Training in Quarantine – Day 50

Finally hit day 50 of quarantined exercising. A colder, but less windy day. Big lap today, but decided to try cutting some of the longer corners to see how much of a difference that made.

My hair is really starting to grow out and is beginning to really irritate my ears.

And I found out my second backup domain I play development with no longer had its email forwarders working, and when I logged in, my account seemed to be pretty borked. A back and forth with support emerged that my hosting provider got acquired (again) and looks like my data was not transferred properly, or was empty when it was transferred. More likely someone f**ked up during the migration.

They recreated my account but it’s still pretty flaky. I’m asking whether I’ll get a credit for the 6 months of failed hosting (the acquisition took place at the end of last year), and I’m seriously considering transferring the domain off this hosting provider and onto Google Domains, but I would lose my email forwarding. I think I’ll look at buying another dummy domain on Google Domains and test with that for a bit.

Training in Quarantine – Day 49

Fitbit workout today wasn’t too bad. Not as intense as my last one. Still sweaty, but not “dropping beads of sweat” sweaty. Next workout is Legs, Arms & Shoulders

Also did my 3km walk, but today was super windy during the walk so I won’t be surprised if I catch a cold from this.

Pixelbooks and Ubuntu 20.04

After using my Pixelbook Eve on Ubuntu Eoan (19.10), my Ubuntu has started notifying me for an upgrade to 20.04 LTS. So, based on my past experiences of Ubuntu upgrades and how they always break things, I went through the process of backing up my files and making a Clonezilla image of my Pixelbook before even starting to do anything.

Then I went through the upgrade. It went through without any problems, but when it went to reboot afterwards, I was black screened after the Ubuntu splash screen.

I suspect it’s because my Pixelbook contains some tweaks via this GitHub repo, and that is still using a 4.x kernel. Last update was in 2019, so maybe it’s out of date.

Before restoring my old image back on, I installed GalliumOS which is an Ubuntu-based distro specifically aimed at ChromeOS devices. Then made a backup image of that before restoring the old image back on.

I might try installing Ubuntu 20.04 from clean and see if that has any better Pixelbook support than the older versions of Ubuntu, and make it so I don’t need to use the hacks. Bear in mind the hacks used the ChromeOS kernel, and I couldn’t do some things like use ufw or gufw. Using GalliumOS should fix that since I wouldn’t be using tweaks.

However, there’s still an annoying quirk GalliumOS has on my Pixelbook and that’s the jumpiness of the mouse pointer — touch the touchpad and the pointer jumps to that part of the screen, as if the touchpad was a representation of the screen, not a touchpad. It’s a quirk that can be gotten used to, but it is still annoying.

Slow Download Speeds on Steam For Linux

I’ve been getting horrendously slow speeds on Linux Steam (~500k/s) and 5-6Mb/s on Windows, and only now found out why. There’s a ticket on GitHub for this:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3401

In short, the client is very aggressive on its DNS requests, which normally causes it to be throttled by servers, leading to really slow downloads. However, using dnsmasq allows the requests to be cached locally and offload the requests.

Even though the instructions are for Arch, they worked for me:

  1. Install dnsmasq
  2. Modify /etc/dnsmasq.config and add the line listen-address=127.0.0.1
  3. Restart the dnsmasq service (systemctl restart dnsmasq.service) or reboot your machine

Enjoy the speed

Training in Quarantine – Day 46 — VE Day

A free Friday because I’m now on 4 day week, and it’s VE Day, so my one-hour walk came across several roads with bunting and lots of Union Jacks. It certainly was suitable weather for it…

Lots of people were queuing and saw the longest queue outside Tesco Supermarket (and not Sainsbury’s surprisingly)

After the one-hour walk, I then did my Fitbit workout, which was just shy of 35 minutes and I certainly felt it afterwards….