Most of what I post falls into the category of "Something that should be working but isn't and how to fix it." -- all in the hope that someday I'll save someone some aggravation. Some of what I post, however, is just me being me!
GitHub Repo for WordRefAnkiNoteCreate: https://github.com/jglotzer/WordRefAnkiNoteCreate As a committed user of both Anki as well as wordreference.com I've always wanted to have an easy way to create new Anki Cards. Creating Anki Cards (or more accurately, Anki Notes, as a Note consists of two sides while a Card is only one side.) can be a laborious, manual process, depending on how complicated or…
Long story short - have a windoze PC for Zwift (gaming) and the WiFi got progressively worse - went from intermittently working to never working. Sometimes the windoze dialogs would show the wifi adapter as disabled, other times not disabled but the network center would say "no internet" access. Really no reason at all to suspect the wifi signal (all other devices in house work) or really the PC…
After getting a pair of Airpods Pro and connecting them to Fedora 38 computer I found that I could use them as "headphones" but not as a "handset". Pairing was easy using the utility bluetoothctl - put the airpods in pairing mode, run bluetoothctl and then issue the "pair" command giving the proper hex string e.g. as in https://meroupatate.github.io/posts/airpods/ . Once this is done, the…
I've been using Zwift for years now. The one problem that I've been plagued with and have up until now failed to find a soution for is this - When in Erg Mode aka Workout Mode, very often the power setting gets "stuck". This means that despite the Zwift platform raising the power setting as the workout progresses the trainer remains stuck on some particular power setting. When this happens the…
Settings Apps & Notifications See All Apps Pixel Launcher Advanced Additional Settings in the App Display Google app (To the left of the main Home Screen)
Very much like a previous blog post . In that case the bootchart package borked the F21 to F22 upgrade. Here to make a long story short in going from F25 to F26 this time it was infinality. How did I figure it out? Most of the init sequence would execute but couldn't get to gdm so startup only got so far. Booted into single user mode and then did init 4 Did a dnf distro-sync but that didn't help.…
This was puzzling me for awhile. Found the answer on the arch linux wiki which is to do a reboot. Apparently if there is skew between the latest kernel and the running kernel, things won't work. After a reboot it moutned find using MTD stuff.
In Gnome Shell 3 (3.18 actually) if I chose DarkGlass as my Shell theme and I clicked on the date at the top the calendar that "pops down" would be cut off at the right side. Actually it was there but the background color was missing. The fix is to find either the file /usr/share/themes/Dark-Glass/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css or ~/.themes/Dark-Glass/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css and change width: to…
Synergy is a very useful piece of software that allows two (or I suppose more) computers to share a keyboard and a mouse. One computer is configured as a server, one as a client, and the client computer can be then controlled with the server computer's input devices. In my typical setup at work I have two Ubuntu computers (although I'm a Fedora user at home) - a desktop and a laptop with a dock.…
Determine if you're vulnerable to the Logjam Attack - go to https://weakdh.org/ with your chrome browser and see if you get a blue bar (good) or a red one (bad). When I tried this Firefox was OK, Google Chrome was not. I fixed this by editing /usr/bin/google-chrome and adding the --cipher-suite-blacklist parameter. # Make sure that the profile directory specified in the environment, if any, #…
My OBI-100 drops outbound calls usually right at 16 minutes. First thing I noticed there was some stale config on the OBI device. When I thought Google Voice (free) was going away I paid for another VOIP provider. Today I noticed there was some stale config related to the old VOIP provider related to keepalive server config. I restored all of that to default. So hopefully that will fix the…
After upgrading from Fedora 21 to Fedora 22 I experienced a kernel panic on booting into the new, 4.0.2 kernel with the message given in the title "VFS Unable to mount root FS on unknown-block(0,0)". Long story short - looking into /boot there was the vmlinuz kernel, vmlinuz-4.0.2-300.fc22.x86_64 , but no corresponding initramfs-4.0.2-300.fc22.x86_64.img file. Also in the grub.cfg stanza there was…
Indexing borked so you get no results when you type in the search box. What I found to do: Search | Search Tools | Search Options | Indexing Options Remove the "Outlook" file and then replace it which forces the index to rebuild. Elsewhere there is an option to "rebuild the index" but it doesn't seem to have any effect. The above procedure will cause the index to rebuild. While it is rebuilding…
I couldn't make outgoing calls with my OBI 100. On the phone you'd hear the high pitched three tones that signify an error and hear something like " The number you dialed, was rejected by the service provider, error 4 0 0". Incoming calls worked OK. A test call to **9 222 222 222 which is the OBI echo service worked fine. A check of the call history at the OBI device web interface at 192.168.1.x…
IMPORTANT - Pipelight works as a Firefox plugin but doesn't work for Chrome. So we're going to be basing this on Firefox only. Some Helpful Links - but there's a caveat - stay away from the DarkPlayer Pipelight Repo - it will cause you to descend into dependency hell! http://pipelight.net/cms/install/installation-fedora.html http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html…
The Samsung BD-P1600 Blu Ray player streams Netflix albeit with one restriction - you either need a direct (wired) Ethernet connection or if you want to use WiFi you need a Samsung Wifi "dongle". But OK - this player is about 3 or 4 years old and it used to work great with Netflix. You added a movie to your Netflix "Instant Queue" then you could browse your "Instant Queue" (on the device) and…
sudo yum install deja-dup-nautilus log out/log back in
Hitting something with a hammer often feels good but does nothing useful. Here's one case where it actually helps. On my 2004 Ford Explorer the alternator light came on. I brought it to the auto parts store and they put a volt meter on it. The alternator needs to put out a voltage that is higher than the battery's full charged voltage in order to properly function - somewhere in the 14 volt range.…
The web interface for 3ware's RAID controller, 3dm2 uses a self signed certificate when you connect via https://localhost:888. Firefox and Chrome will not accept such a certificate (even if you configure a "security exception), so you cannot administer your RAID controller via the web interface. All you get is a "connection reset" screen. (tw_cli and BIOS utility still work, however). Someone on…
Why would anyone want to swap left and right pulseaudio channels? After some web searching I found that I am hardly alone. The classic problem is that your computer is on one side or the other, the audio-in cable goes to one speaker or the other, and the audio cable is too short. But this is linux, after all, so most things if not all things are possible, right? The first fix I came across was…
As indicated now in the title of Redhat Bugzilla 969648 the problem is the "data=writeback" parameter in /etc/fstab. Fedup and Fedora 19 have a problem with this particular setting. I have two fedora machines - a desktop and a laptop. During the last upgrade cycle, Fedora 17-->18, the desktop upgraded without any problem whatsoever. On the laptop, I had managed to shoot myself in the foot due to…
I've recently been writing some homegrown scripts to parse web pages and do something useful with the information using Python 2.7 and the BeautifulSoup library. This involves printing the output to a terminal (e.g. Gnome Terminal) where the output is hopefully human readable but in some cases was not. The most common issue I ran into were various forms of "smart quotes" and similar html…
Google recently rolled out a new version of their Google Maps web service. From what I can tell you can't retrieve a set of GPS coordinates from the new interface. I expect they will remedy that situation at some point. But for now the workaround is to temporarily switch back to "Classic" Google maps and get the GPS coordinates from there. Here's what I did: Shift back to Classic maps (Gear in top…
Did a yum update with Fedora 18 and got nothing but timeouts and 404 not found errors. yum clean metdata and yum clean all and (a reboot) were all of no help. However yum --disableplugin=fastestmirror update completely fixed the problem. Trying other mirror.…
Mine is a use case that is got to be exceedingly rare - maybe 0.001% of users or something like that. Still it's interesting to me, well, because it's my use case and perhaps it may have some general interest for users with less convoluted use case. The setup - an corporate email Exchange server using IMAP. A linux Thunderbird email client that is used as the email client of first resort. I also…