Problem: there were only 2.1 portions, according to my notes. OK, make some alu masala. That's not difficult. But then Jane
complained of a cold, and though she did eat something, we didn't finish the biriani, and I
didn't even finish cooking the alu masala. Not a very satisfactory day.
Jane was feeling no better this morning, and she had decided to return home today. She gave
me just enough time to warn Yvonne that she needed to be at
the railway station at 9:30. And almost before we knew it, she was gone.
Somehow I'm getting bored with my breakfast recipes. Today I had a number of leftovers to process, something that I normally do with
nasi goreng, but I didn't feel like
that today. So I made something like my fake pad Thai, just with a different ALDI spice paste and with some Beijing noodles::
The result was different, but not bad. I think it's time to start considering my noodle
dishes as variable, like I have been doing for some time with nasi goreng.
Without Jane, I finally had enough time to look at updating lagoon. It has taken me
less than 6 weeks. Build a new world, update ports to the latest and greatest, fight
the cables holding the thing in place, into Yvonne's office,
fight the cables holding (the old) lagoon in place, install a 16 port switch because
it's all I had apart from an old 10 Mb/s hub, and finally it was in place:
Things weren't perfect. Even before installing the new machine, I ran into cable problems
with the old lagoon: the display no longer connected it. But probably we won't need
that.
For the fun of it, I suspended the system with zzz(8) before moving it and watched
what happened when I powered it on again. As I feared, it booted normally.
OK, fire it up. Why do the NFS file systems not get
mounted?
Mount the file systems, start X. A good semblance
of Yvonne's environment. Just the mouse didn't have middle button emulation, something that
I need to automate:
# Find mouse index. This assumes that the last one in the list is the
# one we're looking for.
MOUSE=`xinput|grep -i mouse|tail -1|sed 's:.*id=::; s: .*::'`
# Look for the index of the enabler.
INDEX=`xinput list-props $MOUSE|grep 'Middle Emulation Enabled ('|sed 's:.*(::; s:).*::'`
# And enable
xinput set-prop $MOUSE $INDEX 1
Then the sizes and fonts of the xterms were wrong. That's a separate issue that I
haven't got round to fixing for over a year now, since the transition to fvwm3. No /var/mail: that's another
symlink to add.
Photo processing? We use distress (a Microsoft box) to run DxO PhotoLab and other stuff. But I can't wake
it. wake(8) needs to be setuid. And then it came up with my credentials instead of
Yvonne's, another configuration issue to look at.
By contrast, sound Just Worked: plug the plug into the output socket, and all is well. I
hadn't expected that.
The big issue, of course, was with web-oriented stuff. Both firefox and Chromium refused to
start. A new device! Chromium was the most helpful:
=== yvonne@lagune (/dev/pts/1) ~ 7 -> chrome [1674:69546526969872:0804/130003.158863:ERROR:chrome/browser/process_singleton_posix.cc:358] The profile appears to be in use by another Chromium process (74466) on another computer (lagoon.lemis.com). Chromium has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted. If you are sure that no other processes are using this profile, you can unlock the profile and relaunch Chromium.
[1674:69546526969872:0804/130003.158884:ERROR:chrome/browser/ui/views/message_box_dialog.cc:198] Unable to show message box: Chromium - The profile appears to be in use by another Chromium process (74466) on another computer (lagoon.lemis.com). Chromium has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted. If you are sure that no other processes are using this profile, you can unlock the profile and relaunch Chromium.
OK, fool, how do I unlock the profile? I've seen this before, but this time I asked
Google Gemini. Simple:
But why can't the browser offer that function, or at least the information?
And then there was WhatsApp,
which wanted her to involve her mobile phone and potentially its horrible glass
keyboard. After about 10 minutes I was able to work out how to do it without the keyboard.
And mail? I installed Postfix, but not its configuration. And the system came up running dma, the DragonFly Mail Agent.
Maybe that's a better choice. First I need to RTFM.
One of the pressing reasons for the upgrade to lagoon was because Yvonne had signed up for a subscription to TRT method, an equine training site that is particularly
fussy about what browsers it talks to. Now that we have the latest and greatest firefox and Chromium, it shouldn't
be a problem, right?
Wrong. First we no longer had a login, which was relatively simple to fix. But when we
did, the videos didn't display. What we got was:
Are those padlock icons an indication that it doesn't like something? It's too polite to
say. Sent off a message to support and got no answer by evening. I have been able to
access the videos before, so it's presumably a bug in their web software.
The alu masala that I made yesterday called for black mustard seed. Where is it? I couldn't find it. All I
had was yellow mustard seed, which had expired about 11 years ago.
How much else has expired? It's time to dispose of really old stuff, say over 10 years old.
And there was plenty of it:
It's gone now, though it hurts. Much of the stuff smelt perfectly usable. But in many
cases we also have newer versions. And somehow the spice shelves don't look any emptier:
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
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