Welcome to Nick's Random Musings

A Stopped Clock is right twice a day. But a Clock two minutes early is wrong all the time.

Peter Watts, Liu Cixin, Alastair Reynolds

For when you want the answer to the Drake equation to be "You didn't want to know".

Radiosity, A Programmer's Perspective

Ian's book, a colleage, friend, and mentor.

• Printing "just working"
• Video card / Monitor detection. There has been alot of great work, and now it's incredibly easy.

Blind Ape Social Club

With Fedora 37, you may need to update a few things.

1. Set ControllerMode = "bredr" in /etc/bluetooth/main.conf
2. Have up to date bluetooth drivers.
3. install the ofono package
4. Have the pulseaudo-module-bluetooth for handsfree speakers and mic.

Then pair with the headphones in the case by pressing the back button till the case light flashes white.

If you try and run the DigiIPLIl.exe application on Windows for reprogramming, and it will not start with an get an error involving "Side-By-Side" issues, you need to install the software libraries it depends on for access to the USB and video display. From microsoft, this is the mfc90 redistributable, which can be found at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26368. Run this to add this classic windows library.

Then you may need to run it as Administrator to properly get access to scanning the USB "COM" ports to find your hardware.

A great way to speed up accurate cuts on a paper cutter is to use a flashlight to backlight the paper being chopped. You can clearly see the lower blade on even a large piece of semi-opaque paper.

Say you want to sound like you are huffing Helium.

Recoding with Cheese, save a file (on Fedora 37, this becomes a .webm)

Cut the audio out of the video:
ffmpeg -i 2023-02-13-203611.webm  -vn -acodec copy "output.oga"

Shift the pitch up:
ffmpeg -i output.oga -filter:a "rubberband=pitch=2.059463094352953" 
out_balloon2.wav

Then add the audio to a 
ffmpeg -loop 1 -y -i balloon.png -i out_balloon2.wav -shortest -acodec 
copy -vcodec mjpeg the_ballon_knows.avi

The Balloon Knows Where It Is...

If you want to debug a pytest within a framework,

import pytest;pytest.set_trace()

at a point in a test you want to break at, then

./pytestrun.sh tests/foo_engine/test_my_grits.py --pdb

and it'll break there in your pytest to the debugger.

Tender

Sent from my radio telephone.

Sent from my radio telephone.

Add some tasty treats around the nozzle.

UPP 430

Sent from my radio telephone.

Haunted chicken coops have.. poultrygeists.

Using an OpenWRT 21.02 device on CenturyLink fiber internet.
This is a small J1900 Celeron device with four gigabit ethernet ports.
The Eth0,2,3 are the local network.
Eth1 connects to the fiber modem.
The VLAN is 201 for CenturyLink

config interface 'loopback'
    option device 'lo'
    option proto 'static'
    option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
    option netmask '255.0.0.0'

config globals 'globals'
    option ula_prefix 'fd39:05db:f787::/48'

config device
    option name 'br-lan'
    option type 'bridge'
    list ports 'eth0'
    list ports 'eth2'
    list ports 'eth3'
    option vlan_filtering '1'

config interface 'lan'
    option device 'br-lan'
    option proto 'static'
    option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
    option netmask '255.255.255.0'
    option ip6assign '60'

config interface 'wan'
    option password 'PASSWORD'
    option ipv6 'auto'
    option device 'eth1.201'
    option proto 'pppoe'
    option username 'USERNAME'

config device
    option name 'eth1.201'
    option type '8021q'
    option ifname 'eth1'
    option vid '201'
    option macaddr 'XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX'

Influencers, like Superheroes, need an origin story.

Creation Date: 2002-06-19T16:43:03Z

That's alot of spam recieved, nginx / apache reconfigurations, and apt-get updates. Being a small fish in a big pool ain't easy, but it has been educational.

Count If

V begin, V end, Ah Ah Ah.

Fill the piñata with Brussel sprouts, broccoli florets, carrots and snap peas.

It's a Non-Fungible Token!

And business is good.

Sent from my radio telephone.

Please. My Wash Trading Bot. It Is Very Sick

Organic Revenue Growth, because we don't apply pesticides to our revenue.

Work in Progress, Banta Modelworks kit.

Sent from my radio telephone.

20F outside, 350F inside.

Sent from my radio telephone.

Sent from my radio telephone.

The un-gamified life is not worth living.

I steal people’s warm seats.

January 22nd, 2022

Sent from my radio telephone.

Sent from my radio telephone.

Men are from us-east-1, Women are from us-west-2.

But there is Meat.

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to photograph Jodankees. Even on three legs, they are particularly fast. They are a great example of Undefined Behavior.

Recreational Equipment Inc.

Sent from my radio telephone.

N Scale Supply
Rocky Mountain Train Supply

Great selection of engines, rolling stock, scenicing materials, used equipment, and parts.

This is a Tomalco D&RGW #50 in Sn3 kit. First step is to confirm the mechanism is square, in gauge, and rolls smoothly. Before any motor or electronics, you want to make sure the mechanism is a solid base to build on.

But replace ACME with AMAZON.

Sent from my radio telephone.

Can’t get enough of them.

Sent from my radio telephone.

Sent from my radio telephone.

When you see someone by the side of the road / trail with mechanical or health issues:

Don't ask "Do you need Help"

Say: "Do you have everything you need?"

Don't directly explain how to fix something or use a tool, but you can lighten the mood by saying "If you'd like me to mansplain that you just tell me to".

Lots of people are learning or new to on the road fixing stuff. They also may not know their limits or get into dehydration or heat stroke. So keep an eye out to improve their experience.

Sent from my radio telephone.

The Canon MF733 is a nice, reliable, economical printer, but it’s really annoying that out of the box it complains about empty toner at 20% levels.

To turn that down or off entirely, go into:
Menu -> Preferences -> Display Settings -> Display Timing for Cart. Prep ON/OFF.

Enter toner level in Custom level and hit apply.

I have a face for radio, and a voice for telegraph.

Sent from my radio telephone.

Shoveling in nine half cups of sea salt really hammers home how much mineral content the ocean holds, and how essential this is to life.

Sent from my radio telephone.

If you are using the newer snap plugin for letsencrypt, you may need to add you subdomains like:

certbot --expand -d gully.org -d www.gully.org

Recently I've had a big increase in spam from gmail itself, so I wanted to whitelist only the people I want to hear from gmail.

All the people who mail me

grep "^From:" /var/mail/nick >> whoknocks.txt

All the people who mail me using gmail

grep "\@gmail.com" whoknocks.txt >> just_gmail.txt

Sent from my radio telephone.

Sent from my radio telephone.

If you want to use a TP-Link Deco with CenturyLink Gigabit fiber, here is how I made it work.

The CenturyLink supplied ZyXEL C3000Z seemed rather decent, but I wanted to directly connect to my TP-Link mesh to minimize hardware power demands and router hops.

1. Call or Chat with your friendly installer, or contact online the support staff to get the PPOE password. The username can be gleamed from the supplied modem documentation.
2. Go into the TP-Link app and setup the internet connection of the main AP to More -> Advanced -> IPv4 and use the configuration for CenturyLink Fiber.
3. Setup the IPv4 with The PPoE Username and Password.
4. Have the IPv6 use the same login as the IPv4
5. Enjoy!

If you forward declare a class and and #include the header of that class in the same header in C++, you are going to have a bad time.

If docker is complaining about containers that cannot bind to ports, and you do not have other processes running on those ports, it may be that systemd has a bad ExecStart for docker, and it broke sub-process access.

It could look like: exec: "docker-proxy": executable file not found in $PATH

Or is could be: level=debug msg="FIXME: Got an API for which error does not match any expected type!!!: driver failed programming external connectivity on endpoint my-funny-valentine (43dc047fd585ce93dc8230d0ab60a8dfd3c5bef77b4055d218ed6722b416fd1d): Bind for 0.0.0.0:9092 failed: port is already allocated" error_type=types.internal module=api

Change this: systemd/system/docker.service.d/hosts.conf 2:ExecStart= 3:ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// -H tcp://0.0.0.0:2736

To this: override.conf [Service] ExecStart= ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd [ngully@magpie docker.service.d]$ pwd /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d

This was on Fedora 31, docker "moby-engine"

A whale of a good time.

If you are playing with docker, and want to mount a folder in your home directory, but end up getting your home directory instead, you might have misspelled it.

/home/ngully/experiment

vs.

/home/ngully/experement

And that's the more you know.

Sent from my iPhone

If your slim-and-light Microsoft Windows 10 device has gone into "battery saver" mode, indicated by a tiny green blob icon on top of the taskbar battery icon, it may have quietly shut down your printing processes to save energy, and applications like Chrome, Microsoft Office, and Edge will print into a black hole, with nothing coming out.

Sent from my iPhone

Does this outfit make me look O(2ⁿ)?

Recently the normal site to host this index has experienced some technical difficulties. I will endeavor to add to this amazing resource by Maynard Van Roekel NGSL Gazette Indexes

Little Starr 990000002311152

Creamsicle 991001001931820

While Downing at 10th is being repaved, an artifact of earlier transport history appears.

The siding and main are on slightly different elevations, per prototype.

Sent from my iPhone

Murdercat, Murdercat,

Why did you murder that?

Toy mouses, balls of string

Shiny Crinkly Anything.

Robe Belts, Exposed Toes,

Sinking your teeth into my nose

Toy trains, Birthday balloons

Take a minute to stop and mew.

khaaaaaanban [image: Screen Shot 2018-11-19 at 1.24.28 PM.png]

We haven't updated our Terms of Service.

We haven't updated our Privacy Policy.

We don't use cookie to track your behavior.

We don't sell data to third parties you might be interested it.

Hell, I barely check the logs at all these days.

An absence of space is where we live. An absence of consciousness when we sleep. An absence in walls make up windows. An absence of hunger makes a kitchen.

Ice not!

Gagarin (Vostok-K ~4 launches before crew)

Shepard (Mercury-Redstone ~3 launches)

Komarov (Soyuz 13 +5 launches)

Glenn (Mercury Atlas ~7 launches)

Komarov / Feoktistov / Yegorov (Voskhod ~3 launches)

Grissom / Young (Gemini Titan II ~10 launches)

Schirra, Eisele, Cunningham (Saturn 1B 4 launches)

Borman, Lovell, Anders (Saturn V 3rd launch)

Filipchenko / Rukavishnikov (Soyuz-U +10 launches)

Young / Lovell (Space Shuttle 1st launch )

Liwei (Shenzhou / Chang Zheng 2F 5th launch)

If you are getting the error:

Attempting to renew cert from /etc/letsencrypt/renewal/example.com.conf produced an unexpected error: At least one of the required ports is already taken.. Skipping.

Add hooks to start and stop your webserver in certbot's cron job:

0 */12 * * * root test -x /usr/bin/certbot -a ! -d /run/systemd/system && perl -e 'sleep int(rand(3600))' && certbot -q r enew --pre-hook "service nginx stop" --post-hook "service nginx start"

And business is good.

What do you call computers that write poetry? Beep-niks Chemistry jokes are funny if you know what amine.

What is the sound of one TCP socket ACKing?

Some days in Denver you get a steady wind.

RGVudmVyIE1hcHM=

CiAgICAK

CiAgICAK

VGhlIGNsZWFudXAgZm9yIGEgZGVyYWlsbWVudCBpbnZvbHZlZCBwdXR0aW5nIHRoZSBkYW1hZ2Vk IGNhcnMgb24gdGhlc2Ugc3BlY2lhbCBmbGF0Y2Fycy4=

CiAgICAK

We all immigrated to the Americas In boats In flight In chains In Ancestor=92s Dreams=

Link to my notes on modeling light on model railroads.

QmVhdXRpZnVsIHByb2dyZXNzLg==

U3ZlbHQgbGl0dGxlIGdvb3NlLg==

The wye track that was once used to turn steam engines at East Portal = was used Saturday June 25th to tuck a short work train out of the way. = Some classic MOW equipment from a variety of predecessor roads.=

Qm9keSBvZiBtc2cgdGVzdC4=

Qm9keSBvZiBtc2cgdGVzdC4=