Author Archives: Blender Fox

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About Blender Fox

Recreational road-runner, blender/CG rookie, linux user (LE-1, LPIC-1, SUSE CLA 11, SUSE 11 Tech Spec), programmer, avid tinkerer (I'm always breaking things), self-confessed anime & manga otaku & japanophile

Fedora, Manjaro, WordPress & Twitter

So, quite a few things have been happening recently.

I tried to go the next step on Manjaro and copy my home directory across ready for me to run the Ansible playbook to do the setups (I’ve been testing it would work via VirtualBox on my Windows laptop)

After waiting ages for the file copy, when I went to do the backup, there was a btrfs checksum error so I’ll have to try again some other time.

Separately, I got a message on an issue I raised at Fedora’s bugzilla the Fedora 36 (the version of Fedora I raised the bug on), was coming up to EOL so I should look to move away from it or upgrade. So I decided to try doing the upgrade.

The upgrade completed without error, but first boot after the upgrade hung with a weird Kernel Panic error (I have posted this on the Fedora Forums)

So I rolled my laptop back to preupgrade state for now.

I suspect I may need to end up doing a clean install, so I’ve prepared a btrfs and a ext4 lvm installation and have imaged those in preparation.

Finally, WordPress posted that they’re stopping Autosharing to Twitter because of Twitter’s Idiot-in-Chief screwing up the API usage.

Still, they have mentioned they will be adding autosharing to Instagram and Mastodon instead, and that helps me, since I’m slowly moving what little Twitter presence I had onto Mastodon anyway.

My Twitter has been disconnected from my WordPress and I’ve revoked its access from Twitter’s side anyway.

Manjaro

I’ve been continuing to tinker with ArchLinux and Manjaro and have since found out about “Oh-My-Zsh” and “Oh-My-Bash” — basically addons you can add onto your shell via the shell’s rc and profile files and it provides a really nice prompt that tells you additional information at a glance, like which branch you are in if you are in a git repo, or whether the previous command returned a non-zero error code.

They are quite polarising though, as I found out when I mentioned this to one of the systems architects here in the office. One of the architects told me someone he worked with even considered OMZ malware.

Vanilla ArchLinux uses bash out of the box, Manjaro uses zsh out of the box, which is how I found out about the OMZ/OMB addons.

OMZ has a ton more plugins than OMB – unsurprisingly since it’s also the default shell for Macs (vomit).

I did start copying my files across to my Manjaro installation. It took nearly 6 hours to copy. However, when trying to do the backup afterwards, it failed with a btrfs checksum error. That worried me since I hadn’t done anything since the previous backup other than copying files.

I do remember running into similar issues with btrfs last time I tinkered with it when reinstalling Fedora. It could end up with me switching to either ext4 (like I did with Fedora) or trying the xfs file system option in Manjaro.

Manjaro

Referring to my earlier blog post, I finally got Manjaro sound to work and have been spending my spare time working on getting the Arch/Manjaro side of my setup playbook to work. VirtualBox has helped with that.

I’ve been struggling with making CloneZilla backups on my new Toshiba SSD. The transfer speed onto it is horrendous, but the speed on my Samsung SSD is fine. And the return window is now closed so I can’t return it. I guess, I’ll need to look at purchasing yet another external SSD.

Speeding

Well, it was going to happen at some point in my life, but I ended up getting a speeding ticket after registering an average speed over 5mph above the speed limit for an average speed zone.

Instead of points, I’ve been offered a driver education course, which I of course am going to have to take. I opted for the classroom rather than virtual.

Not how I wanted to spend my Saturday morning, but I can combine it with some shopping.

Poor Article Wording

This article popped up on my Google News feed and the first thing that caught my eye was the fact the headline mentions they were sacked, but the subheading says “affected due to layoffs”

Laying someone off is not the same as sacking them. As someone at work explained: sacking someone is when you keep the role but do away with the person; layoff is when you do away with the role, but (sometimes) keep the person. These workers were laid off since they also got severance pay. Something you’d never get if you were fired.

In fact, this article may get the writer and the publication in trouble. Being fired has a far more negative impact on your career than being laid off so anyone of those 140 workers trying to get jobs elsewhere may find it harder to get a new job if their prospective employers do a basic internet search and find this article that implies (incorrectly) that they got sacked.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/github-sacks-entire-india-engineering-team-around-140-of-them-2352591-2023-03-28

Manjaro and ArchLinux

After spending many years using Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, I’ve decided to look at going a bit deeper and start tinkering with ArchLinux

Initially I tried to use Manjaro, but I couldn’t get its sound working with my Pixelbook, even using u/LyncolnMD’s setup (reddit link here). That being said, a commenter on that thread did say they had sound working, so I’m not sure how he made that happen.

Bizarrely, under vanilla ArchLinux, on which Manjaro is based, it works. So I’ve decided to go into ArchLinux instead.

I spend several hours making backups of my current Fedora setup and making CloneZilla images.

It took several hours to copy back the files too (212GB of content in my home folder).

I have also decided to reutilise my pixelbook-fedora-setup repo to configure for archlinux too. That will take a while to reconfigure everything since ArchLinux uses pacman as its package manager (with some AUR helpers like yay or pamac). Ansible has a pacman module, but no yay module, so each time I have to use yay to install packages under ArchLinux, I have to use the shell module instead. A minor issue, and I can see a few people have already worked on some yay modules, but none are officially distributed yet.

So until I finish reconfiguring my pixelbook setup repo, I’m staying on Fedora. I’m using a VirtualBox machine to do the testing of the setup.

Operation Update

I got called by the hospital and they gave me an update on the lump removed from the mouth. It was thankfully nothing serious, but recommended I keep an eye on it in case it came back (there is always a risk of that)

Twitter, TFL and Dilbert

It’s been a while so here’s a few updates in the meantime

It’s coming up to a year since I moved house and only now have the pile of construction rubbish been moved from outside my old flat. Dumping of rubbish by the neighbours in the adjoining block of flats into the garage is still happening.

Conservatives lost control of the area to Labour but I’m seeing absolutely no change

We went through a period of very cold weather (-6degC) and this was costing us £10-£15 per day in gas usage.

Moving onto other updates. As posted previously, I went into hospital to remove a lump from my mouth. I’ll soon get a follow up call from the doctor to check how I’m doing. Stitches took about 10 days to dissolve. I just have a small white patch there now where the lump was removed and the doctor cauterised the wound.

Twitter has descended into a real s**thole since Elon took over. First killing all third-party clients and then indicating it may start charging for API usage.

The third-party client purge I can tolerate — it was originally started during the Jack era, but charging for API usage, or even limiting tweets per day is not something many people will accept.

I started working on stripping out twitter functionality from my TFL updates bot and that’s near enough done now. It now tweets (or should that be toots) into a Mastodon account at https://mastodon.xyz/users/updatesbf

RSS feed functionality should still work, but it is not enabled yet, until I can get Keda to work.

Operation Update

Time for a final update on the operation.

The stitches they put in my mouth have finally dissolved just over two weeks after the operation. All I have now is a small white patch in my mouth where the lump was with white lines across it where the stitches used to be.

Operation Update

So it’s been a couple of days since the operation. The pain has now died down enough to be tolerable without painkillers – or at least as frequently.

I’m able to eat semi-solid food now stuff like soups, porridge and congee (look that up if you don’t know what that is). I have been able to drink hot drinks without too much pain now, like tea, although I still need to mix in a bit of cold water to cool it down first.

Brushing my teeth has been easier now and I’ve started using salt water rinses as instructed — although the side effect of that seems to be that it dries the hell out of my lips (well, that’s what salt does, after all).

I’ll be heading back into the office next week, but only for one day since I’m training for three days and the fifth day is taken up by another freaking train strike.