s documentation how it&rsquo;s done. At NearlyFreeSpeech.net, it&rsquo;s easy to upload your ssh public key, and you&rsquo;re all set for ssh, rsync and sftp without a password.</p> <p>With ssh set up, here is roughly what my rsync command looks like:</p> <pre><code>rsync -avzh --delete ~/blog/public/ login_name@web_host_url.com:/home/public/ </code></pre> <p>Remember to replace <code>login_name@web_host_url.com</code> with the login and domain your host tells you to use for <code>ssh</code>, replace <code>~/blog/public/</code> with the path to your local content and replace <code>/home/public/</code> with the path to your remote content.</p> <p>Also: in <code>rsync</code>, the final <code>/</code> is important. It means, &ldquo;copy everything that&rsquo;s <em>in</em> this directory but <em>don&rsquo;t copy the directory itself</em>.&rdquo;</p> <p>Before you actually run this command for the first time, it&rsquo;s helpful to do two things:</p> <ul> <li>Back up any content on the server that you don&rsquo;t want to lose</li> <li>add the <code>--dry-run</code> switch (after <code>--delete</code>) to your rsync line the first time and see what the system tells you is happening. If it looks good, remove <code>--dry-run</code> and give it a go for real.</li> </ul> <p>Once I was satisfied with my rsync line, I put it in a script, made it executable with <code>chmod a+x</code> and used <code>sudo</code> to stash it in <code>/usr/local/bin</code>:</p> <pre><code>#!bin/sh rsync -avzh --delete ~/blog/public/ login_name@web_host_url.com:/home/public/ exit 0 </code></pre> <p>I should combine these two things together and make a script that does the <code>hugo</code> build and the <code>rsync</code> operation in one go:</p> <pre><code>#!bin/sh /path/to/my/hugo/directory/hugo rsync -avzh --delete ~/blog/public/ login_name@web_host_url.com:/home/public/ exit 0 </code></pre> I got a SinkShroom. Is it worth the money? https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/i-got-a-sinkshroom.-is-it-worth-the-money/ Thu, 08 Oct 2020 15:36:53 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/i-got-a-sinkshroom.-is-it-worth-the-money/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2020_1008_sink_shroom_04.jpg" alt="A human hand holds the chrome SinkShroom in preparation to install it in an empty drain"></p> <p>I bought this plastic drain stopper called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076QDB6QZ">the SinkShroom</a> from Amazon. I removed the original stopper from our sink long ago and have been using another easily removed plastic sink stopper that was supposed to catch hair but never did. It didn&rsquo;t work too well at all, but it sells for about $8.</p> <p>The SinkShroom and its bigger cousins the TubShroom and ShowerShroom have a lot of marketing behind them.</p> <p>I opted for a &ldquo;chrome&rdquo; model SinkShroom, which cost $11.99 with free shipping on Amazon orders over $25. We quit Amazon Prime a few weeks ago. That is a topic for another post, but I&rsquo;m sure with Prime they&rsquo;ll happily send you this in its own padded envelope within a day or two. I&rsquo;m OK with slow delivery and more crap in one box (even though a pack of canned cat food smashed a box of tea bags &hellip; but as I say above, THIS IS A TOPIC FOR ANOTHER POST).</p> <p>I got the SinkShroom today and freed it from its packaging with scissors. I was expecting something a little more substantial for $12. Maybe I should have gotten the even-more-expensive <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SinkShroom-Revolutionary-Bathroom-Protector-Stainless/dp/B07W8218FZ">stainless steel version</a>. If this one is even slightly effective, I might do that.</p> <p>Back to the &ldquo;chrome&rdquo; SinkShroom. The &ldquo;chrome&rdquo; part is really just plastic (or VERY thin sheet metal) that is chrome-colored. Not cool. I don&rsquo;t expect this finish to last very long.</p> <p>The plastic on the SinkShroom seems kind of flimsy. It&rsquo;s thin. The part that fans out on the bottom to hold the stopper in the drainpipe doesn&rsquo;t seem like it will last either.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve also heard these things attract mold and are hard to clean.</p> <p>But I just got the thing today. My problem is that looking at the SinkShroom, it should cost $5, not $12. At $5, if the thing lasted six months and than gave out or was super slimy and disgusting, I&rsquo;d just pull it out of the drain and get rid of it. But at $12, I feel like it needs to last a full year.</p> <p>Will this piece of plastic work without looking horrible 12 months from now? Time will tell.</p> <p>I will either add to this post, or write a new one, when I have some new (and no doubt exciting) SinkShroom news.</p> <p><strong>Update on 10/12/2020:</strong> As others have said, the SinkShroom is held in the drainpipe by plastic fanning out from the bottom, and there&rsquo;s nothing to keep it straight in the drain — except for you straightening it by hand.</p> <p><strong>Update on 2/21/2021:</strong> I pulled the SinkShroom today and replaced it with my previous drain stopper. The SinkShroom doesn&rsquo;t look great after four months in the drain. The soft plastic tends to attract black mold that is hard to get off. Worse that that, even when I clear the hair and other crap from the &lsquo;Shroom, it still drains too slowly. I think I&rsquo;m better off trying to pull hair from the trap with one of those &ldquo;hooky&rdquo; plastic drain clearers and having full flow of the drain.</p> <p>I could see the SinkShroom lasting another six months, but overall I&rsquo;m not terribly impressed with it, and I still maintain this is a $5 item that sells for $12.</p> <p><em>In addition to the image above, I pulled more chrome SinkShroom images from Amazon. They look better than what I could have shot myself, and it pretty much does look like this:</em></p> <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2020_1008_sink_shroom_01.jpg" alt="The chrome SinkShroom in its package"></p> <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2020_1008_sink_shroom_02.jpg" alt="The chrome SinkShroom installed in a bathroom sink"></p> <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2020_1008_sink_shroom_03.jpg" alt="The chrome SinkShroom out of its package"></p> Dave Winer is too important to think he's accomplishing nothing https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/dave-winer-is-too-important-to-think-hes-accomplishing-nothing/ Sat, 04 Jul 2020 14:27:14 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/dave-winer-is-too-important-to-think-hes-accomplishing-nothing/ <p>I read Dave Winer&rsquo;s <a href="http://scripting.com">Scripting.com</a> blog every day. I subscribe <a href="http://scripting.com/email/">via email</a>. Like <em>everything</em> Dave does, it makes me think.</p> <p>Today I wonder if I should set up an email subscription service of some kind for this blog. Email is the new hotness in marketing. Email addresses are like gold.</p> <p>Dave recently wrote about how he feels he&rsquo;s reaching nobody with his blog, especially as it pertains to the political issues of the day (e.g. coronavirus, the Black Lives Matter movement and Trump).</p> <p><a href="https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1278587419697319936">He writes</a> on Twitter:</p> <blockquote> <p>I enjoy writing my blog because as I’m writing I feel like I’m helping straighten things out, but it’s an illusion, none of it ends up in the bigger conversation, none of it ends up mattering.</p></blockquote> <p>Dave has 68k Twitter followers, and my <em>theory</em> is that your Twitter feed starts to &ldquo;matter&rdquo; when you get past a certain number. I <em>know</em> it&rsquo;s way more than I have: 1,771.</p> <p>Would things be different if I had 68k followers, or would I still think that the Twitterverse, as it were, barely knows I&rsquo;m alive?</p> <p>Maybe 1 million followers is the point at which you really think something&rsquo;s happening.</p> <p>How many followers does the &ldquo;average&rdquo; active Twitter user have? If I were to guess, I&rsquo;d say fewer than 500.</p> <p>According to <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-twitter-users/">the Pew Research Center</a>, of the 10% who tweet most often, the median number of followers they have is 387, and the median number of accounts they follow is 456. Also, 80% of tweets come from that top 10%. That means 90% of Twitter users send 20% of the tweets.</p> <p>Does any of this mean anything? My gut says no.</p> <p>Like with any social media service, the bigger your audience, the better you feel about it and the more you post. That&rsquo;s the theory anyway.</p> <p>You can bet that Donald Trump is eager to feed his 80 million followers, never mind that a great many of those who follow him are not Trump &ldquo;fans&rdquo; per se. Maybe they think they&rsquo;re watching a slow train wreck. Or they just want to know what&rsquo;s on the mind of the world&rsquo;s most powerful person (or at least one of the world&rsquo;s most powerful people).</p> <p>The interactions with my Twitter posts are limited. I don&rsquo;t &ldquo;reach&rdquo; that many people per post, as Twitter is happy to tell me, and the interaction I get is usually people I know or work with in &ldquo;real&rdquo; life, or the few people I interact with constantly on the service because our interests align.</p> <p>So if Dave thinks he has no reach, where does that leave the rest of us with around 1K followers?</p> <p>One think I learned from Dave and others is to <em>use your voice</em> and <em>own your content</em>. The internet and the open web are gifts, or gift horses, at any rate. I&rsquo;ve been in media a long time, and I remember when gatekeeping was real, and nobody would see what you wrote — ever — unless you convinced a newspaper or magazine to print it.</p> <p>The web is a revolution, and the revolution&rsquo;s purpose wasn&rsquo;t to create social media silos run by giant corporations intent on vacuuming up your data for marketing purposes.</p> <p>We have that. But we also have more. Dave invented some of the good stuff, and he has created so much.</p> <p>I read Dave all the time. He&rsquo;s a major inspiration for my writing and programming. I even name him as an inspiration and influence in the README to <a href="https://github.com/passthejoe/blogPoster">my blogPoster project</a>, a Ruby script that allows me to write quick posts (currently from the command line) and publish them on my own blog, Twitter and Mastodon.</p> <p>The other inspiration for blogPoster — also listed in the README — is <a href="https://manton.org/">Manton Reece</a>, whose work on microblogging intrigued me. I had a hard time understanding exactly what Manton was doing, but I knew I wanted to do something similar. When his <a href="https://micro.blog/">Micro.blog</a> project came out, I still didn&rsquo;t quite get it. It wasn&rsquo;t exactly what I wanted to do. But you can see how <a href="http://updates.passthejoe.net">my microblog site</a> looks much like what Manton and Dave are doing. I just do it in my own way. That&rsquo;s the power we can tap with free software and the open web.</p> <p>Back to Dave, who thinks he&rsquo;s not reaching anybody. I agree that a regular &ldquo;column&rdquo; (the word is so <em>20th century</em>) on a mainstream site like <a href="http://nytimes.com">nytimes.com</a> or <a href="http://washingtonpost.com">washingtonpost.com</a> is a platform that has more potential reach than <a href="http://passthejoe.net">http://passthejoe.net</a> or <a href="http://scripting.com">Scripting.com</a>.</p> <p>But the freedom to write, edit publish and promote this work as I see fit is worth something. That&rsquo;s what I learned from Dave, Manton, <a href="https://ma.tt/">Matt Mullenweg</a>, <a href="https://daringfireball.net/">John Gruber</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/karaswisher">Kara Swisher</a>, <a href="https://ode.io/">Rob Reed</a>, <a href="https://blog.penelopetrunk.com/">Penelope Trunk</a> and many others.</p> <p>Maybe just writing on the web isn&rsquo;t enough. Dave is reaching me. He makes me think every day. There&rsquo;s an amplifying effect. The more he writes about these topics, the sharper the message gets.</p> <p>Why isn&rsquo;t Dave on TV six times a week? I can&rsquo;t believe that TV news isn&rsquo;t interviewing him on a regular basis. Some &ldquo;sources&rdquo; make it so easy to be interviewed that they get called all the time. The more they say &ldquo;yes,&rdquo; the more they get called.</p> <p>Being at journalists&rsquo; beck and call can be draining. It helps if you love being on TV. I can tell you that influencing people happens at a greater scale on TV than it does anywhere else. The difference from the 20th century is that we get &ldquo;TV&rdquo; so many other ways, mostly digital. Video (and to a lesser — but still significant extent — audio) is how people really <em>get to know you</em>. Even if they don&rsquo;t <em>really</em> know you, they think they do. You can see this as creepy, or the other thing.</p> <p>See how I ramble? If you&rsquo;re still here, congratulations. Who else would publish this? That&rsquo;s why I have my own site: so I can do what I want.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m working on <a href="https://codeberg.org/passthejoe/zen-of-debian/">a longer project</a> that is definitely not blog posts where, when I ramble, I make a new file. Call it a new chapter. I&rsquo;m hoping that the Git versioning system and a public, remote repository will turn all of my rambling on Unix, Linux and Debian into something coherent. How do <em>real</em> people write <em>real</em> books? I have no idea. I&rsquo;m trying to find what works for me in the 2020s.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve written thousands of blog posts, thousands of tweets. I know how to do it. Or how I do it, at any rate.</p> <p>News stories ­— especially the kind I write — just roll out of my fingers. I can write about a fire, shooting or car crash in my sleep. Since I get up at 4 a.m. and start working at 5, that&rsquo;s what happens more often than not.</p> <p>What has a profound effect on the lives of those involved is often just another breaking news story to me. That&rsquo;s because I&rsquo;m writing and editing dozens of them a day. What does that say? I try to think more about that. I have people in my life who remind me of this.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve written thousands of news stories and edited many tens of thousands more.</p> <p>This is a long way of saying that I&rsquo;m comfortable blogging, microblogging and writing shortish items. I&rsquo;m thinking that time will help me write longer things.</p> <p>I worry about the impermanence of blog posts. I want them on my own site, on my own server (or my own shared hosting account, to be real). But what if WordPress.com, where I still have <a href="http://passthejoe.wordpress.com">more than a thousand posts</a>, is the best way to keep my work online as close to forever as possible?</p> <p>Does anybody care what I thought about Ubuntu in 2008, or how I tried to make an old laptop work?</p> <p>I worry just like Dave does about whether anybody&rsquo;s reading, listening, or giving a shit.</p> <p>I always say I need to write more about what I&rsquo;m thinking or feeling. More about <em>what&rsquo;s going on in my life</em>, and not just the tech.</p> <p>The tech is easy. Just like sizing up a fire or freeway crash from &ldquo;official&rdquo; reports. But it&rsquo;s nothing like getting out to the scene and talking to people. Or creating a software project from the ground up.</p> <p>I wonder. I worry. And now I know that Dave worries.</p> <p>I won&rsquo;t speak for Dave, but I write — and I do — what compels me. If I&rsquo;m driven, that&rsquo;s what I do. If I don&rsquo;t care, nothing.</p> <p>If I care, I write it. If you care, that&rsquo;s gravy.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s easy to see that Dave cares about what he writes. It&rsquo;s a valuable thing. He&rsquo;s sharing what&rsquo;s on his mind. He works through things over the course of his posts.</p> <p>I hope I do the same. Nobody&rsquo;s asking me to do it. Am I moving any needles? I deliberately don&rsquo;t track how many people read this site. I value your privacy. And my own. When I did track readers, the information was not particularly useful to me.</p> <p>Should I write more articles like those that are the most popular? What if I&rsquo;m missing something that could be even more popular? What if nobody&rsquo;s reading anything at all. I&rsquo;d rather not know.</p> <p>In the end, I just write what I want. That&rsquo;s easier. And better. (Maybe.)</p> <p>I see the irony in working for a group of news web sites where we monitor audience and think about search-engine optimization all the time. Yet it&rsquo;s revenue that really matters. Especially subscription revenue. That&rsquo;s this year.</p> <p>Dave&rsquo;s ideas on how news sites should work have really made me think. Any &ldquo;world&rdquo; can&rsquo;t last forever, especially the one we&rsquo;re in right now.</p> <p>But it&rsquo;s not all about the business that I&rsquo;m still lucky to be a (money-earning) part of. Not even a little.</p> <p>I still love the internet and the radical democracy that the World Wide Web dropped in each of our hands. I realize there&rsquo;s a whole spectrum between each of us doing what we want online and how many people we can reach with whatever that may be. Finding those points is part of the game.</p> <p>Our world has been remade since the WWW was created in 1993. Things were totally different in 2003 (two years after 9/11) and 2013 (smartphones, Obama). Even today, we don&rsquo;t know where we&rsquo;ll be in 2023, even though it&rsquo;s only three years away. Most of us aren&rsquo;t looking beyond November 2020 and whenever coronavirus will be over.</p> <p>(I need a profound thought to go right here, but nothing has come to mind.) I&rsquo;ll leave you with this:</p> <p>Dave shares himself through his writing. It&rsquo;s valuable as hell, and more people should read it and think about it.</p> I love these clean electric guitar sounds https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/i-love-these-clean-electric-guitar-sounds/ Sat, 27 Jun 2020 13:57:20 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/i-love-these-clean-electric-guitar-sounds/ <p>Electric guitars weren&rsquo;t invented to make overdriven sounds, though they do excel at that.</p> <p>Made for electricity — and for the music of the day in the 1950s — the guitars created by Leo Fender&rsquo;s company are capable of surprisingly sweet sounds that are as much at home in jazz as in country.</p> <p>I am particular struck by these Songbirds Foundation videos of guitarists playing stellar examples of 1950s Fender Stratocasters and Telecasters through amps that range from vintage Fender to a Dumble.</p> <p>I&rsquo;d never heard of Joe Robinson, but he makes these Strats sound so good:</p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hlEGoYuXAck?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> <p>I <em>have</em> heard of Tommy Emmanuel:</p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WZDprubbjYw?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0JS-Xg0KdW0?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> <p>It really says something about the possibilities when you bring a great player, instrument and amplifier together.</p> Writing in git vs. blogging https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/writing-in-git-vs.-blogging/ Sun, 21 Jun 2020 14:10:21 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/writing-in-git-vs.-blogging/ <p>Any of us who have been blogging over the past 10 or more years has written hundreds or maybe thousands of posts.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m pretty sure I have at least a couple thousand.</p> <p>But blog writing and <em>other</em> writing are different. A blog tends to say &ldquo;this is now, things below this are in the past, things above this will appear in the future.&rdquo;</p> <p>It&rsquo;s reverse-chronological. That&rsquo;s not a horrible thing.</p> <p>But if you&rsquo;re trying to write something longer, something where you do a lot of editing and want to change the order in which things appear, a blog is not the best choice.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;m beginning to use Git and remote repositories like GitHub and Codeberg to help me write outside of the blogging format. So far I&rsquo;m enjoying it. Getting things &ldquo;right&rdquo; is slow-going.</p> <p>And even though writers of &ldquo;longer&rdquo; pieces are supposed to keep them hidden from the public until they are ready to be published, I am purposefully keeping my first repo in this format — <a href="https://codeberg.org/passthejoe/zen-of-debian">Zen of Debian</a> open. You can read what I have now](<a href="https://codeberg.org/passthejoe/zen-of-debian">https://codeberg.org/passthejoe/zen-of-debian</a>) open. You can read what I have now.</p> <p>This is working for me. I don&rsquo;t feel like I&rsquo;m working in a total vacuum, but it&rsquo;s not as <em>public</em> or ready for prime time as it would be on a &ldquo;real&rdquo; website.</p> C++ in Vim with two lines in .vimrc https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/c-in-vim-with-two-lines-in-.vimrc/ Sat, 23 May 2020 16:55:32 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/c-in-vim-with-two-lines-in-.vimrc/ <p>With inspiration and code from <a href="https://goyalankit.com/blog/compile-and-run-cpp-program-from-vim">Ankit</a>, I am using Vim to compile and run C++ programs without leaving the editor.</p> <p>I added these two lines to my <code>.vimrc</code>:</p> <pre><code>nnoremap &lt;F7&gt; :!g++ -o %:r %&lt;Enter&gt; nnoremap &lt;F8&gt; :!./%:r&lt;Enter&gt; </code></pre> <p>I hit <code>F7</code> to compile the program I&rsquo;m working on.</p> <p><code>F8</code> runs that program.</p> <p>This is much simpler than an IDE, and simpler still than Geany, which is pretty simple already.</p> <p>These lines could be modified to compile and run a Java program, or to just run your code in scripting languages like Ruby, Perl and Python.</p> <p>See Ankit&rsquo;s post for his exact adds to <code>.vimrc</code>, which are slightly different from what I ended up with.</p> <p>And I want to thank him and all the others with similar tips and tutorials for opening my eyes to what you can do with Vim.</p> Upgrading my now-dying 2012 laptop to Fedora 32 probably won't happen https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/upgrading-my-now-dying-2012-laptop-to-fedora-32-probably-wont-happen/ Sat, 09 May 2020 14:25:37 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/upgrading-my-now-dying-2012-laptop-to-fedora-32-probably-wont-happen/ <p>My 2012 HP Pavilion g6 laptop&rsquo;s keyboard and touchpad are working intermittently. I&rsquo;ve already replaced the keyboard twice. They are crazy cheap to buy (and also cheap in quality), but I&rsquo;m tired of doing it. Not sure what is wrong with the touchpad, but it&rsquo;s about time to cut my losses.</p> <p>The laptop has run Fedora for a LONG time. It is now on F30. It has gone through many upgrades between about 2013 and 2019. I did a backup and downloaded the Fedora 32 upgrade, but that&rsquo;s as far as I went. I have all the user files backed up. I could plug in an external keyboard and mouse, and it&rsquo;ll work fine, but it&rsquo;s pretty slow. It&rsquo;s not worth investing in a SATA SSD and is already maxed out at 8 GB of RAM.</p> <p>So I&rsquo;ll keep it for now as a last-resort backup.</p> Installing OpenBSD on a USB flash drive. Do not recommend. https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/installing-openbsd-on-a-usb-flash-drive.-do-not-recommend./ Sat, 09 May 2020 13:39:17 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/installing-openbsd-on-a-usb-flash-drive.-do-not-recommend./ <p>My test laptop &ndash; a 2012 HP Pavilion g6 &ndash; is dying. The past couple of OpenBSD installs resulted in kernel panics, and now the keyboard and touchpad keep failing. I&rsquo;ve replaced the keyboard twice, and now it&rsquo;s mostly the ribbon connector between the keyboard and the motherboard.</p> <p>I have to pop the bottom off the laptop, take out a screw, then pry the keyboard off and re-seat the cable. It&rsquo;s probably the same kind of thing with the touchpad. And then there are the kernel panics.</p> <p>Curiously the same laptop is running Fedora 30 fine &ndash; except for the keyboard and touchpad issues.</p> <p>What I like about this 2012 HP laptop is that I can unscrew the bottom panel, pull the SATA hard drive out and swap in another one. My 2017 HP laptop isn&rsquo;t as easy to modify. To access the battery, SATA hard drive, M.2 SSD (yes, I did install one) and RAM, first you have to remove all the screws on the bottom, including those under the now-long-gone rubber strip (I am using those rubber dots that keep cabinet doors from clacking as a cheap replacement. Why pay $50 for a piece of sticky rubber that I&rsquo;d have to pull off again?).</p> <p>After the screws are removed, then you have to pry the case bottom off with a plastic spudger in order to do any kind of servicing or swapping of parts. Too much work. The lack of easy serviceability in modern laptops is annoying. I won&rsquo;t get started on my mid-2011 iMac which is older than my easily-serviceable 2012 HP laptop. OK, I will. It&rsquo;s easy to get the iMac&rsquo;s RAM out but the the SATA hard drive is BEHIND THE SCREEN, which must be removed by somehow spudging and unclipping it, after which you need SPECIAL SUCTION CUPS to lift the screen out. No thanks.</p> <p>We also had a 2003 Apple iBook where the hard drive failed. I used iFixit instructions to take the old drive out and put the new one in, and I basically had to take the entire laptop apart. Little bits were EVERYWHERE.</p> <p>On to the real content:</p> <h3 id="installing-openbsd-on-a-usb-flash-drive">Installing OpenBSD on a USB flash drive</h3> <p>I wanted to try out <a href="http://openbsd.org">OpenBSD</a> 6.6, so I decided to install it to a 32 GB USB flash drive on my 2017 HP laptop &ndash; the one where I can&rsquo;t easily get the hard drive out.</p> <p><em>If your question is why I don&rsquo;t add OpenBSD as a dual-boot to one of my current drives, my answer is that I don&rsquo;t dual-boot for the most part. I don&rsquo;t like it. The process is brittle, both in Windows and Linux. Adding BSD is another layer of potential failure. I prefer separate physical drives.</em></p> <p>I put the OpenBSD installer on an old 1 GB flash drive, plugged both drives in, and also plugged in my old <code>urtw</code> WiFi dongle (after I learned that my 2017 laptop&rsquo;s WiFi chip was supported but required firmware).</p> <p>I did the installation to the USB flash drive. I went into the laptop&rsquo;s BIOS to allow &ldquo;legacy&rdquo; booting. Then I booted into OpenBSD 6.6.</p> <p>I still love OpenBSD. I didn&rsquo;t love all the trouble I had running Firefox and Chromium the last time I installed it on the 2012 laptop.</p> <p>The main problem with the install to the USB flash drive was extreme slowness due to the disk I/O taking forever. It probably took 3 hours to install the Firefox browser. And saving a file in vi took a full 5 seconds instead of being instant.</p> <p>It was a nice experiment, but OpenBSD needs a hard drive that isn&rsquo;t a USB flash drive.</p> <p>My use of Debian and Fedora notwithstanding, I continue to have a soft spot for OpenBSD, and I&rsquo;d love to have a dedicated laptop that runs it well.</p> The problem with Conexant's Flow.exe and Firefox has been fixed in Windows https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/the-problem-with-conexants-flow.exe-and-firefox-has-been-fixed-in-windows/ Sat, 09 May 2020 13:04:03 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/the-problem-with-conexants-flow.exe-and-firefox-has-been-fixed-in-windows/ <p>I&rsquo;m not sure who fixed it, or when, but somebody resolved the issue involving Firefox in Windows 10 laptops from HP and other manufacturers who use the Conexant audio hardware and software.</p> <p>What happened in my 2017 laptop was that running the Firefox browser would cause a Conexant program called Flow.exe to start using a whole lot of CPU, causing the laptop to run hot &ndash; and poorly.</p> <p>The &ldquo;fix&rdquo; at the time was to <a href="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/post/2019_0626_conexant_flow_exe_firefox_fix/">rename the Flow.exe file as _Flow.exe</a> and ignore the Conexant audio system&rsquo;s nag about Flow.exe being missing.</p> <p>Today, for the first time in maybe a year, I renamed <code>_Flow.exe</code> as <code>Flow.exe</code>, rebooted into Windows and started Firefox.</p> <p>Flow.exe is behaving, and Firefox runs great.</p> <p>Thanks to whoever fixed this issue. I&rsquo;m betting its the Firefox developers.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t spend a whole lot of time running Windows on this laptop. Win 10 is on the 1 TB spinning drive, and Debian Stable is on the 250 GB M.2 SSD and is far and away faster. I expect I&rsquo;d see a similar performance boost with Windows on an M.2 NVMe SSD, but that&rsquo;s not how I have it set up.</p> <p>Still, I <em>could</em> spend more time in Windows, and should that happen, I can run Firefox, with the cursed Flow.exe running, and have no problems. It probably won&rsquo;t happen since I&rsquo;m more confortable in Debian with GNOME &ndash; especially after discovering the bulk-file-renaming features hidden in GNOME&rsquo;s Files/Nautilus when I &ldquo;accidentally&rdquo; selected two files and then tried to rename them. The global search and replace, including the addition of consecutive numbering if you want it &ndash; it&rsquo;s so incredibly useful. It&rsquo;s the kind of feature that keeps me using GNOME. If other file managers have it, I&rsquo;d love to know about it.</p> It won't cure coronavirus, but LAUSD sweetens your life with the recipe for its famous coffee cake https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/it-wont-cure-coronavirus-but-lausd-sweetens-your-life-with-the-recipe-for-its-famous-coffee-cake/ Wed, 08 Apr 2020 14:36:30 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/it-wont-cure-coronavirus-but-lausd-sweetens-your-life-with-the-recipe-for-its-famous-coffee-cake/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2020_0408_lausd_coffee_cake.jpg" alt="LAUSD posted what looks like an old-time mimeograph of its famous coffee-cake recipe on Twitter"></p> <p>It&rsquo;s 2020, and coronavirus has shut down most of the country and the world. Los Angeles Unified School District campuses have been closed for weeks.</p> <p>Schools are trying to stay relevant and keep students engaged with online lessons. LAUSD doesn&rsquo;t want parents to forget about them either. With three robocalls a night, how could we? Nobody does robocalls like the LAUSD.</p> <p>Without actual school, children — and teachers, no doubt — can&rsquo;t enjoy the LAUSD&rsquo;s famous coffee cake. I remember it, too.</p> <p>Like the colonel&rsquo;s original &ldquo;11 herbs and spices&rdquo; Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe, which is kept in a vault, the LAUSD&rsquo;s legendary coffee cake recipe must be similarly well-guarded.</p> <p>I will forget that local newspapers, in response to reader requests, used to run this on the regular. The equally legendary Natalie Haughton of the LA Daily News Food Section must have run this a couple of dozen times when I was a copy editor in the Features department.</p> <p>The original recipe from 1954 looks like it was printed on a mimeograph machine. Remember mimeographs? The color, which was purple. The smell.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s the tweet, which is indeed burning up the internet:</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Baking more now that you are staying home? Remember the legendary LAUSD Old Fashioned Coffee Cake? Here is the original recipe from 1954. Photo credit: Danielle Chiriguaya. <a href="https://t.co/xpzN48JeXZ">pic.twitter.com/xpzN48JeXZ</a></p>&mdash; Los Angeles Unified (@LASchools) <a href="https://twitter.com/LASchools/status/1247633383091343360?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 7, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> 1888 Torres SE 115: A fine example of the maker who set the standard for the classical guitar https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/1888-torres-se-115-a-fine-example-of-the-maker-who-set-the-standard-for-the-classical-guitar/ Mon, 30 Mar 2020 16:35:59 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/1888-torres-se-115-a-fine-example-of-the-maker-who-set-the-standard-for-the-classical-guitar/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2020_0330_1888_torres_guitar.jpg" alt="Thanks to Guitar Salon International for this image of the 1888 Torres SE 115 classical guitar"></p> <p><em>(Thanks to Guitar Salon International for <a href="https://www.guitarsalon.com/store/p5101-1888-antonio-de-torres-ex-matilde-cuervas-emilio-pujol-spmh.html">their entry</a> and this photo of the 1888 Torres SE 115)</em></p> <p>Between its many hundreds of videos and extremely informative <a href="https://www.guitarsalon.com">site</a> and <a href="https://www.guitarsalon.com/blog/">blog</a>, Guitar Salon International is doing quite a service for classical guitar players and fans.</p> <p>Hundreds of historic instruments have passed through the doors of this Santa Monica institution, and this is no exception.</p> <p><a href="https://www.guitarsalon.com/store/p5101-1888-antonio-de-torres-ex-matilde-cuervas-emilio-pujol-spmh.html">This 1888 Torres (Second Epoch No. 115)</a> is historic not just because it has survived more than 120 years. Maker Antonio de Torres is the man whose instruments ushered in the &ldquo;modern&rdquo; era of classical guitar in the hands of such legends as Francisco Tarrega and Miguel Llobet.</p> <p>If you wonder about the &ldquo;reference&rdquo; sound of the spruce-topped classical guitar, this is it.</p> <p>This particular guitar, SE 115 (Torres&rsquo; guitars were numbered by him, corresponding to his first and second &ldquo;epochs&rdquo; of making instruments), is one number away from Tarrega&rsquo;s favorite Torres (SE 114), according to the Guitar Salon International web page. That page includes a lot of background on the guitar along with two recent videos of contemporary musicians playing it. Naturally the instrument sounds great.</p> <p>There is also a video that features a circa 1932 audio recording of its one-time owner Matilde Cuervas, playing this Torres with her husband, the great Emilio Pujol. Cuervas played it for many years, and after her death Pujol himself played the instrument for years before giving it to his niece in 1997.</p> <p>A student of Tarrega, Pujol is known for his tireless work on the repertoire and technique for the guitar and vihuela. His four-volume &ldquo;Escuela Razonada de la Guitarra,&rdquo; three volumes of which were translated into English as &ldquo;Guitar School,&rdquo; is a towering work on guitar technique.</p> <p>Listening to this vintage recording, both Cuervas and Pujol are wonderful players, and seeing the other videos shows how a guitar can survive over 100 years and still sound so good.</p> <p>Guitarists of the 20th and 21st century wanted louder instruments, leading luthiers to make radical changes to the Torres template. But for smaller audiences and with amplification in larger venues, the Torres-style guitar offers a playing experience and sound that should be cherished in the same way as that of Gibson, Fender and Martin guitars from those makers&rsquo; classic eras.</p> Classical guitar: My nails on March 30, 2020 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/classical-guitar-my-nails-on-march-30-2020/ Mon, 30 Mar 2020 13:45:39 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/classical-guitar-my-nails-on-march-30-2020/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/2020_0330_nails.jpg" alt="The fingernails on my right hand for playing the classical guitar"></p> <p>The whole <em>idea</em> of playing the classical guitar without nails — with just the flesh of the fingers — holds a great deal of appeal for me.</p> <p>Rob MacKillop&rsquo;s <a href="https://rmclassicalguitar.com">extensive web site</a> is a great resource — and source of inspiration — for players of (or with) the flesh (of the fingers). His own videos are excellent, as is his touch with the guitar. The history he lays out, of players from the 19th century to the present day, is compelling.</p> <p>I wanted to believe. And for other players, like the astounding <a href="https://rmclassicalguitar.com/interviews/virginia-luque/">Virginia Luque</a>, I do.</p> <p>And when I returned to the classical guitar some 30 years after my time studying the instrument at Cal State Northridge, I began with the flesh of the fingers. No nails.</p> <p>Then I grew my fingernails for the first time in 30 years. I remembered what my teacher Ron Purcell taught me about nail length and care. I read many articles and books on classical guitar technique.</p> <p>I experimented with shaping and buffing the edges, and I worked on my right-hand techique.</p> <p>And everything changed.</p> <p>When it comes to <em>my particular right hand and the classical guitar</em> the sound with nails has a clarity and pureness that I can&rsquo;t approach with just the flesh.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m still in the beginning stages of building my technique, but the sound and the feel of the strings with the flesh-nail technique has made me a believer.</p> <hr> <p><strong>Above:</strong> <em>This is what my right-hand nails look like on March 30, 2020. This is the shortest they have been since I started growing them in recent months to play the classical guitar. The <code>i</code> and <code>m</code> fingers have always sounded the best. I have had trouble with thinness in the sound of the <code>a</code> (aka <code>ring</code>) finger. But this shorter length has really helped the sound. While I&rsquo;m growing the <code>p</code> (aka <code>thumb</code>) nail, I&rsquo;m not really using it. I have to bend the thumb inward yet away from the <code>i</code> finger for the nail to have access to the strings, and I find that movement awkward. I&rsquo;m keeping the thumb bent &ldquo;out&rdquo; in a more &ldquo;natural&rdquo; way, using the flesh of the thumb to strike the strings. It sounds fine — and not much different than with the nail. I find the flesh-only sound of my <code>p</code> and <code>a</code> fingers to be very good. The sound of the bare <code>i</code> and <code>m</code> fingers is not so good. And since the <code>i</code> and <code>m</code> fingers sound so much better with nails — and I&rsquo;m now getting a better nail sound with the <code>a</code> finger — I think I&rsquo;m on the right path.</em></p> <hr> <p>That said, another thing that separates my study of the guitar in the 1980s from today is the large amount of instructional materials and online video available. With classical guitar performance videos all over YouTube, it&rsquo;s easy to both see and hear hundreds of players. And quite a few of those players use nails. The sound isn&rsquo;t always great. There are many harsh sounds (too much nail, too long, too close to the bridge). The great players always sound &hellip; great. Bream, Williams, and yes, Segovia. Stunning.</p> <p>Today&rsquo;s players making videos by the hundreds for the likes of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1Uz3Jz4PXd9CpMkF-1XJwA">Guitar Salon International</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR39sLAZ5wS_vrMo4tRylHw">Siccas Guitars</a> and their own channels are all over the map. Those videos represent one of the greatest gifts to fans and students of the guitar, and over the course of watching dozens of these videos, I&rsquo;ve seen techniques — and sounds — all over the map.</p> <p>The first thing to remember is that the technique promoted by Andres Segovia calls for nails that are more short than long, with the guitarist striking the strings with a combination of flesh and nail.</p> <p>Segovia&rsquo;s nails can be seen in close-up photos in Vladimir Bobri&rsquo;s book &ldquo;The Segovia Technique,&rdquo; which for some reason is out of print. (I&rsquo;ll have to scan those pictures and upload them here).</p> <p>The problem in emulating Segovia&rsquo;s technique — and nail shape — is that nobody has Segovia&rsquo;s hands. Different finger and hand size and shape calls for different nail length and shape.</p> <p>But the idea that the nails shouldn&rsquo;t be <em>too long</em> and that the flesh remains part of the stroke (be it <em>rest stroke</em> or <em>free stroke</em>) is the key.</p> <p><strong>Coming up:</strong> <em>I discuss — and show pictures — of my many nail files and buffers. I have a lot of them.</em></p> Ruby gtk3 GUI applications ARE cross-platform https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/ruby-gtk3-gui-applications-are-cross-platform/ Sun, 06 Oct 2019 13:48:05 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/ruby-gtk3-gui-applications-are-cross-platform/ <p>I&rsquo;ve been intermittently struggling and totally forgetting about the best way to create cross-platform GUI applications. I&rsquo;ve veered between <a href="https://www.tcl.tk/">Tk</a> for Ruby or Python, <a href="https://openjfx.io/">JavaFX</a> and <a href="https://www.qt.io/">Qt</a>.</p> <p>I recently <strong>stumbled on GTK3 in Ruby</strong>, and I&rsquo;ve been going through <a href="https://iridakos.com/tutorials/2018/01/25/creating-a-gtk-todo-application-with-ruby.html">a couple</a> of <a href="https://github.com/COMU/rubygtk3/wiki/Ruby-Gtk3-Tutorial">tutorials</a> in an attempt to figure it out.</p> <p>Since I&rsquo;m back on Debian Stable for 90 percent of my computing, I figured I&rsquo;d give GTK3 a try. I knew that you <em>could</em> run GTK apps in Windows (and presumably also on MacOS), but maybe I&rsquo;d have to resort to exotic packaging to make it happen.</p> <p><em>(Aside begins here. Feel free to skip it.)</em></p> <p>My 2017 HP Envy laptop has spaces on the motherboard for a traditional SATA hard drive and an M.2 NVMe SSD. I am running Debian on a smallish (250 GB) M.2 NVMe and have so far kept Windows 10 on the 1 TB magnetic hard drive. Running each OS on completely separate physical disks is as close as I will get to dual-booting, and my newer (2017) HP laptop handles it better in the BIOS than my older (2012) HP Pavilion laptop. I can even put Linux first in the boot order and have it be the default OS.</p> <p>So today I booted into Windows. <strong>As an aside</strong>, it takes at least a half-hour — if not a full hour — for my Windows 10 system on a magnetic hard drive to &ldquo;stabilize&rdquo; enough to be actually useful. That&rsquo;s with Dropbox taking forever both to update itself and then &ldquo;check for changes&rdquo; and resolve them.</p> <p>Believe me when I say that getting an M.2 NVMe SSD is a life-changing upgrade for any computer with any OS. I haven&rsquo;t tried Windows on an M.2, but Debian 10 with GNOME 3 on an SSD is light years ahead of Windows on a magnetic drive.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s not apples-to-apples, but my laptop battery is so old, I can&rsquo;t really suspend for more than 3/4 of a day, and the only way to &ldquo;survive&rdquo; with Windows 10 is to <em>suspend/resume</em> instead of <em>cold booting</em> every day. With Debian on the SSD, I can shut down the laptop in fewer than 10 seconds, and boot the next day in less than 30 seconds. And with Debian and even GNOME, the system is ready to use right from the start. With Debian 10 and GNOME 3, this new laptop has none of the problems I have with slowness and overly zealous processes that I have with my 2012 HP laptop and Fedora 30 with GNOME 3. The new laptop is ready to use right after the sub-30-second boot.</p> <p><em>(Aside ends. Back to GTK3.)</em></p> <p>I didn&rsquo;t realize how easy it is to run a GTK3 Ruby app in Windows. The key is <a href="http://www.msys2.org/">the MSYS2 system</a>, which brings Linux-ness to Windows. I can&rsquo;t remember the first time I installed MSYS2 in Windows. Did it come with <a href="https://rubyinstaller.org/">the Ruby installer</a>? It definitely could have. It could also have come with <a href="https://gitforwindows.org/">Git for Windows</a>.</p> <p>In any event, I have Ruby and MSYS2.</p> <p>I had just booted into Windows, and at this point I didn&rsquo;t know MSYS2&rsquo;s role in all of this. I added the gtk3 Ruby gem at the Windows command line:</p> <pre><code>$ gem install gtk3 </code></pre> <p>I was <em>then</em> in for a half-hour wait as MSYS2 proceeded to install a lot of things, build many of them from source, and generally get my Windows system ready for GTK3 in Ruby.</p> <p>After it was all over, I ran one of the Ruby GTK3 tutorial scripts I had been working on in Debian, and it worked. Everything worked the same way.</p> <p>So GTK3 in Ruby is a legitimate choice for cross-platform development — for Linux and Windows, anyway. What happens in MacOS, I don&rsquo;t know. I do have a Mac system at my disposal, and I will check the gtk3 Ruby gem on it at some point.</p> <p>When developing in GTK3, there&rsquo;s even a graphical Linux program called <a href="https://glade.gnome.org/">Glade</a> to help you make GTK GUIs. Plus, did I mention that GTK3 is a current framework that people are using today, and not something for which both development and interest waned in the mid-2000s.</p> <p>All in all, it seems like a MUCH saner choice than Tk. For the kind of simple applications I&rsquo;m interested in making, using <em>any</em> compatible language along with GTK3 is very much worth exploring.</p> <p>Before I close out this post, let me summarize my limited experience with Tk and JavaFX (and you can <em>totally</em> skip this part):</p> <h3 id="tk">Tk</h3> <p>Tk is the &ldquo;default&rdquo; GUI toolkit for Ruby, and I think also for Python. It&rsquo;s easy to get a trivial GUI going with Tk, but the output can be fuzzy looking (in the <em>literal</em> sense) depending on your platform. The method for creating Tk GUIs is much better documented in pre-2000 books focusing on the TCL language — and I&rsquo;m pretty sure Tk and TCL are really just two sides of the same project.</p> <p>Plus NOBODY is using Tk, so there is a huge dearth of tutorials and documentation, especially in regard to Tk and Ruby.</p> <p>Things are much better for Tk and Python. But then again, documentation and enthusiasm are better with EVERY GUI toolkit when it comes to Python. I fully realize that I should just move over to Python. (It could happen.)</p> <p>I found it too hard to <em>figure out</em> Tk, especially for Ruby.</p> <h3 id="javafx">JavaFX</h3> <p>This is another case of Oracle not caring about Java. In the Java 8 days, which is still <em>now</em> for some platforms, JavaFX, the &ldquo;latest&rdquo; Java GUI framework (it&rsquo;s old, but there&rsquo;s nothing newer), was included in the JDK and fully integrated in IDEs like Netbeans.</p> <p>Now that Oracle has cast off JavaFX, and the community is maintaining it, you have to install it separately, and none of the IDEs (Netbeans, IntelliJ, Eclipse) seem to offer an <em>easy</em> path to getting Java 9/10/11/12 working with JavaFX/OpenJFX. If I need a seven-part tutorial just on how to START coding in an IDE, what are the chances that I can actually make a real, working app?</p> <p>However, during my time using Netbeans 8 and Java 8 with JavaFX built in, I was impressed by some of the things you can do with the GUI. For instance, you can pop in a very nice, well-featured editor.</p> <p><strong>Note:</strong> Developers for Apache Netbeans (it&rsquo;s no longer an Oracle project) say that with Netbeans 11.1 and 11.2 Beta 2, JavaFX/OpenJFX integration is supposed be easier and better. I&rsquo;ll wait for the 11.2 release and see how it goes.</p> <p>Even though JavaFX is quite a bit newer than Tk, it still has relatively few people using it, and there isn&rsquo;t much when it comes to tutorials or books. It works, but it seems to be strenuously languishing. That said, I might come back to JavaFX. The ability to use one of the big Java IDEs to develop GUI apps without a whole lot of configuration magic would be a big motivator.</p> <p><strong>tl;dr:</strong> Ruby scripts using the <em>gtk3</em> gem will run on properly configured Linux and Windows computers, making for a true cross-platform solution to developing GUI programs using Ruby (or Python, Perl, C, C++, etc.). It could very well work for what I&rsquo;m doing better than Tk or JavaFX.</p> <p><em>Discuss this post on <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/dfhsas/ruby_gtk3_gui_applications_are_crossplatform/">Reddit</a> and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21203582">Hacker News</a>.</em></p> My 'dynamic' IP is pretty static https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/my-dynamic-ip-is-pretty-static/ Sat, 21 Sep 2019 12:35:57 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/my-dynamic-ip-is-pretty-static/ <p>I have been running this web server on a Raspberry Pi Zero W in my coat closet for three months, and my dynamic IP still hasn&rsquo;t changed.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s good because I still haven&rsquo;t implemented a script to change where my URL points from <a href="https://freedns.afraid.org">FreeDNS</a> in the event that my home IP changes. At some point I guess it&rsquo;ll happen, and the server will be offline until I figure it out.</p> <p>Or I&rsquo;ll just sit down some time before then and work out the script &hellip;</p> I've been using Syncthing to mirror files in Linux, Windows, MacOS and OpenBSD, and it's working https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/ive-been-using-syncthing-to-mirror-files-in-linux-windows-macos-and-openbsd-and-its-working/ Sat, 14 Sep 2019 15:39:51 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/ive-been-using-syncthing-to-mirror-files-in-linux-windows-macos-and-openbsd-and-its-working/ <p>Now that I&rsquo;m running a new Debian 10 Buster laptop and use Dropbox to sync 160 GB of personal files, I have turned to the open-source, Go-coded <a href="https://syncthing.net/">Syncthing</a> to keep about 500 MB of work-related files mirrored across that Linux laptop, a Windows 7 desktop and a 2011-era iMac desktop.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s all pretty much seamless. I have the Syncthing client running on each PC, and I can monitor the &ldquo;state&rdquo; of the sync via a web GUI. Syncthing doesn&rsquo;t consume a lot of CPU, especially when compared with Dropbox, though I&rsquo;m not syncing anywhere near as much data for business on Syncthing as I am for personal use on Dropbox.</p> <p>Syncthing doesn&rsquo;t require a central server on which to &ldquo;store&rdquo; the files. It does use servers of some kind, somewhere, to facilitate the syncing between desktops, but I really don&rsquo;t know how that works — and I don&rsquo;t have to know. Syncthing just works.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s <em>very</em> cross-platform. Right now I&rsquo;m actively using it across Linux, Windows 7 and MacOS Mojave. I also have it on a laptop running Fedora 30 and OpenBSD 6.5 on different drives, and I have it on my main laptop on a Windows 10 drive (the Debian 10 system is on the M.2 SSD).</p> <p>For awhile, I thought that I couldn&rsquo;t keep things in sync because I never had two of my computers running at the same time, so I ran Syncthing on a Raspberry Pi Zero W that I kept on 24/7. That worked well, but now that I&rsquo;m using Syncthing for &ldquo;production&rdquo; instead of just testing it, I keep the Windows 7 and MacOS machines running all the time, and Syncthing works even when I&rsquo;m not logged in, so I don&rsquo;t need to use the Pi as a persistent client.</p> <p>Instead I&rsquo;ve repurposed the Raspberry Pi Zero W as a web server, and I&rsquo;m having a lot of fun running a couple of live web sites — including this one — out of my coat closet.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t know how Syncthing will perform if I throw 20 GB — or 100 GB — at it instead of 0.5 GB, but it beats &ldquo;traditional&rdquo; file-syncing because it&rsquo;s <em>so</em> cross-platform, and you have to pay <em>nobody</em> to store your files because you&rsquo;re storing them on your own computers.</p> <p>The reason I&rsquo;ve used Dropbox for so many years is that it has always offered Linux support. I&rsquo;m not surprised that Microsoft&rsquo;s OneDrive doesn&rsquo;t support Linux, but I&rsquo;m VERY surprised that Google, whose business is basically built on top of Linux, doesn&rsquo;t offer an official Linux client for Google Drive.</p> <p>And with Syncthing, not only is Linux a first-class platform, I can also sync with OpenBSD. Other Syncthing platforms include FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD and Solaris. I suspect that one of the reasons Syncthing runs everywhere is that it&rsquo;s easier to generate binaries out of <a href="https://golang.org/">Golang</a>, and the Web GUI already runs everywhere there&rsquo;s a browser.</p> <p><strong>FYI:</strong> I downloaded the Syncthing binaries for Windows 7 and 10, and MacOS, but I&rsquo;m using project-supplied packages for Linux and OpenBSD. The downloaded packages self-update through Syncthing, and the different versions don&rsquo;t seem to be posing a problem.</p> Printing in Debian 10: CUPS isn't in the default desktop if you forget to check the box during installation https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/printing-in-debian-10-cups-isnt-in-the-default-desktop-if-you-forget-to-check-the-box-during-installation/ Wed, 11 Sep 2019 07:13:18 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/printing-in-debian-10-cups-isnt-in-the-default-desktop-if-you-forget-to-check-the-box-during-installation/ <p>I haven&rsquo;t had the occasion to print anything in Debian 10 Buster in the couple of weeks that I have been running it, but today is the day.</p> <p>I knew from the release notes that Debian 10 included <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/SystemPrinting">&ldquo;driverless&rdquo; printing</a>, but I couldn&rsquo;t find any printers in GNOME Setings, even though I have a wireless printer on my local network.</p> <p>The reason? I didn&rsquo;t have CUPS. I had forgotten to check the &ldquo;print server&rdquo; box during my installation.</p> <p>I installed CUPS:</p> <p><code>$ sudo apt install cups</code></p> <p>My printer showed up immediately.</p> <p>I printed my document.</p> <p>Easiest Linux printer &ldquo;setup&rdquo; ever.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s where I missed the checkbox (thanks to <a href="https://www.linuxtechi.com/debian-10-buster-installation-guide/">LinuxTechi&rsquo;s Installation Screenshots</a> article for the image):</p> <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/Software-Selection-Debian10-Installation.jpg" alt="The Debian Installer screen where you are asked what you want installed, including a print server."></p> Debian 10 Buster with GNOME 3: I didn't expect it to be this fast, but that could be the SSD talking https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/debian-10-buster-with-gnome-3-i-didnt-expect-it-to-be-this-fast-but-that-could-be-the-ssd-talking/ Mon, 02 Sep 2019 13:30:00 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/debian-10-buster-with-gnome-3-i-didnt-expect-it-to-be-this-fast-but-that-could-be-the-ssd-talking/ <p>I don&rsquo;t know how much of it is <a href="https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706">Debian</a> 10 and how much is swapping a 5400-RPM hard drive with an M.2 NVMe SSD, but my 2-year-old laptop is FLYING now that I&rsquo;ve ditched Windows 10 and the 1 GB magnetic drive that came with it.</p> <p>And this is with GNOME 3. The stock or lightly/heavily-favored desktop environment in Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu looks great, runs with no hesitation (in constrast to Windows 10) and doesn&rsquo;t have me thinking that I need anything else for speed-related reasons.</p> <p>Could it be the M.2 SSD?</p> <p>I&rsquo;d been missing a &ldquo;full&rdquo; Linux system for the past couple of years while I stuck with Windows 10, albeit with heavy WSL/Ubuntu use.</p> <p>And hearing about arduous, days-long efforts to install Windows 10 on an M.2 SSD didn&rsquo;t excite me about trying it.</p> <p>Instead, after I got set of Torx screwdrivers (I needed a T4) in the mail from Amazon, it took me about 10 minutes to crack open the laptop and install the M.2 drive and another 10 minutes to boot into Debian 10 on USB and install to the SSD. Like everything with the M.2 NVMe SSD, I can&rsquo;t believe how fast things are now and how disk-bound everything is on SATA-disk systems.</p> <p>It probably didn&rsquo;t hurt that I&rsquo;ve done many dozens of Debian installs over the years, and I almost always go for the same setup: using the full disk with encrypted LVM and a separate <code>/home</code> partition. I let the installer auto-partition the drive.</p> <p>It was that easy.</p> <p>The laptop is super quiet. You hear the CPU fan. And that&rsquo;s it. Suspend/resume works perfectly and is crazy fast. My HP Envy as133cl&rsquo;s Intel Core i7 7th Generation chip is running cool.</p> <p>Everything is better and faster. I&rsquo;ll mention again that it looks great. I&rsquo;m using the Adwaita Dark theme (which requires <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283086#c7">this tweak</a> so Firefox uses Adwaita Light instead and you don&rsquo;t end up with a lot of black on black and white on white).</p> <p>All of my hardware on this 2017 laptop works out of the box. No tweaking, no Googling needed.</p> <p>Except for one thing:</p> <p>It took me a week or so to figure it out, but I needed get a newer Linux kernel because my <code>i2c HID</code> touchpad was throwing errors — and <code>systemd-journald</code> was logging them — about 10 times a second (aka 600 times a minute, 36,000 times an hour), causing <code>systemd-journald</code> to hog about 25% of one of my four CPU cores. It didn&rsquo;t <em>kill</em> performance, but a little Googling told me the issue was taken care of in newer kernels.</p> <p>How did I know this was a problem? I saw <code>systemd-journald</code> running way too often by using <code>htop</code>, and then I checked the logs:</p> <p><code>$ sudo journalctl</code></p> <p>This is how I got the most recent entries:</p> <p><code>$ sudo journalctl -e</code></p> <p>The fact that performance was <em>fine</em> is extremely surprising. Again, it&rsquo;s probably due to the SSD, but I&rsquo;ll take it. Still, who wants a dodgy touchpad to spam your logs, making them useless?</p> <p>In Fedora, I would already have a kernel new enough to include the fix. Fedora tracks the upstream Linux kernel very closely, and you probably get a new kernel every week. It&rsquo;s the best way for your new hardware to get the most compatibility in the least amount of time.</p> <p>So how do you get a kernel newer than Debian Stable&rsquo;s 4.19? I could have turned to either <a href="https://backports.debian.org/">Debian Backports</a> or <a href="https://liquorix.net/">Liquorix</a>. I chose Liquorix. <a href="https://liquorix.net/#install">The install</a> was easy. I added the Liquorix repository to my <code>/etc/apt/sources.list</code>, told my system to recognize Liquorix&rsquo;s GPG key and then used <code>apt</code> to install a 5.2 kernel. Before I did any of this, I had to install <code>curl</code>, which isn&rsquo;t part of the Debian 10 default.</p> <p>This wasn&rsquo;t my first time using Liquorix. And I forgot that I also used a kernel and other packages from Debian Backports. All of this happened in the early days of Debian Squeeze. <a href="http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog/linux/debian/">I went back to my old blog posts</a>, and way back in 2011, I had some audio issues with my AMD-running Lenovo G555, and I used kernels from both Liquorix and Debian Backports to fix this and other problems I was having with Squeeze.</p> <p>Note that Liquorix kernels are not signed, so they won&rsquo;t boot if you have Secure Boot enabled on your computer. Regular Debian kernels <em>are</em> signed, so Secure Boot <em>will</em> work. I believe that both signed and unsigned kernels are available in Debian Backports. I didn&rsquo;t have Secure Boot enabled, so the new kernel ran with no issue.</p> <p><strong>To sum things up,</strong> I&rsquo;m now running Debian 10 Buster (aka Stable) with GNOME 3 and a Liquorix version 5.2 Linux kernel on a 2017 HP Envy 15 as133cl laptop with an Intel Core i7 7th Gen CPU, 16 GB of RAM and an HP-branded 250 GB M.2 NVMe SSD. I got the drive on sale — for about $30 — many, many months ago after I discovered that my hard-drive running laptop had a spot on its motherboard for the M.2 drive.</p> <p>As I say above, there&rsquo;s no reason other than <em>preference</em> for me to run another desktop environment, as GNOME is crazy fast in Debian with this hardware.</p> <p>Everything is faster.</p> <p>I didn&rsquo;t have <em>too many</em> complaints about Windows 10 on this laptop and its 1 GB magnetic hard drive. The Windows file manager is NEVER as quick to respond as any Linux file manager. But one thing I like about the Windows file manager is that it has a few kitchen sinks&rsquo; worth of features. GNOME has a minimalist philosophy, and you pretty much have to add features through Extensions. But GNOME does the basics <em>very well</em>, has no performance issues on my &ldquo;modern&rdquo; hardware and has been extremely stable.</p> <p>Did I mention that with Debian 10 and GNOME 3, this laptop is fast AF?</p> <p>I&rsquo;m pretty sure the game-changer is the M.2 SSD and not Debian Stable, though Debian does have a reputation for running &ldquo;faster&rdquo; than Fedora and Ubuntu. But it mostly has to bhe the SSD. The M.2 doesn&rsquo;t use the slower SATA interface of traditional disks that even slows down SSDs that use the same plugs. Instead, the M.2 has a quicker pipeline to the CPU, and it seems that modern CPUs and RAM can more than handle the faster disks. Everything speeds up.</p> <p>But Debian definitely adds to the experience. I could have gone with Fedora, which I&rsquo;ve been using steadily on my older HP laptop. Fedora is a very different animal than Ubuntu or Debian. Fedora releases every six months, just like Ubuntu (and NOT like Debian, where releases are generally spaced two years apart). But Fedora is <em>very dynamic</em>, and there are updates <em>all the time</em>. I really don&rsquo;t need the newest of everything, especially if my hardware is working well. And with the combination of Debian Buster and a newer kernel, I&rsquo;m pretty much knocked over by how fast everything is going and how cool — temperature-wise — the laptop is running overall.</p> <p>And I&rsquo;m ready — for now anyway — to enjoy the slow pace of Debian Stable updates, as opposed to the continual flood of new Fedora packages. I haven&rsquo;t been so crazy about the frequent Windows 10 updates, and I really don&rsquo;t like having to manage application updates on a program-by-program basis. And <em>no</em>, I haven&rsquo;t yet tried <a href="https://chocolatey.org/">Chocolatey</a>, which seems like a great solution for Windows&rsquo; no-package-management problem.</p> <p>New hardware is hard on Linux. So many things can be dodgy, and when I got my HP Envy 15 laptop a couple of years ago, I wanted to give the newish Windows 10 a try, especially with the availability of the Windows Subsystem for Linux to provide a full console-level Ubuntu system to run the shell scripts and Linux utilities I had been using for years in Fedora.</p> <p>Windows 10 has been better than expected, better than Windows 7 and 8. In the beginning, I didn&rsquo;t know when — or even if — I would get back to a Linux or BSD system.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s not like I haven&rsquo;t had problems in Windows. Those updates can take forever and be of poor quality. At one point, an update failed in some kind of spectacular fashion, and the disk was working at 100% for about three whole days, during which I couldn&rsquo;t really use the laptop. It took at least a couple of those days to coax a backup of my user files onto a 64 GB USB flash drive. Eventually the laptop came back to life. I couldn&rsquo;t figure out exactly what caused the problem.</p> <p>And for probably a year at this point, the Conexant sound driver would spawn a process by the name of Flow.exe that would combine with Firefox to chew through about 30% to 60% of <em>total</em> CPU, but only when FF was running. Other applications were not affected. But I couldn&rsquo;t run Firefox without the laptop sounding like it was going to lift off until I figured out the hack to stop Flow.exe. That &ldquo;fix&rdquo; involved renaming Flow.exe as _Flow.exe so Conexant wouldn&rsquo;t be able to launch the former and would only nag me about it during every reboot. FYI, Conexant is now owned by Synaptics, so the degree to which their incompetence hits all OSes seems to be very high indeed.</p> <p>I didn&rsquo;t want to dual-boot like I did with Windows 8 and Fedora 18-30 on the HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop I bought in 2012 and still have today.</p> <p>I got that HP Pavilion after the untimely death of the Lenovo G555 laptop I bought in 2010. The Lenovo began its life with Windows 7 before I replaced the whole drive to run Fedora 13 (briefly), then 14 and (extremely briefly) 15. My use of Fedora ended during the 14-to-15 upgrade when the system&rsquo;s video capability crashed and spectacularly burned due to my use of the fglrx/Catalyst proprietary driver and the delicate nature of upgrading Fedora systems that use those drivers.</p> <p>Rathern that re-install Fedora, I switched over to Debian 6 Squeeze on that Lenovo without incident — until one day in 2012 I put it to sleep and it never woke up. Enter the HP Pavilion g6.</p> <p>I used that dual-booting HP Pavilion for several years. I could never upgrade the Windows side from 8 to 8.1 (and then 10) because the Windows Store-based upgrade would kill the ability to boot either Windows or Linux until I used some kind of Windows rescue mode to fix what the Windows Store broke.</p> <p>In 2017, I was gifted with the HP Envy 15.</p> <p>Back then I had no idea the HP Envy 15 could accommodate <em>two</em> hard drives, the 1 TB magnetic drive it shipped with and an M.2 NVMe SSD. I didn&rsquo;t know anything about M.2 drives. I had never heard of them.</p> <p>Once I figured out that these way-faster-than-SATA drives were available — and my laptop supported them, I started looking them up. It seemed like the Samsung EVO M.2 drives were the ones to get. They ran faster than others. They didn&rsquo;t have overheating issues. But they hovered around $100 for a 512 GB size and nearly $200 for 1 TB. I didn&rsquo;t know for sure that an M.2 drive would even work in my laptop, despite having a slot for it.</p> <p>I came across a sale on a 250 GB HP-branded M.2 NVMe SSD a few months ago, and I snapped one up for about $30. Then it sat in a drawer until about a week ago. Moving OSes, even reinstalling one Linux over another, is a major endeavor, especially on a laptop I use for work.</p> <p>I had already been testing the waters on my older HP Pavilion g6, where I can easily unscrew a door on the bottom and swap various SATA drives in and out with little trouble. I really wanted to run OpenBSD, but I had so many problems with applications either crashing (just about everything from KDE) or not running at all (Chromium, which is kind of essential) that I figured I had to fall back to Linux.</p> <p>I pivoted to testing live systems on the 2017 HP Envy 15. Everything seemed to run just fine. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian. I pretty much had my pick.</p> <p>Despite the relentless bad press and general &ldquo;real geeks use <em>insert DE or window manager that is definitely not GNOME</em>&rdquo; vibe, I like GNOME 3. On my 2012 Fedora 30-running HP Pavilion laptop, you can feel a little heaviness, so I use Xfce about half the time.</p> <p>I love Xfce and have spent a lot of time using it over the years, but GNOME&rsquo;s modern design, the fact that it is under active development, is the main &ldquo;choice&rdquo; of the Debian, Ubuntu and Debian projects and is the only DE that works with the Wayland display system are all cementing it as the environment I want to be in right now.</p> <p>Installing the M.2 drive was an easy hardware &ldquo;project.&rdquo; The Debian install was quick and easy. Now I&rsquo;m tweaking things here and there.</p> <p>And I can honestly say I&rsquo;m enjoying the hell out of this super-fast Debian 10 system.</p> <p>A 150 GB Dropbox sync that took many days on a 2012-era laptop with a magnetic drive was done in a couple of hours with the SSD.</p> <p>Things like using <code>apt</code> to find and install software, searching for something in GNOME&rsquo;s Files, starting either Firefox or Chromium, and even booting or shutting down the laptop are all extremely fast.</p> <p>While I haven&rsquo;t run a SATA SSD, I&rsquo;m very sold on the M.2 NVMe SSDs. If you&rsquo;re buying a new laptop or desktop, make sure you get one. Don&rsquo;t include any SATA drives, spinning or SSD. And if your current laptop or desktop has a slot for an M.2, get one immediately.</p> <p><strong>Update on 9/7/19:</strong> Since this is an encrypted install, <code>/boot</code> is outside of the encrypted portion of the drive, and the Debian installer made it only 237 MB in size. I had the original Debian kernel and a Liquorix kernel installed, and during today&rsquo;s Debian 10.1 update, <code>/boot</code> filled up.</p> <p>I tried the stock Debian kernel again, and my i2c HID touchpad did not throw 10 errors per second and fill up the logs. Everything worked perfectly.</p> <p>So I removed the Liquorix kernel, finished the rest of the Debian 10.1 upgrade, and now I am running standard Debian Stable.</p> <p><strong>Would I have made /boot bigger?</strong> I&rsquo;ve never had this problem before, and I have run many encrypted Debian systems. The next time I install, I am definitely making <code>/boot</code> bigger — probably 1 GB — just to be safe.</p> <p><strong>Will I stick with Debian Stable?</strong> Yes, it is working very well for me.</p> <p><strong>Flatpaks:</strong> Debian supports the <a href="https://flatpak.org/">Flatpak</a> application installation system, and running Debian Stable with Flatpaks (from <a href="https://flathub.org/home">Flathub</a>) seems like a very viable way to have a stable base with newer applications.</p> <p><strong>Update on 9/8/19:</strong> The i2c HID touchpad errors returned while I was using the stock Debian kernel. This time I used the kernel from <a href="https://backports.debian.org/">Debian Backports</a>. Once I <a href="https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/">enabled Backports</a>, <a href="https://packages.debian.org/buster-backports/kernel/linux-image-5.2.0-0.bpo.2-arm64">this is the kernel I installed</a>.</p> <p>That brought everything back to normal.</p> <p>While I was booted into the Backports kernel, I removed the stock Debian kernel in an effort to keep <code>/boot</code> from filling up.</p> <h3 id="here-is-my-stack-in-debian">Here is my stack in Debian</h3> <h4 id="desktop-environment">Desktop environment</h4> <ul> <li>GNOME 3</li> </ul> <h4 id="browsers">Browsers</h4> <ul> <li>Firefox</li> <li>Chromium</li> </ul> <h4 id="text-editors">Text editors</h4> <ul> <li>Gedit</li> <li>Gvim</li> </ul> <h4 id="office-suite">Office suite</h4> <ul> <li>LibreOffice</li> </ul> <h4 id="ftp">FTP</h4> <ul> <li>FileZilla</li> </ul> <h4 id="image-editors">Image editors</h4> <ul> <li>gThumb</li> <li>GIMP</li> <li>IrfanView (.exe under Wine)</li> </ul> <h4 id="file-synchronization">File synchronization</h4> <ul> <li>Dropbox</li> <li>Syncthing</li> </ul> <h4 id="multimedia">Multimedia</h4> <ul> <li>Videos (Totem)</li> <li>Rhythmbox</li> </ul> <h4 id="other-things-ive-installed">Other things I&rsquo;ve installed</h4> <ul> <li>Ruby (with Nokogiri and Twitter Gems)</li> <li>htop</li> <li>curl</li> <li>git</li> <li>Wine</li> </ul> <h4 id="things-i-havent-installed-yet-but-might">Things I haven&rsquo;t installed yet (but might)</h4> <ul> <li>OpenJDK</li> <li>OpenJFX (JavaFX)</li> <li>Clojure and Leiningen</li> <li>Racket</li> <li>Golang</li> <li>Geany</li> <li>Inkscape</li> <li>OpenShot</li> <li>Audacity</li> </ul> <p>Discuss this post at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20862461">Hacker News</a> and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/cz54ci/debian_10_buster_with_gnome_3_i_didnt_expect_it/">Reddit</a>.</p> WordPress and Disqus in 2019 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/wordpress-and-disqus-in-2019/ Mon, 05 Aug 2019 09:37:43 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/wordpress-and-disqus-in-2019/ <p><a href="http://wordpress.com">WordPress</a> is a vital resource that hasn&rsquo;t taken undue advantage of its users like other free, hosted services have done. But right now, it&rsquo;s not for me.</p> <p>The one thing I miss about blogging with a static-site generator is the lack of native comments. It&rsquo;s the one thing self-hosted WordPress (aka <a href="http://wordpress.org">WordPress.org</a>) gets right.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s probably because WP was &ldquo;doing&rdquo; comments before Twitter and Facebook came along. Back then, social <em>was</em> comments.</p> <p>Now nobody seems willing to really tackle blog comments, especially in the context of self-hosting. There are a few bolt-on projects, but no blog software itself, and no static-site generator that I know of is going beyond easy integration of Disqus.</p> <p>I was never crazy about the off-site comments model that <a href="http://disqus.com">Disqus</a> uses, and I&rsquo;m not going to deploy it here, even though Hugo makes it ridiculously easy to do so.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m REALLY not crazy about the kinds of ads that Disqus runs. They&rsquo;re like the horrible clickbait ads that most websites put at the bottom to make a few extra bucks. Even &ldquo;serious&rdquo; sites do it. I wish they wouldn&rsquo;t.</p> <p>I know I could pay Disqus $5 a month to make these cheesy ads go away, but since I&rsquo;m not crazy about the off-site/embed model, I&rsquo;d rather do without.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m thinking about creating links to posts on <a href="http://reddit.com">Reddit</a> and holding discussion over there. I <em>know</em> that is also &ldquo;off-site,&rdquo; but it seems better to me &ndash; here and now &ndash; to have a link to a Reddit thread that isn&rsquo;t going anywhere rather than an embed that disappears when you change the URL, or even go from <code>http</code> to <code>https</code>. I know a lot of people aren&rsquo;t crazy about Reddit, and that is making me pause for the time being.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve seen bloggers use Hacker News for their comments, but to me Reddit seems more suited to what I&rsquo;m doing.</p> Google Cloud nuked the web server on my VM https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/google-cloud-nuked-the-web-server-on-my-vm/ Mon, 05 Aug 2019 09:07:01 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/google-cloud-nuked-the-web-server-on-my-vm/ <p>I wasn&rsquo;t paying for my Google Cloud VM, and it turns out the price was right.</p> <p>Since I started working on my own server in the coat closet, I haven&rsquo;t been using my free Google VM.</p> <p>I got an email today saying that it&rsquo;s been 120 days since I&rsquo;ve opened Google Cloud Shell. If I didn&rsquo;t log in, &ldquo;in 7 days, your Cloud Shell home directory will be automatically scheduled for deletion.&rdquo;</p> <p>What they didn&rsquo;t tell me was that EVERYTHING ELSE in my VM had already been deleted. All the packages I added are gone. All my config files in <code>/etc</code> are gone. All my web files in <code>/var/www/html</code> are gone.</p> <p>There was no warning about all of that.</p> <p>Yes, I was paying nothing, and that&rsquo;s pretty much what I have now.</p> I'm using the Pixyll theme in Hugo https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/im-using-the-pixyll-theme-in-hugo/ Sat, 03 Aug 2019 16:03:35 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/im-using-the-pixyll-theme-in-hugo/ <p>The hardest part about starting a new <a href="http://gohugo.io">Hugo</a> site isn&rsquo;t getting the Hugo program to run. In Windows that part&rsquo;s easy. All you do is download a binary, unzip and run it.</p> <p>I have been a <em>new</em> user of Hugo at least three times in the past few years. I&rsquo;ve never stuck with it. Every time, the initial <em>pain point</em> is finding a theme that <em>a)</em> works, <em>b)</em> has the features I want and <em>c)</em> I can understand and modify where needed.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s not so easy. The <code>config.toml</code> configuration file in one theme can be wildly different from that in another. Plus, Hugo is deep and completely customizable. The <a href="https://gohugo.io/documentation/">documentation</a> is extensive, but much of it starts at 80 mph while I&rsquo;m back in a 15 mph zone. It&rsquo;s hard to tease out how to do <em>that one specific thing you want to do</em> when it seems that you can do everything, all the time.</p> <p>Hugo is not alone in this. The learning curve for every static-site generator I&rsquo;ve tried has been steep. I figured with Hugo, there are so many people working on coding it and even more just using it, things would <em>just work</em> more than not.</p> <p>Finding the <em>right</em> theme isn&rsquo;t easy. There are at least <a href="https://themes.gohugo.io/">a couple of hundred to choose from</a>, all made available on GitHub by users, with the most-recently updated themes appearing at the top.</p> <p>When you&rsquo;ve just started using Hugo and don&rsquo;t know much about its capabilities, it&rsquo;s hard to pick a theme.</p> <p>I start by downloading the ones that look good to see if I can get them to work.</p> <p>Hugo themes can be finicky and brittle. If you don&rsquo;t have your posts in the right place, if you are missing some code in the front-matter section at the top, if you either <em>do</em> or <em>don&rsquo;t</em> change something in the <code>config.toml</code> supplied in the theme&rsquo;s <code>exampleSite</code> directory, the whole thing can blow up.</p> <p>I wanted to use <a href="https://themes.gohugo.io/hyde-hyde/">Hyde Hyde</a>, but I wanted my name to be the title of the blog, and the theme&rsquo;s style and layout broke my too-long last name in half. Not that my name is all that long. I couldn&rsquo;t figure out how to modify the CSS because <strong>Hyde Hyde</strong> uses SCSS, and the CSS is broken up into multiple files. There are CSS variables. While SCSS is fascinating and something I might want to explore in the (even near) future, right not it doesn&rsquo;t translate to a workable site.</p> <p>For my Hugo blog, here are my <em>table stakes</em>:</p> <ul> <li>Pagination (Listing of entries on multiple pages)</li> <li>Display of tags on entries and on a tag page (Hugo offers tags, but it&rsquo;s surprising how many themes ignore them)</li> <li>Somewhat modern and responsive (many are responsive, fewer are modern)</li> <li>I can figure out how to set it up without too much breakage</li> </ul> <p>I was able to find that with <a href="https://themes.gohugo.io/pixyll/">Pixyll</a>, the theme you see at the time of this blog post. (I probably <em>will</em> continue experimenting with Hugo themes, and you might see a new one very soon. Or not.)</p> <p>Right now I&rsquo;m serving this site from the Raspberry Pi Zero W in my coat closet. I experimented with a <em>dynamic</em> blogging system on this very, very small server, and while it ran well enough, a <em>static</em> site is much easier both on resources and configuration. After a little bout of <em>permissions hell</em> and a fight for file ownership between my Linux user account and the web server user, now everything works with the standard Unix permissions (<code>755</code> for directories and <code>644</code> for files).</p> <p>Features of the <strong>Pixyll</strong> theme include an email form, which does work, and a search box, which <em>should</em> work once I set it up. At least I <em>think</em> it will work.</p> First post in Hugo for 2019 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/first-post-in-hugo-for-2019/ Fri, 02 Aug 2019 11:24:29 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/first-post-in-hugo-for-2019/ <p>It&rsquo;s been a long time since I messed around with Hugo.</p> <p>Now I&rsquo;m thinking it&rsquo;s time for me to make a real blog with this static-site generator.</p> <p>Here it is.</p> Permissions are hard https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/permissions-are-hard/ Sun, 14 Jul 2019 19:56:40 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/permissions-are-hard/ <p>Figuring out file and directory permissions on a server is hard.</p> <p>You have to balance security with functionality. What are the most restrictive permissions you can set and still have everything work?</p> Shared hosting does take care of a lot for you https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/shared-hosting-does-take-care-of-a-lot-for-you/ Sun, 14 Jul 2019 19:00:23 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/shared-hosting-does-take-care-of-a-lot-for-you/ <p>As I build my own server — and this would be the same for a cloud VPS or a local computer, there is a lot to set up and configure.</p> <p>Shared hosts like <a href="http://NearlyFreeSpeech.net">NearlyFreeSpeech.net</a> (which I will be using more soon) and <a href="http://hostgator.com">Hostgator</a> (which I&rsquo;ve used for years and will probably be using less) take care of many things in a safe and secure way.</p> <p>Setting up your own server is very much like reinventing the wheel. It&rsquo;s better if you like making wheels, have used a lot of wheels, fixed broken ones and rebuilt old ones.</p> <p>Sometimes you want somebody else to fix your wheel. Other times you want to do it yourself. Both ways are OK.</p> Setting up FTP on my Raspberry Pi https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/setting-up-ftp-on-my-raspberry-pi/ Sun, 14 Jul 2019 18:05:22 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/setting-up-ftp-on-my-raspberry-pi/ <p>Running your own servers — be they VPSes on Google, AWS or Digital Ocean, or Raspberry Pis in the closet — is a learning experience. You have to put on your sysadmin hat and get to work.</p> <p>Today I&rsquo;m trying to figure out the ftp server. I&rsquo;ve used a hundred of them but never installed and configured one. The hardest part to figure out is the SSL encryption.</p> <p>If you see this file, it means I&rsquo;ve made some progress.</p> Set umask in vsftpd so incoming files have 644 permissions https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/set-umask-in-vsftpd-so-incoming-files-have-644-permissions/ Sun, 14 Jul 2019 13:09:18 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/set-umask-in-vsftpd-so-incoming-files-have-644-permissions/ <p>If you are setting up an FTP server (I&rsquo;m using <em>vsftpd</em> in Debian Buster), setting the umask is the way you get incoming files to &ldquo;take&rdquo; the right permissions.</p> <p>For text files, I like the permissions to be <code>644</code>, which is <code>rw-r--r--</code> (read-write for user, read for group, read for the world).</p> <p>To get this in vsftpd, uncomment this line:</p> <pre><code>local_umask=022 </code></pre> File permissions and ownership that make Ode's Indexette work on a Debian Buster server https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/file-permissions-and-ownership-that-make-odes-indexette-work-on-a-debian-buster-server/ Sun, 14 Jul 2019 13:00:40 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/file-permissions-and-ownership-that-make-odes-indexette-work-on-a-debian-buster-server/ <p>This was easier on Hostgator, where everything is &ldquo;owned&rdquo; by my user account and everything works.</p> <p>To get Ode addins to work, the <code>/data</code> directory is owned by my user and is in the <code>www-data</code> group.</p> <p>The <code>/data/addins/state</code> directory has the same ownership and permissions (<code>755</code>).</p> <p>The <code>/data/addins/state/Indexette</code> directory is owned by <code>www-data</code> and is in the <code>www-data</code> group and has permissions <code>755</code>.</p> <p>The files created by Indexette in <code>/data/addins/state/Indexette</code> are <code>aux_index_file</code> and <code>primary_index_file</code>. They are owned by <code>www-data</code> and are in the <code>www-data</code> group. Their permissions are <code>644</code>.</p> My current fix for the Conexant-Flow.Exe-Firefox issue https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/my-current-fix-for-the-conexant-flow.exe-firefox-issue/ Wed, 26 Jun 2019 20:27:13 -0700 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/my-current-fix-for-the-conexant-flow.exe-firefox-issue/ <p>The problem for users of Windows laptops using the Conexant audio driver that makes Conexant&rsquo;s <code>Flow.exe</code> program eat large amounts of CPU when the Firefox web browser is running has not been solved by &ldquo;conventional&rdquo; means.</p> <p>And in order to be part of the &ldquo;solution,&rdquo; should one ever come, <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1555726">I filed a bug with Mozilla</a> on the issue.</p> <p><a href="https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Audio/Flow-exe-spikes-to-20-CPU-and-causes-sporadic-windows-freeze/td-p/6483020">There have been many fixes proposed</a> for this problem, which only seems to manifest itself on my HP Envy laptop while running Firefox. You hear the fan rev up almost immediately and then can see both Firefox and <code>Flow.exe</code> climb in the amount of CPU they are taking, combining for a total of about 60% on my laptop.</p> <p>This has been going on for many months, and a couple of days ago I got tired of being forced to run Chrome. It&rsquo;s not right that I can&rsquo;t use the privacy-loving Firefox on my Windows 10 laptop.</p> <p>So I went back to one of the &ldquo;fixes&rdquo; that works:</p> <p>To keep <code>Flow.exe</code> from running constantly and stealing excessive CPU while you are using Firefox or any other program, just change the name Flow.exe to something like <code>_Flow.exe</code> (I just added an underscore) so the Conexant audio system can no longer &ldquo;find&rdquo; it. Trust me, sound works fine without it. Why it&rsquo;s there at all is a mystery.</p> <p>You can find <code>Flow.exe</code> in this folder: <code>C:\Program Files\CONEXANT\Flow</code>. Just rename <code>Flow.exe</code> as <code>_Flow.exe</code> (or whatever you want; changing its name is enough to keep it from running). I&rsquo;m not sure whether or not you need to reboot after this, but it couldn&rsquo;t hurt.</p> <p>Once you rename <code>Flow.exe,</code> You will get a popup every time you restart the PC warning you that you need to reinstall your Conexant audio software because Flow.exe is missing. Ignore this nagging box. I&rsquo;d like to send Conexant a few popups, or maybe I should send my good wishes to Logitech, the company that bought Conexant a few years ago. Both are garbage. They&rsquo;re certainly not seeing what I&rsquo;m saying about them on Twitter and consequently falling all over me to fix anything. No, it&rsquo;s radio silence. F&amp;^% &rsquo;em.</p> There is an rsync for Windows, and it works https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/there-is-an-rsync-for-windows-and-it-works/ Mon, 16 Jan 2017 15:34:27 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/there-is-an-rsync-for-windows-and-it-works/ <p>I&rsquo;ve been meaning to look into backup solutions for Windows, and while there should eventually be a full Ubuntu Linux shell coming to Windows 10, it&rsquo;s not there yet unless you tweak things that I can&rsquo;t ask other users to do.</p> <p>So I figured that when the Linux shell comes to Windows, I&rsquo;ll use <code>rsync</code>, the Unix/Linux backup utility I&rsquo;ve been using for years.</p> <p>I just found out that there&rsquo;s already <a href="https://itefix.net/cwrsync">an rsync port to Windows</a> called <code>cwRsync</code> that you can pay for, with a free command-line-only edition <a href="https://itefix.net/content/cwrsync-free-edition">available for download</a>.</p> <p>Since I use <code>rsync</code> on the command line in Linux, why do I need the GUI in Windows? I don&rsquo;t.</p> <p>So I downloaded it, unzipped it all, put my rsync command into the <code>cwrsync</code> Windows Command Script file, and it worked right out of the box.</p> <p>So far my tests have been small ones that haven&rsquo;t involved ssh into remote servers (I do backups to USB hard drives anyway), but I am very confident that <code>cwRsync</code> will work well for full Windows user-file backups. Plus it&rsquo;s free and nobody&rsquo;s going to bug you about buying anything ever.</p> PulseCaster records both sides of your conversation - and I can confirm that it works https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/pulsecaster-records-both-sides-of-your-conversation-and-i-can-confirm-that-it-works/ Fri, 06 Mar 2015 20:43:14 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/pulsecaster-records-both-sides-of-your-conversation-and-i-can-confirm-that-it-works/ <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/pulsecaster.jpg" alt="PulseCaster has a very simple GUI"></p> <p>So I&rsquo;m looking for PulseAudio-related software today, and I come across <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/pulsecaster/wiki">PulseCaster</a>, a Python application created by former Fedora Project Leader (and current Red Hat employee) <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields">Paul Frields</a>.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s a simple app. On Linux systems equipped with PulseAudio (which these days is most of them), it will record both sides of a conversation you are having on any application that pushes that audio over PulseAudio. The default is recording both sides of the conversation to a single OGG file. There is an &ldquo;advanced&rdquo; setting that records each side of the the conversation as a separate, uncompressed WAV file.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s a simple app, and I can tell you that it works well. The wiki suggests that you use it with VOiP apps like Ekiga and Twinkle. Let me tell you now that it also works just fine with the non-free, freedom-hating Skype.</p> <p>If you wanted to record a podcast, or just a VoIP call with someone else (and yes, PulseCaster warns you not to record without the other party&rsquo;s permission), it couldn&rsquo;t be easier than this.</p> <p><img src="https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/images/pulsecaster_warning.jpg" alt="PulseCaster&rsquo;s warning screen"></p> <p>PulseCaster is packaged for Fedora, but you can get the code from the links on the <a href="http://stickster.github.io/pulsecaster/">project home page</a> (which is generated out of GitHub).</p> <p>It&rsquo;s a simple app that works. What more could you want?</p> <p><strong>All the PulseCaster links you&rsquo;ll need:</strong> <a href="https://fedorahosted.org/pulsecaster/wiki">Wiki</a>, <a href="https://github.com/stickster/pulsecaster">GitHub</a>, <a href="http://stickster.github.io/pulsecaster/">Home</a></p> Firefox vs. Chrome on Windows and Linux https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/firefox-vs.-chrome-on-windows-and-linux/ Tue, 25 Feb 2014 17:51:06 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/firefox-vs.-chrome-on-windows-and-linux/ <p>I spent quite a bit of time running Google Chrome/Chromium on both Windows and Linux, but between feeling uncomfortable giving away so much data to Google (when logged in on Chrome) and how well Firefox performs on Linux (which is <em>very well</em> from what I can see), I now use Firefox about 99 percent of the time in Fedora 20.</p> <p>But on my Windows 7 work machine, which is a more powerful (quad-core AMD to my laptop&rsquo;s dual-core, with 8 GB of RAM to the laptop&rsquo;s 4 GB), I flip it, using Chrome about 99 percent of the time.</p> <p>So I&rsquo;ve been switching it up to see how I might like using more Chrome in Linux and more Firefox in Windows.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ll keep it short. There&rsquo;s nothing about Chrome on my laptop in Fedora 20 that makes me want to use it. It&rsquo;s no faster and no more stable. And SELinux doesn&rsquo;t much like it (and I get warnings).</p> <p>I spent the whole day yesterday in Windows 7 on my big box running Firefox (version 27 on both machines for the record) for everything. It was measurably slower, and I had a few periods of non-responsiveness, especially with my customary 15-20 open tabs.</p> <p>This means I&rsquo;ll be sticking with Firefox on my Linux-running laptop (and for my personal use, where I&rsquo;m not so crazy about Google spying and Chrome on my workplace desktop, where I&rsquo;m already using Google Apps and am not doing any personal business (and could care less if Google knows about my web use as it relates).</p> Amazon s3-style storage without Amazon https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/amazon-s3-style-storage-without-amazon/ Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:36:51 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/amazon-s3-style-storage-without-amazon/ <p>Since Amazon has an open API for its s3 Simple Storage Service, other cloud vendors (and even YOU) can spin up a similar service.</p> <p>Rudy Godoy shows how you can <a href="http://blog.stone-head.org/s3tools-simple-storage-service-for-non-amazon-providers/">use s3tools in Linux</a> to tap into s3-like services both at Amazon and elsewhere.</p> Amazon Web Services free for one year https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/amazon-web-services-free-for-one-year/ Sun, 11 Nov 2012 08:07:04 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/amazon-web-services-free-for-one-year/ <p><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/free/">You can use Amazon Web services free for a year</a>, and I did just that.</p> <p>I wouldn&rsquo;t say signing up for Amazon Web Services was easy, or that you don&rsquo;t need to possess a certain level of geeky experience, because you do. But if you know a minimum about how a Linux server goes together, you can do it.</p> <p>One thing to note: Ubuntu is HUGE in the world of AWS. This is an area where it looks like they are either dominating, or well on their way to dominating.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m using Ubuntu 12.04 as the distribution for my Amazon EC2 server.</p> When I try to arrange bookmarks in the Chromium or Google Chrome browsers in Debian Wheezy, the app crashes https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/when-i-try-to-arrange-bookmarks-in-the-chromium-or-google-chrome-browsers-in-debian-wheezy-the-app-crashes/ Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:05:09 -0800 https://relvokcor.xyz/~passthejoe/hugo/when-i-try-to-arrange-bookmarks-in-the-chromium-or-google-chrome-browsers-in-debian-wheezy-the-app-crashes/ <p><strong>Update:</strong> <em>I only have this problem with the Chrome/Chromium menu while running the GNOME 3 desktop environment. In Xfce, everything is fine.</em></p> <p><em>The original entry starts here:</em></p> <p>I guess I should file a bug report against Chromium in Debian Wheezy about the following:</p> <p>When I go into the menu in either Chromium or Google Chrome (yes, I have both) and try to edit the bookmarks, the browser crashes. So I can&rsquo;t re-arrange my bookmarks in these two browsers.</p> <p>FYI, re-arranging bookmarks in Firefox/Iceweasel not only works but is extremely intuitive: You can drag/move bookmarks right in the bookmarks menu &ndash; no need to go to a special bookmarks-editing screen to change the order of a bunch of bookmarks. Thanks, Mozilla!</p>