SeTec Astronomy @SetecAstronomy@hackers.town

Just found a whole batch of Hackers.town people languishing in my Follow queue.

Locals should drop me a line when following so I can approve. Not currently accepting outside follows.

#Reintroductions? But I never did #Introductions...

I'm a weird guy who decided to base his profile on the movie Sneakers. I love technology, probably more than is healthy. My interests tend to revolve in a cycle but in the spirit of hackers.town I try to keep it to infosec and general internet nerdery.

I live with a migraine 24/7 so don't be surprised to see the occasional related toot.

Fun STA Fact #4 (collect them all!): A Canadian goose once attempted to carjack me.

My suspicion with the duper is that the drive is dirty/malfunctioning.

The good news is that it has three of them. I've just been using one because there are other bottlenecks that would make it pointless to run more at once. So I'll just change which drive I'm using and move on. Tomorrow, when all the ruckus of it shuffling discs around wont be minded.

I did however discover a flaw in my script that runs the whole thing. Because I added support to keep looping over all the drives until the queue was empty, and the queue only empties when they are processing a disc, it gets stuck in an endless loop if it fails to load a disc. It just tries, and tries, and tries. The spindle is empty, poor little robot, you can stop trying now.

I'm going to have to edit this crontab and disable the job so it doesn't run overnight

...

OR maybe, I could just change the schedule so it only runs during the day?

Oh dear. I can hear the duper in the other room, and it's just churning through the discs. Not sure if it's hit a season of a show and it can't read any of them or what's going on.

Really hoping it settles down and I don't have to go in there and shuffle most of the output spindle back onto the input spindle.

There's an interesting little program that will draw images on a Linux framebuffer device. It's capable of a slideshow. Seems perfect for a Pi, except for the framebuffer part.

But I finally got it sorted anyway. The biggest hassle was that it wasn't happy with quoted filenames with spaces in them. Oh no, I had to escape the spaces. And `printf "%q" "some string"` doesn't escape the spaces, it just quotes the string.

But I now have a simple script to launch it, provided I find the right keyboard to be able to switch to a real console first. All those images I swiped from Chromecast and Windows 10 are coming in handy.

Ugh. I think I need a real keyboard on this Pi. I need a console with a framebuffer for Reasons and this silly wireless keyboard I'm using now lacks function keys.

Somehow it took all day, too many distractions, but now the duper is working.

Well, it'll run for a little while at least. It's far too noisy to run overnight.

But hopefully tomorrow it'll make some nice progress through this stack of DVDs. Knowing the size of the spindle, there has to be around 50 on there.

I realized I can't run the Blu-rays through it, as it doesn't have a drive that can read them. In fact I don't have any PC drives that can read them. I ordered one, but the duper is so old it's all IDE, so the new drive will have to go somewhere else (like the server). I don't have many Blu-rays anyway. Less than five.

Huh. As slow as this thing is transferring ISOs to the server, I thought for sure it'd half a 100Mbit NIC in it.

Nope. 1Gig, FD.

Why did it succeed? Something random? Or because I was running it in the foreground? Did it consume too much of some resource while in the background and get killed? How would I figure that out?

Of course it succeeded.

The plan was to have the duper image DVDs and do the transcoding later on something with a bit more horsepower (I think the duper is 500MHz, and it has three drives, transcoding three DVDs at once.... ouch).

Unfortunately, when I ran a disc through the process to test, after a sufficient amount of time .... there was no ISO in the folder. No idea why. So DD is running *again*, manually this time, and with a little more logging. Maybe I'll figure out why it failed. If it succeeds, uh, I guess I put in some logic to check for an ISO when it's done, so it can move unimaged discs to the fail pile instead of the output spindle.

Buy a storage thing 15 years ago. Need more in 2019, no problem, the internet has 'em. Want a third set today, surely they're still out there?

Nope. None. Zero on eBay. A general DDG search turns up nothing related except a sold-out eBay listing.

#Labgornization2022 has commenced. Mostly in the form of a long list of all the things I intend to deal with. Things that need to go. Things that need to be put away. Things that need to be reorganized.

I decided one of the first things to take care of was to finish getting the duper (a robotic CD/DVD reader/burner) automated and rip all those discs sitting there next to it. There's a five foot table entirely occupied with that whole project, between the duper and the boxes of assorted discs. The plan is to rip everything, and then dispose of much of it. The remainder will be physically archived.

*That* will free a fair bit of space that can then be used for medium term sorting, without taking up bench space.

Assuming I decide not to keep the duper anyway. It's neat, but where to put it?

... I seem to have misplaced the TV remote.

The only thing I use it for is to turn the TV on and off. I turned it on earlier. I went to turn it off some hours later and ... gone.

It should have been sitting on the desk, or the bench. But nope, just gone.

I've looked all over for it. No clue.

Really want to tackle the mess in this place, but not entirely sure where to start.

Which I guess means a list? Maybe this project needs some scope.

Android: You have one unused app. Uninstall it to save 10 MB.

... I have 15 GB free, no idea why this is suddenly appearing. But I tap it out of curiosity.

It suggests I remove:

Firefox - Last used: yesterday
My password manager - Last used: July

OK, I assume the password manager is what set it off, if that last used date is even correct (I don't use my phone much). But Firefox? Seriously? That's messed up.

Trying to set up Firefox on this new Raspi, and it keeps crashing.

Turns out that as my profile syncs all my extensions over, the version of one of them that's on the mozilla addon site requires a newer version of Firefox than is available and it all blows up.

So now I'm copying my whole profile off my other Linux box in the hope that it all Just Works...

Meatloaf is running around in my head singing, and normally I'd kick him out, but recent events and all...

The dog woke me up early, and while I managed to convince her to go back to sleep, I wasn't able to. Just realized that I've laid here for a couple of hours working on this and that and generally not doing any of what I really want to be getting done.

I bet I'll be ready for a nap right about the time I have to get ready to leave for therapization.

I have learned the name of the missing file, and as a result learned that it is truly missing. It's not on the server, nor on the lab PC.

Interestingly enough, it was a background image on a profile I had somewhere, and it hadn't been renamed or resized. So good enough. I'll just save that one...

Jake, and Kia, 2004.