Heartland

A new mobile phone for an elderly friend who I help out.
I did the setup & had to ask her what security she wanted. PIN, pattern, finger print, or facial recognition.
Her old phone wasn't even locked & for this one she decided on the finger print option.
One of the coolest 80+ year-olds I know

Currently geeking: my home theatre PC has given up the ghost. Support for really old nvidia graphics cards on Arch Linux is sketchy at best and trying to downgrade is a nightmare: the latest Debian image refused to install on the fecker so it's currently sitting there with a totally blank hard drive.

I think I'm going to have to give up on the old beast and repurpose a raspberry pi.

markfiend wrote: ↑15 Mar 2021, 10:07 Currently geeking: my home theatre PC has given up the ghost. Support for really old nvidia graphics cards on Arch Linux is sketchy at best and trying to downgrade is a nightmare: the latest Debian image refused to install on the fecker so it's currently sitting there with a totally blank hard drive.

I think I'm going to have to give up on the old beast and repurpose a raspberry pi.

The Debian disk image I'd loaded onto a live USB was corrupted. Second attempt and I have Debian installed and kodi up and running again. Now all I need is to get my remote control working again.

Brave browser.
& it isn't half bad as it goes

As I mentioned elsewhere, I've been learning to use a DAW. Having no musical education at all this has involved learning my measures from my scales, etc. (Aside: why does one have to dig so deep to tie it all back to a baseline Hz value? After that things make much more sense. Why don't they start there and build up?)

Anyway the end goal was to make some banging techno for a 4yo birthday. With the bar set appropriately low I think I will achieve it satisfactorily in time for the party.

markfiend wrote: ↑16 Mar 2021, 12:11

markfiend wrote: ↑15 Mar 2021, 10:07 Currently geeking: my home theatre PC has given up the ghost. Support for really old nvidia graphics cards on Arch Linux is sketchy at best and trying to downgrade is a nightmare: the latest Debian image refused to install on the fecker so it's currently sitting there with a totally blank hard drive.

I think I'm going to have to give up on the old beast and repurpose a raspberry pi.

The Debian disk image I'd loaded onto a live USB was corrupted. Second attempt and I have Debian installed and kodi up and running again. Now all I need is to get my remote control working again.

Plan C: the old home theatre running Kodi on top of Debian was failing on all sorts of media file types; it's now a NAS server and I got a new Pi on which to install Kodi. Balls to Debian I'm back on Arch (Arch Linux ARM on the Pi and bog-standard Arch on the NAS). I'm still troubleshooting why some .mkv files just randomly crash the whole Pi but re-encoding them with a bit of ffmpeg magic seems to do the trick.

How to passive-aggressively make absolutely sure that somebody is never going to try to put a test system into production: name it "Church of the Electric Moose". Yup, that'll do.

markfiend wrote: ↑12 May 2021, 10:51I'm still troubleshooting why some .mkv files just randomly crash the whole Pi but re-encoding them with a bit of ffmpeg magic seems to do the trick.

Ah I remember this. I ended up asking on an Arch Linux ARM forum and I was struggling because I hadn't enabled kodi as a systemd service (spit). Seems I also needed some udev rules in place to allow access to hardware decoding for h265.

BTW office PC uptime now at 595 days

mh wrote: ↑05 Nov 2021, 16:01 How to passive-aggressively make absolutely sure that somebody is never going to try to put a test system into production: name it "Church of the Electric Moose". Yup, that'll do.

See my signature line.

currently geeking ... well that's somewhat exaggerated, but can anybody tell me, please,
whether those spotify playlists can be downloaded or used only online. I see no need to
register with them in case I can listen to the stuff online only, anyway... ...

Spotify is a streaming service; I don't think it's possible to download the tracks.

markfiend wrote: ↑12 Nov 2021, 17:34 Spotify is a streaming service; I don't think it's possible to download the tracks.

Apparently with 'Spotify Premium' you can....

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/listen-offline/

Big Si wrote: ↑12 Nov 2021, 22:12

markfiend wrote: ↑12 Nov 2021, 17:34 Spotify is a streaming service; I don't think it's possible to download the tracks.

Apparently with 'Spotify Premium' you can....

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/listen-offline/

Anyway, access to some playlist is access only if you register and become a spotify customer ...

Currently geeking: writing imagemagick scripts instead of manually processing images in the GIMP.

I've spent most of a day writing a script to save myself an hour's manual work

However it's an hour that I've now saved on every single set of images I'll ever do for this project in future...

sounds fabulous...whatever the f**k that is [/dumbass old man]

markfiend wrote: ↑21 Feb 2022, 13:18 I've spent most of a day writing a script to save myself an hour's manual work

https://xkcd.com/1205/

alanm wrote: ↑22 Feb 2022, 08:56

markfiend wrote: ↑21 Feb 2022, 13:18 I've spent most of a day writing a script to save myself an hour's manual work

https://xkcd.com/1205/

I should have known there'd be a relevant xkcd

A while back I was on record here opining that Wide Receiver should get a rap-style cover.

So uh, here we go. It's pretty stupid, but at least it exists now.