The easiest way to tell I use my stylus a lot: the number of cringes between sitting down and getting up to go fetch my S-Pen from the next room.
After a good while, I’ve finally upgraded my main laptop from Debian Stretch to Buster. Unless your name is OpenBSD, I don’t do zero day upgrades; and it’s been a few months since Buster shipped. Enough for me to feel comfortable that any big, scaries about the new Debian stable would have made it to my ears by now.
It’s long been my policy to upgrade a less important machine before pushing a major upgrade to one I don’t want to wipe and restore from backups.
My guinea pig was a desktop that’s been running Debian stable releases since Squeeze without a serious problem. The only issue I experienced with it on upgrade was that the antique nVidia card requires a very legacy driver version that doesn’t really want to work with the current OS. But aside from that everything was peachy.
My laptop on the otherhand was a fairly painless experience. I only encountered two issues.
One is it looks like consolekit has been ejected in favour of systemd-logind. Frankly, I don’t care. But I also am a weirdo who still likes to run XDM. Because beyond configuring PAM or my X session script, I don’t give a flying floop about the modern login managers–my session still trucks through ~/.xsession and I don’t need fancy stuff in my login screen. A small change to the xfce4 specific part seems to be enough to resolve that, or at least I can still reboot my laptop through the xfce4 menu instead of using sudo.
Second case was for whatever reason, apache2.service wanted to be enabled during the upgrade and was preventing lighttpd.service from starting and running my tweaked configuration. So when I saw my /var/www/html/index.html file about altering an NSA surveillance unit, I knew that was happening. That’s actually why that file exists. If you’re not using my configuration that makes content go to /srv/{hostname}, you get the cheaky file I left myself for being able to tell. Because I know if I stick my shit in /srv/{hostname} rather than /var/www/html, probability of packages mucking with my webroot goes down :P. A simple disable + stop apache2.service and restart lighttpd.service, and bingo.
I’ve been trying to eat less pasta and rice, and more vegetables of late. Tonight however was the I need a nap not a cooking spree solution.
Willow was so thrilled at the fried chicken that she licked the camera, trying to get to it.
Things that I find sad += 1.
If I get in the car ten minutes early, leave on time, or sleep in for five more minutes: I arrive at work at approximately the same time. The difference is the level of traffic o/
Three years ago and Willow was definitely still comfortable, along with the rest of our tribe.
Ahh, I’m reminded of what really makes me hate NT: hardware support.
Ever since my good cable got a tad bent at the connector, I’ve only had two cables that really like to drive my Xbox One controller. One that’s like 3 meters, and one that’s like 30 centimetres: neither of which is particularly fun with my desk. But at least they work, if you deal with the cable lengths.
So, I figure let’s try the wireless adapter for Windows. Well, guess what? It’s shit.
The “Slim” model 1790 now available doesn’t work with Windows 10, 1903, up to date as of what Microsoft lets my desktop get. As far as the base operating system is concerned there is no driver for this device–none, nadda, zilcho!
If you browse the go fetchy it catalog referenced in places like this and this, and get a bit creative in pointing Windows at various entries and fine one that’ll actually match the device: the most you’ll get is an error code: “The software for this device has been blocked from starting because it is known to have problems with Windows. Contact the hardware vendor for a new driver. (Code 48)”. If you give up more easily than I do when I’m tired and almost ready for sleep: you’ll just get a message saying it didn’t find squat that works with the driver you extracted.
Because why would you expect Microsoft’s driver’s to work with Microsoft’s hardware? That’s a lot to ask, I guess.
In my experience there are really only three kinds of drivers for Windows.
- Those that just work, and often those come with the Microsoft’s install.
- Those that almost never work; and
- Those that are about as stable as drunk with ten shots of rum in’em.
On the flipside scenario 3 is why error codes like 48 exist. Not being able to use a piece of hardware is frequently better than it turning the rest of your experience to crap.
For the extra curious nerd, the device reports itself as usb vid 045e pid 02fe in the device manager’s GUI. 0x45e being MS’s USB vendor id. Dunno what their product ids in the wild are, and I’m not buying multiple adapters to find out.
The Microsoft Xbox One Wireless Adapter for Windows kit also comes with a really nice but rather short length USB extension cable. Which aside from being an overpriced cable when you consider the wireless adapter is actually a paperweight until MS fixes the driver, does in fact solve my real problem. I.e. if I was smart I would’ve just bought a decent cable in a length > 0.3 & < 3.0 meters long instead of MS’s wireless adapter. Ha! 🤣
Thus my real solution is to take the extension cable that came with the useless wireless adapter, plug in my too damned short cable I wanted to replace, hook up my controller and go play a damned game before my head droops and hits the desk.
Sitting down to watch an episode of The Good Place during an afternoon break, and ending up binge watching all of season three: reminds me that is kind of how the rest of the show went.
A couple years ago: I had heard about it from a friend and decided to try a couple episodes. Didn’t think much of it at first but then fork, I found myself binge watching the crap out of the first season. #TheGoodPlace was definitely worth watching ^_^.
Simple solutions for simple problems: couldn’t figure out what to make for dinner. Made pasta and ate whatever I didn’t have space for storing.
Plus that kinda takes care of lunches for the week 😀.
I find it a bit amusing how Special Folders have evolved, and less so how programs have perverted them. At this point, NT and X desktop environments mostly agree about the dumping grounds in your home directory or “User Profile”. Programs not so much.
One of the things I do find amusing is this compat trick:
C:UsersTerry>dir /A:H Documents
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is 9278-0228
Directory of C:UsersTerryDocuments
2015-02-28 20:24 0 Default.rdp
2019-08-14 21:31 402 desktop.ini
2019-07-02 23:22My Music [C:UsersTerryMusic]
2019-07-02 23:22My Pictures [C:UsersTerryPictures]
2019-07-02 23:22My Videos [C:UsersTerryVideos]
2 File(s) 402 bytes
3 Dir(s) 295,411,253,248 bytes free
C:UsersTerry>;
A long time ago the content was like “My DocumentsMy Pictures”. And then eventually when the concept of multiple users took off, we ended up with “%UserProfile%My DocumentsMy Pictures” and so on, until we finally ended up with the modern path. Kindly, some Microsoftie decided ‘Users’ was a lot nicer than ‘Documents and Settings’ as far as prefixes go for where you store user profiles.
So while %UserProfile%Pictures is the legit place on my modern system: if for some reason you still wanted to access them through the documents folder: hidden junctions will redirect you. Thus keeping old software working. Once upon a time this was probably important for keeping software written for Windows 95 and early NT working.
Curiously there is a hidden junction of “Documents and Settings [CUsers]” at the top of my %SystemDrive% but there are none for the really-damned-old “My Documents” at the top of the drive. I wouldn’t be surprised however if compatibility trunks for older software faked those.
Also, I kind of feel glad that I haven’t really touched a live Windows 9x install since the Pentium 4 was still sexy ^_^. That might sound less fun if you consider that I know where to reach for install discs that makes XP look young enough to be playing with Fischer Price…. but I’m not interested in running a virtual machine to jog the ol’ meatbag memory.
Behind the Scenes: Redesigning the Note Editor in Evernote.
Rather nice look at things. The fancier concept of a checklist and editing is a positive, since at best some of their clients have had the daisy chain of enter -> newline + checkbox; but mostly that was it. Sometimes related bugs as well–I used to use Evernote for my shopping list and groaned at that.
Table editing in Evernote has been both a sore and a sweet spot over the years, largely based on what client you were using. For me, mostly a sore one because my 90% interface is the mobile apps. Where the PC and Web editors tend to due the best. The current PC client has a simple but pretty complete way of doing tables, and the Android version just has rudimentary editing support.
The kind of drag/drop manipulation of table cells is a UX ballpark that over the years, I just stopped assuming anyone still cares that much about my workflows versus their five o’clock thanks to the effort it takes to pull that off. About the only time I tend to expect such drag and drop niceties to work in document editors is in Microsoft office. A coworker relies on Outlook and it’s got many nifty things like that if you abuse its features, and let’s just say if I was doing the same I’d have a host of other problems than dragging and dropping stuff in a rich text editor 😜.