Just as I really ramp up using this site again, I do something that breaks it for a couple of hours. Ain’t that that way?
OK, in all seriousness: Every week I run package updates on the various Linux servers I run, including this one. Usually that’s a matter of a few minutes total and everything’s fine & dandy afterward. Maybe there’s a reboot involved, which nobody will notice.
Today? What I didn’t notice was a package getting flagged for removal. The core webserver package. Whoops. Due to a problem of some kind with the repository where the packages come from, that package in particular just would not install, no way no how.
A couple of hours later the maintainer got it squared away, but in the meantime there was no here, here. Sorry about that.
Lesson learned: Look closely at the “will be removed” listing before forging ahead.
This afternoon I pulled up an album in MusicBee that I hadn’t listened all the way through in years, Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. Partway into it I noticed one song (Little 15) had a bit of a skip. I scrubbed back, listened to that part again, and sure enough… skip confirmed.
Well, great. How long ago did I rip this CD anyway?
Checking the codec properties for that song’s data file revealed that while it wasn’t made with the beta versions of the Ogg Vorbis codec (thank goodness), it certainly dated back to roughly 2002, thus a very early release version. This means the skip glitch could be on account of a newer playback decoder disliking something about early Ogg Vorbis encoding, but is more likely just a result of the cheap fast CD ripper software I used back then.
No time like the present to freshen the library up a bit, then, is there?
Sweet mercy, it’s been twenty one entire years as of today since journal post number one landed in a database on a long-forgotten web host somewhere. It wasn’t the start of my blogging experience, as I’d been running Monaural Jerk on a workstation at the office called Zero previously, but it was the start of this grey duck dot net experience, such as it’s been. The software and the memes and the hosting environments have changed along the way, but the silly man behind the keyboard remains the same… older, but relatively unchanged, for good or ill.
More than two decades later and I’ve still managed not to figure out what I’m really doing here, but I intend to keep doing it anyway.
Fediverse user “c0debabe” posted thus, this afternoon:
Bad logging is worse than no logging because then there is false hope that the info you want might actually be there.
https://hackers.town/@c0debabe/109667298320413659
And that inspired me.
It’s unusual for me to use an existing, well-known template. Enjoy this rarity.
Look, I am a delight, okay? Also, I might as well get something useful out of that year I spent living deep in “spotted owl makes good eating” country as a teenager.
I queued this one up in advance so I’d have a post to start off the new year. (Be proud of me, dammit!)
Of course, since I’m posting this mere days after receiving the trackball named in the subject field of this entry, you can probably guess that I’m now awaiting my third trackball purchase of the past few months.
The Sanwa Gravi is (more or less) a Japanese company’s rework of the venerable Microsoft Trackball Explorer. It’s comfy and familiar and is very close to being a very good input device overall.
Too bad that this is not one of those cases, like a game of horseshoes or chucking hand grenades, where “very close” is “good enough.”
My first problem was the stiction (“stickiness,” basically) of the ball itself. It hitched or got fully stuck a lot. Oddly enough, the solution to this was… swapping out the ball for the one in the Elecom. Stiction problem resolved!
Unfortunately the other problems couldn’t be solved, no way no how. Firstly, the only way to program the rightmost two buttons (which default to issuing “forward” and “back” commands to your web browser, a “feature” I did not “ask for”) is to install the special software. Great, I did that, can I turn one of those buttons into a double-click? I love having a double-click button.
Those are the Mouse Function options available for programming a given button. Also, I could program a button to execute a program or send a command to my media player. Just… no double-click.
Well, okay then. So I just turned those two buttons off entirely. But speaking of buttons… I then noticed that the left-click button sometimes… doesn’t. Click. Or it’ll click and kind of forget that I’ve been holding it down for a reason, and sometimes then remember again. Imagine you’re drag-and-dropping something, or drag-selecting a bounding box around stuff, and the mouse decides you didn’t really intend to do that. That gets very frustrating, very quickly. And I do a lot of drag-selecting because I make screenshots almost every day, usually of specific parts of my screen. (Lightshot is great for this, by the way.)
What’s worse, the mouse driver seemed to go to sleep after a minute or so of inactivity. I’d be typing, or watching a video, or whatever, then go to move the mouse pointer… and nothing would happen until I tried again, then it’d behave like it’s supposed to.
Who in their right mind programs their mouse driver to go to sleep? Of all the things on a computer that need an inactivity timer, the mouse is just about the last of them.
So I’ve ripped out the drivers for the Sanwa, and there’s a new device on order. I just have to hang on for a couple of weeks for it to arrive. Maybe the third time really will be the charm…?
