mones

After years suffering price raises in services —specially the ones which we're forced to pay (TV)—, being left without mobile phone when crossing the borders of France or Portugal —being "compensated" with a couple of euros for a week without service—, and having to live with their crappy hardware—just because it had to be upgraded— we've decided to leave our current cable ISP and switch to a local FTTH provider.

Don't know how this will end, but at least we will be nearly halving current costs ;-)

don't
 forget
  to
   run
    postmap
     on
      your
       /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

(repeat 100 times sotto voce or until falling asleep, whatever happens first).

...that cowbuilder raises an Spanish flag when it fails?


;-)

Today's git activity on Claws Mail has reminded me of an old post: 4 ways to avoid merge commits in git.

This kind of post is a bit hard, despite of the jocular language used. I think it's hard enough so that if you understand it fully then you already don't generate those unnecesary merges. You can also use the recipes blindly, though I think that's never a good idea.

Other people tries to achieve it graphically or textually.

In the end, as it happens with every tool out there, there's really only one way: understand how it works.

Not having to dedicate nights to work in university projects leaves time for more pleasant activities, like reading, which is one of my all-time favourites since I can remember.

One book pending was “The Long Twlight” (1969) by Keith Laumer, published translation as “El largo crepúsculo” (1990) in Spain, which I had bought in 2017 summer. A curious story from several point of views, which lets you look at some Nordic heroes you can see lately on big screens from a different and somewhat less glorious perspective.

Other book which probably beat some record of less-time-from-buy-to-read (no more than two weeks IIRC) was “パラドックス13” (2009) by Keigo Higashino, published translation as “Paradox 13 (2017)”. A very intimate story about relations in Japanese society in a end-of-the-world background with a surprising end.

This one is non Sci-Fi, an attempt to leave my comfort zone which was very enjoying: “Tea Rooms. Mujeres obreras” (1934) by Luisa Carnés. A bittersweet view of the tough life for work-class women in the Republican Spain. From today's perspective, nearly a century later, you can see western society hasn't advanced much regarding women.

And these are my currently unfinished trio:

• “Мы” (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, published translation as “Nosotros” (2008).
  


• ”La Caída del Imperio Galáctico” (2016) by Carlos Saiz Cidoncha, which unfortunately has passed away a couple of months ago. This book was also a present from a friend of mine and which had met him personally.
  


• 
  “Galactic Pot-Healer” (1969) by Philip K. Dick, published translation as “Gestarescala” (2016).
  

One of the reasons which made me switch my old 17" BenQ monitor for a Dell U2413 three years ago was it had an integrated SD card reader. I find very convenient to take camera's card out, plug the card into the monitor and click on KDE device monitor's option “Open with digiKam” to download the photos or videos.

But last week, when trying to reconnect the USB cable to the new board just didn't work and the kernel log messages were not very hopeful:

[190231.770349] usb 2-2.3.3: new SuperSpeed USB device number 15 using xhci_hcd
[190231.890439] usb 2-2.3.3: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=0307
[190231.890444] usb 2-2.3.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[190231.890446] usb 2-2.3.3: Product: USB3.0 Card Reader
[190231.890449] usb 2-2.3.3: Manufacturer: Realtek
[190231.890451] usb 2-2.3.3: SerialNumber: F141000037E1
[190231.896592] usb-storage 2-2.3.3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[190231.896764] scsi host8: usb-storage 2-2.3.3:1.0
[190232.931861] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic- SD/MMC/MS/MSPRO  1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[190232.933902] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg5 type 0
[190232.937989] sd 8:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI removable disk
[190243.069680] hub 2-2.3:1.0: hub_ext_port_status failed (err = -71)
[190243.070037] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.070410] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.070660] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071035] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071409] usb 2-2.3-port3: cannot reset (err = -71)
[190243.071413] usb 2-2.3-port3: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?
...

I was sure USB 3.0 ports were working, because I've already used them with a USB 3.0 drive, so first thought was the monitor USB hub had failed. It seemed unlikely that a cable which has not been moved in 3 years was suddenly failing, is that even possible?

But a few moments later the same cable plugged into a USB 2.0 worked flawlessly and all photos could be downloaded, just noticeably slower.

A bit confused, and thinking that, since everything else was working maybe the cable had to be replaced, it happened I upgraded the system in the meantime. And luck came into rescue, because now it works again in 4.9.30-2+deb9u5 kernel. Looking at the package changelog it seems the fix was this “usb:xhci:Fix regression when ATI chipsets detected“. So, not a bad cable but a little kernel bug ;-)

Thanks to all involved, specially Ben for the package update!

Seems the breakage of my desktop computer more than 3 months ago did also caused also a hiatus on my online publishing activities... it was not really intended, it happened I was just busy with other things ಠ_ಠ.

With a broken computer being able to build software on the laptop became a priority. Around September 2016 or so the good'n'old black MacBook decided to stop working. I didn't really need a replacement by that time, but never liked to have just a single working system, and in October just found an offer which I could not resist and bought a ThinkPad X260. It helped to build my final project (it was faster than the desktop), but lacking time for FOSS hadn't used it for much more.

Setting up the laptop for software (Debian packages and Claws Mail, mainly) was somewhat easy. Finding a replacement for the broken desktop was a bit more difficult. I considered a lot of configurations and prices, from those new Ryzen to just buying the same components (pretty difficult now because they're discontinued). In the end, I decided to spend the minimum and make good use of everything else still working (memory, discs and wireless card), so I finally got an AMD A10-7860K on top of an Asus A88M-PLUS. This board has more SATA ports, so I added an unused SSD, remains of a broken laptop, to install the new system —Debian Stretch, of course ʘ‿ʘ— while keeping the existing software RAID partitions of the spinning drives.


The last thing distracting from the usual routine was replacing the car. Our child is growing as expected and the Fiesta was starting to appear small and uncomfortable, specially for long distance travel. We went for an hybrid model, with a high capacity boot. Given our budget, we only found 3 models below the limit: Kia Niro, Hyundai Ioniq and Toyota Auris TS. The color was decided by the kid (after forbidding black), and this was the winner...

In the middle of all of this we also took some vacation to travel to the south of Galicia, mostly around Vigo area, but also visiting Oporto and other nice places.

Today I've just faced another of those happy ideas some people implements in software, which can be useful for some cases, but can also also be bad as default behaviour.

The problems caused were already posted to Debian mailing lists, fortunately, as well as its solution, which basically in a default Debian configuration means to:

$ echo "flat-volumes = no" | sudo tee -a /etc/pulse/daemon.conf
$ pulseaudio -k && pulseaudio

And I think the default for Stretch should be set as above: raising volume to 100% just because of a system notification, while useful for some, it's not what common users expect.

Note: edited to fix first command as explained in comments. Thanks!