linuxbutler

You know those web sites that wait two seconds after you visit, then shade the whole page and put up some question — usually “sign up here for all this great content!” — before you’ve decided if the content is any good? Or ones that ask you to do a survey on how well they’ve satisifed your needs, before they’ve satisifed your needs?

They always make me think of a two-year old yanking on Mummy’s sleeve, saying Mummy? Mummy?? Mummy! Mummy!! MUMMY!!! — No manners at all, no consideration for what I want to do with my time, no consideration for whether this is an appropriate time to ask for a favour. Ugh.

Netdev 0x13 will be held in Prague this year, just before the IETF meeting.

Netdev is March 20-22; IETF 104 is March 23-29.

I’ve seen this message before: “This system is locked, you’ll be redirected to the unlock dialog in a few seconds.”

This morning that message did not clear up after several minutes (including time to walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water). Finally, I had to open a text terminal, run links, visit my favourite search engine duckduckgo.com, and look up how to fix it. Thank goodness for shell tools and the ability to use them.

The answer is[0]: on the terminal,

loginctl list-sessions
loginctl unlock-session <sessionid>

Works like charm, immediately opened the session.

[0] Answer found at askubuntu. Thank you askubuntu for a useful question and answer that solved my problem in minutes. And for a page that was legible in links, the text-based browser.

I need to get a new phone … My last phone failed. It has the Snapdragon 808/810 chipset and suffered a progressively worsening boot loop.

What I really want in a phone is:

• a battery that is removeable
• dual active sim
• works on Freedom‘s network
• DOESN’T use a snapdragon 808/810 chipset
• can run lineageOS (or CopperheadOS)
• fits in most pockets; preferably operable with one hand

My boss mentioned that there is another “distro” of android out there, besides lineageOS, called “CopperheadOS“.

Sure looks interesting.

Here is an xmlstarlet command line to get a node attribute and the child node contents for nodes that contain a certain child node.

Another Debian birthday, another Debian birthday cake. Happy 25th birthday, Debian.

It is still the chocolate-zucchini cake, but with cherry pie filling this time.

Here is another Hacker Public Radio episode. I’ve asked for the Thursday, Aug 16, 2018 slot. It will be show 2619. Below I’ve posted the show notes.

A Gentle Introduction to Quilt

Or, patch management for software.

Speaker Intro

Hi, I’m bjb. I’m a programmer.

Motivation and topic intro

I needed to learn how to use the software tool “quilt“, so you get to listen to my podcast about an introduction to quilt. One more reference.

Yesterday I upgraded LineageOS from 14.1 to 15.1, and TWRP from 3.1.1.0 to 3.2.1.0. It was a lot harder than it should have been, because I was missing a few details on how it all works.

It’s annoying to have to type file:///usr/share/doc/debian-policy/fhs/fhs-2.3.html when you want to see the File Hierarchy Standard … so I made a “desktop icon” pointing to several debian references. After way too much fishing around, I ended up doing the following on my xfce4-based desktop: