languor.us

So I have a Xubuntu box, an old PC that was running Windows previously. All is peachy with the Linux install bar one thing: every time I shutdown the system, it shuts down fine, but immediately restarts again. This wasn't happening with Windows and appeared to be an issue particular to Linux or Ubuntu.

Here are the steps I used to get X11VNC working on an Ubuntu (19.10) box. Hope this helps somebody else out there too.

On a fresh installation of Windows 10, I found that Youtube was working just fine, but other embedded videos on sites like Twitch and Reddit were not. I thought it had something to do with HTML5 or flash, but as it turns out, it was because I had chosen the wrong version of Windows during the installation process. Choosing Windows Professional N or, basically any N version, results in video issues primarily due to the lack of appropriate codec and DRM support. Even Netflix will very likely not play. This also affects all browsers.

Freeplane, a fork of the mind-mapping program, Freemind, works really well. Except for the fact that in my (K)Ubuntu installation, it sometimes hangs in the middle of editing a node. Once it becomes non-responsive, the only fix is to kill the process and restart the program. The version of Freeplane in Ubuntu 18.04 is 1.6.13. However, the current version (March 2019) of Freeplane is 1.7.7. So, it's highly possible that upgrading Freeplane to the latest version will fix this issue.

I needed to install Windows and downloaded the 4.7GB Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft's website. Since I only had Linux machines at my disposal (and no DVD drives), I had to look to install the ISO on a pen drive. While the purists advocated that I use dd to accomplish this, I found that getting the USB to be bootable was something of a chore. So I looked for a friendlier solution and this is what I found for Kubuntu:

So I tried playing a video on Netflix in Firefox and while everything worked including the previews while hovering over a title, the actual movie/TV episode failed to play and resulted in the following error:

The main thing that needs to be done is to enabled DRM support in Firefox's preferences section. (Look for a checkbox titled "Play DRM-controlled content".)

I ran into this error today while running a python program in Kubuntu 18.04 (upgraded from 17.10):

followed by a bunch of other similar SSL-related errors. When I checked apt, I found that my openSSL install was fine. A generous guy on IRC informed me that I was very likely missing libraries that the app was looking for. S/he asked me to try installing libssl1.0-dev and voila, it worked.

There's this rather mesmerising German electronic track named Missy Queen's Gonna Die for which there aren't very good lyrics out there. Here's a better attempt:

You fooling around with my feelings has been too hard on me
Just listen to my voice
ain't got something nice
To say to you now
Ain't got something nice
To say to you now

You wanna love me
You wanna hold me and you want to touch me
But just when you feel I do
And not when I want to

So I had to upload an SVG flowchart which looked great on my computer. However, when accessed from the server, certain text elements were displayed as large black boxes. This was happening only with converted PNGs of the SVG as the SVG itself rendered just fine. I initially thought that this was some kinda font issue. But apparently not. This happens because Inkscape's SVGs are not always valid and in this case, uses something called a flowRoot element which is not valid SVG.

So, when I got home yesterday, I found that my Samsung microwave was beeping frequently for no apparent reason. Switching it off and back on did fuck all and occasionally I'd see the clock display read "5E" or "SE". This issue didn't go away even after a few hours and I'd resigned myself to having to go through the rigmarole of calling a service center and getting this fixed which would undoubtedly involve charges amounting to a good chunk of the microwave's original price. Of course, that wasn't what I did.