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Welcome Back ~realdonaldtrump
One of my favourite Soylentils, ~realdonaldtrump, has been missing in action for several weeks. There were no tweets since Feb 19th, and I was worried that something had happened.
Thankfully, ~realdonaldtrump is back. I can only assume that he was on vacation (perhaps in Vietnam?). Anyways, I'm glad he is back and tweeting here again.
ROCKPro64 Part 3, Working NAS, now on to Kodi
And so I found a decent Debian Stretch build (from here), and it seems to be much more suitable for my purposes than Ubuntu Bionic. For one thing Debian seems to be actually maintaining an ARM build of Transmission 2.94 even if it is in Sid, something which the Ubuntu Transmission PPA doesn't have, much to my irritation. NextCloud proved fairly easy to install, but I found some irritations with setting up MariaDB as its database backend. The mysql_secure_installation script that is the minimum that one needs to do to secure MariaDB/MySQL is broken. Though it says that it will change the MariaDB root password, after prompting you for a new one, IT DOES NOT ACTUALLY DO THAT. MariaDB still uses a blank root password even after that rigmarole. You have to do this bit of black magic in order to actually change the root password:
use mysql;
update user set password=PASSWORD("mynewpassword") where User='root';
update user set plugin="mysql_native_password";
Then restart MariaDB. I then had to check whether the script even actually did all the other stuff that it said it did. That shit's beyond idiotic.
Moving the old LetsEncrypt certificates I got for the dynamic domain I have with afraid.org from the Odroid to the ROCKPro64 was relatively trivial, as was the dynamic DNS update script I've been using, so now I can get some access from the outside to the NAS.
NextCloud was relatively easy to install after that, but there's some weirdness involving php-imagick and libgomp in Apache ("cannot allocate memory in static TLS block") that I was never able to satisfactorily fix. I've begun uploading pictures from my phone to it with the NextCloud Android app but I noticed that it's dog slow doing that, and it might actually be faster to use the web interface to do bulk uploading of that kind. The app has all sorts of missing in it, as you can't tag pictures with it for one (you have to use the web app to do that for now), and I've been thinking of using tags to organise the rather sizeable collection of pictures Mrs. Wyrm and I have been accumulating. But I suppose it's a start, and I can install it on Mrs. Wyrm's phone and have it automatically upload the pictures on her phone to the NAS whenever she's at home. I'd rather keep such things there than continue to entrust them to Google as we've been doing.
Now, it's off to building Kodi. This is proving to be as big a challenge as I've expected it to be, given the way the current LibreElec builds are described as alpha-quality. Looks like I'm going to have to Use The Source, and the information on doing that is sparse to say the least. This is complicated by the fact that no one seems to have built a working X on the RockChips and so Kodi needs to run on framebuffer. I found one reference that seems like it might be a good start, but there's scads of dependencies that need to be installed before Kodi will even build. And so I'm partying in Dependency Hell like it's 1999... More updates on this as I make progress. If I get really pissed at this I'm going to stick to Kodi on the Odroid with my movies and TV shows on an NFS or other distributed file system mount from the RP64. I want to later repurpose the Odroid as a secure auth server for my home machines once I've gotten Kodi working on the RP64, but if this is not feasible I'll have to buy some other smaller SBC to do that.
O FOR THE LOVE OF G-D PLEASE HIDE ME FROM THEM!
I just googled for "Ammonium Nitrate" without thinking to use Tor.
It's for a book that I'm writing.
A novel.
A work of fiction.
TomTom update: any idea why?
I just got this email:
"Your satnav has always been there to guide you, now it needs your help. There is an issue that may impact the functionality of your satnav and requires your attention before 6 April 2019.
Please take a moment to check its status and learn if it will be impacted."
It is TomTom.
Does anyone have an idea why this update is needed? I'm worried it may 'update' a forced retirement on my wife's TomTom (it is getting rather old).
Why April 6?
Sleeping at R2D2 Again Gave Me Scabies Again
At least they're using mothballs so as to keep a lid on the Body Lice.
I would not wish Scabies on my worse enemy.
It's not that I'm homeless again, but that I've been putting in such long hours that I didn't want to go all the way home to sleep.
After I post this I'll go sleep on my cold, hard office floor.
No Vermin There!
Not Yet Anyway.
Umbrella Academy
Want to watch a weird ass good show? Umbrella Academy is as weird as it gets, but pretty good!
Kids with special abilities (powers) grow up.
Fight scenes are done to songs like 'Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows'.
And the one main character is one kid from a pre-teen comedy my son watches, Ricky, Nicky, Dicky and Dawn.
The other kids from that show must be just SHITTING themselves.
One (they weren't given real names), Tom Hopper (Black Sails), is a guy with some gorilla DNA.
Two, can control knives he throws
Three, can control people's minds by saying I Heard A Rumour
Four, a drug addict who communicates with the dead
Five, can jump through space and time
They discover they need to stop the apocalypse...
while hunted by two time travel assassins...
Weird. ass. show.
Can't wait for next season!
(Netflix)
Mike's Garden Chronicles: I Wanted to be a Farmer
"Good compost is a wonderful thing!
-- Efren Lizardo Ibarreta
"What do you want to be when you grow up? A fireman? An astronaut?"
I was but four years old.
"I want to be a farmer."
While puzzled, Mom was pleased as we come from farmers. I expect most people day.
"Why so?"
"Everyone has to eat. I could charge as much as I want. I'll be rich!"
Dad was quite pleased and so purchased some gardening tools and seed. This was in 1968 yet I remember as if it was yesterday that very first carrot he harvested for me.
It was good.
Fast forward to today. Being winter I am preparing for the coming Spring by composting food scraps.
Having established that collecting them in a small bag works well, I tried a large bag - a full-sized paper grocery sack.
That works well too; the fruit flies are very pleased with their new digs.
Judge rules in favor of gender equality
It may well get appealed and we may not see a change for some years, but this looks like a key step.
A Federal Judge has ruled that it's unconstitutional to require men to register for the draft, while exempting females for no reason other than their genitals.
“The male-only registration requirement of the Military Selective Service Act, 50 U.S.C. § 3802(a), violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
All hail women's liberation!?
What do you think?
ROCKPro64 Part 2, Basic Housekeeping
As it turns out Pine64 shipped me a pair of bad cables or so it seems, as after getting replacement cables, the drives never produced any I/O errors again, and a long SMART test passed. A minor problem is that sometimes the system comes up and Linux can't detect the drives. A reboot generally serves to fix that but I wonder why it occasionally happens.
Some annoyances are that the system images that are provided don't come with proper defaults for most settings, even such things as Unicode support in the default locale, and so forth. The fan is controlled by software, and this software isn't even installed by default (grumble) and isn't available directly by an apt-get. Information on how to set these things up seems to be scattered about so I'm going to try to gather all that up here for my own quick reference in case I need to do this yet again (rather likely actually).
A big annoyance is the lack of proper UTF-8 locales. Apparently the following commands suffice to set it up:
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
dpkg-reconfigure locales
update-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="en_US" LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
Change the locale as desired if you don't want to use en_US. Setting up the timezone is one command:
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
The fan control software is a package known as ATS (Active Thermal Service), and what that page doesn't tell you about setting it up is that the default kernel it requires isn't installed on the current ROCKPro64 system images as of this writing, and needs to be installed manually. This forum post gives instructions on what kernel to install before setting up ATS.
The user community is much smaller than RPi's and so a lot of these small but important things aren't set up to be done automatically. Next step I'm going to try to take is set up the software I'm planning to use for it. Most of the stuff like Transmission might be relatively trivial, but since those folks running the transmissionbt Ubuntu PPA didn't make ARM builds, I'm probably going to have try to roll my own .debs for Transmission 2.94. I had to manually kludge 2.94 for the Odroid box I'm using today, and don't want to do that for this new system. Most of the basics such as web service and Samba appear to be a matter of apt. The big one is going to be Kodi. The LibreElec builds available are said to be of alpha quality, and that makes it sound like getting that part going is going to be a lot of work.
You need to be offended.
If you're really clever, you already have it on your hard drive.
Andrew Dice Clay.
The day the laughter died.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdUxDoy5m3o
I should do some Lenny Bruce first but with apologies, bad roll of the dice there I guess.
Here's the setup. Biggest comedian in the world. Bigger than anyone before him. Bigger than Lenny Bruce, who was arguably better.
Shows up to a pretty big comedy club. On a slow week. Unannounced. Without a script. Without a set.
Room is nearly empty. The folks that are there initially consider themselves incredibly lucky, honored.
As the night goes on, some of them begin to reconsider that. Nah, they all do, at one point or another.
This is not entertainment. That's the great thing about this recording. /Good/ comedy before this point (and, for the most part, after it as well) is about speaking as much truth as you can, while still being entertaining.
Dice, on this day, didn't give a copulate if he was funny. He was just speaking truth to power, and he was still young and naïve enough to think that would always be funny.
The best parts are the ones that aren't funny.
The year was 1991. I wasn't in the hall. Nowhere near. I got a bootleg copy of this via usenet about the same time I did my first linux install. I'm afraid some of you won't understand just what a brag that was. ;)
Comments, as always, are open. Worst that can happen is I'll delete the whole damn entry. Flame all you want.
