Using a Librem 13v3 with Pureboot, Heads for BIOS, and a Librem Key normally works without a hitch. However, I was wanting to install Kali on the 2nd internal drive and dual-boot. This presented a pain-in-the-ass challenge.

Kali Live works fine on the laptop. However the installer crashes the display. It seems there is a kexec parameter of vga=788 that the laptop chokes on. Updating the grub config on the Kali ISO, then repackaging it is the long, hard way to deal with this. The simple way would be to install direct from the running Live instance. Unfortunately the Kali gods have decided to remove that feature. Idiots.

Here's the fix. From running Live open a shell and "sudo apt install debian-installer-launcher". Then "sudo debian-installer-launcher" and follow the prompts. Works like a charm.

I'm posting this here because it took way too long to search for a working answer, not knowing exactly what to look for.

Forced perspective is a technique which employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It manipulates human visual perception through the use of scaled objects and the correlation between them and the vantage point of the spectator or camera.

Squid can range in length anywhere from 1 inch up to 80 feet. The Colossal Squid is the largest known variety, and thought to be the inspiration behind legendary monsters such as The Kraken of Greek mythology.

Calimari is the term for he culinary specimens of squid, and typically measure less than 12 inches. Squid lends itself to hot and fast cooking methods such as grilling, broiling, sauteing, and deep-frying. Or, by irritated judges when hack lawyers try and pass off itty-bitty lawsuits as "the Kraken" when they're really just suitable for calimari.

I need a new webhost because my old hosting service deleted my database for being over quota. I have backups, of course, but they're slightly old, so this is irritating. The quota was very small.

MARTIN ESPINOZA
2277 GLENROSE AVE
ALTADENA , CA , 91001
(480) 516-7385

This person has given my email address to Jiffy Lube so that I would get spammed. Obviously it would be inappropriate to call them and tell them they're an ass. "Please" "don't" DO THAT.

When "you" (or your OS) upgrade[s] Firefox it opens a new welcome screen. This one says "Your privacy respected, automatically". Yeah, no. I configured my home page to be my most visited sites, not some page you decided I should visit so that you could collect statistics. Gaslighting much?

PULSE, developed by a small team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), is a 3D-printed wearable device that pulses, or vibrates, when a person's hand is nearing their face. The haptic feedback from a vibration motor simulates a nudge, reminding the wearer to avoid touching these entryways in order to reduce potential infection.

The project is open source, with all the information from parts list to assembly instructions freely available online.

My wife picked up a Google Home unit so she could listen to music without constant obnoxious advertisements. I've been wanting to replace it because I don't want a spy device in my house. As I'd been fiddling with a Raspberry Pi audio player for some time, this finally prompted me to finish it.

So the Google Home will do more than play music, but that is 99% of what she used it for, so that's all I tried to replicate. I normally rip all media I buy, and have a fairly extensive music collection that was almost exclusively purchased as used CDs from second hand stores, like Goodwill. For $1 to $4 I can pick up anything that catches my attention. I also have quite a few comedy albums, a few audio books purchased on CD, and several radio plays from either the BBC or HPLHS.

All of the music is ripped to Ogg-FLAC format, with a .oga extension. All of the spoken word stuff is just plain Ogg-Vorbis, with the traditional .ogg extension. For those who don't know, .oga files are FLAC lossless audio in an Ogg container. The native FLAC container is fairly barebones, whereas the Ogg container has better support for extensive tagging and the bits needed to properly stream and seek. It makes for better streaming of audio whereas FLAC has a tendency to just download the entire file before playing.

Streaming audio with MPD doesn't take a lot of horsepower, and can easily be done with 1 Gb of RAM on even the minimalist RPi Zero. For my house I use RPi 3B+ board with HiFi Berry DAC+ add-on if I want to support analog speakers. That was my original plan, but have since switched to the Bose SoundTouch 10 wireless speaker for convenience. It can be used as a plain Jane BlueTooth speaker and doesn't need their app or anything other than "pair and go". It is Bose's "dumb" speaker, with no built-in Alexa or Google and can be had for under $100. If you want two, they will pair wirelessly for a stereo pair, but as I was replacing those little pod-style speakers, I went with just one.

That being said, if you're an audio snob, the HiFi Berry like of DACs will give you audiophile quality sound to your favorite pair of overpriced sound reproducing boxes.

There are several full-blown FOSS projects designed to turn an RPi into an audio jukebox, and I went thru three of the more popular before settling on my eventual choice. I tried Rune Audio and Volumio before settling on Moode Audio.

There are plenty of online reviews and comparisons of all three, so I won't repeat any of that here. If you're interested in doing this sort of project I suggest to check all three out. They support plugins for handing things like Apple's Air Play, Spotify, UPnP, DLNA, SMB, local touchscreens for the Pi, whole-house synchronized audio, and web interfaces. What clinched it for me was Moode is the only one to support BlueTooth as an output option. For me, fewer wires is a plus.

This brings me to the real point of my writing this journal entry -- documenting a few quirks to maybe help out some poor soul, or maybe my future self after I forget it all.

The big one is that the Pi's BCM43438 wireless LAN and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chip REALLY doesn't like running both WiFi and BT at the same time. Streaming audio from a remote source thru WiFi and then playing on a BT speaker is just crap. Either by themselves is fine, but the chip interferes with itself even if you're doing WiFi in the 5 GHz spectrum, so it isn't a signal interference thing. Save yourself the headaches and disable on-board BlueTooth and just add one of those mini dongles. I use a ZEXMTE USB dongle, which costs around $10 and works out of the box with Linux, no custom drivers needed.

Now that I think of it, that was really the only major problem, but it was a doosey. Depending on how the on-board chip initializes it can either start and give you fits where things randomly freeze, or leave things in an odd state where systemd won't recognize the BT part.

I haven't had a chance to test on the Pi 4, which has an upgraded CYW43455 chip (now owned by Cypress Semi) that support 802.11ac and BT 4.2.

The only other quirk is that these programs rely on your IDv2 tags and honestly the most time I spent on the project -- other than debugging WiFi/BT issues -- was on ensuring my files were tagged correctly and consistently.

eol

When I submit a comment, the resulting page usually doesn't load. It just spins for ages. Now it works. If you can see this, the journal is also fixed — I haven't been able to post to mine for months. Is this a nginx fail or something?

I wrote some user scripts for /., you can find them (with some other people's) on GreasyFork. The scripts remove hostnames from Slashdot links, so you're not being bounced to multiple hostnames, and to send you straight to the domain if you do get sent to a hostname by mistake.

I got interested in actually doing this because I couldn't leave comments on *.slashdot.org a few days back, only on slashdot.org. But it's annoying all the time, IMO.

My scripts probably have no elegance whatsoever, but they work.

Last time I tried to post to my journal I got an error, so I'm trying again now.

FACT CHECK: Snopes is no longer a website (Tb). When you go there without javascript you don't see any images. When I activate all the reputable javascript sources, I still don't see all of the images. I am no longer going to cite Snopes for debunking as a result. Are there any good fact-checking websites, as opposed to Javascript SNAFUs?

It's been since 2010 or so, at least -- if not longer.

I'm writing this down because it was driving me crazy, but I just figured it out.

I have a small system running Armbian, that I use as a DNS-Over-TLS proxy for my home network, using Stubby. This works by acting as a DNS stub resolver that then loops the DNS requests to encrypted DNS servers. This hides my DNS queries from my ISP -- the evil that is Comcast.

My problem has been that the service, managed by Systemd, fails to load on boot but will load if I log in and start it by hand. The error was the service couldn't bind to my chosen IP address, as it was starting up before DHCP finished setting things up.

The standard instructions for getting a service to wait is to use the network-online.target instead of the network.target.

What everything I researched failed to mention was this only works if systemd is handling the network interface and DHCP. If something else -- Network Manager, /etc/network/interfaces, etc. -- is handling your network interface, it just won't work.

Yes, in hindsight, that seems sort of obvious. But, it wasn't explicitly mentioned anywhere and Debian insists on providing half-a-dozen ways to manage your network interfaces, which is why I'm writing this down.

I don't know if Slashdot is malfunctioning, functioning poorly as designed, or whether I'm outright being censored. Since I don't know, I'll list that possibility last. I'm trying to leave a response to This comment by Bruce Perens. This is that response:

If this is not important, why are you engaging me?

Open Source is a wave that you've ridden, not one which you've churned up with your splashing about. There are obvious benefits in the Open Source model to developers and even to corporate rightsholders.

The internet, just as it remembers that people were using "Open Source" before Christine's claim. Faintly, distantly, because archival was not a major concern at the time. Perhaps one day in our apparently inevitable future of surveillance societies, we will remember everything and we'll always be able to look up who did what and when.

The audience thinks I'm being a troll because it doesn't know what trolling is, and because some people have abused moderation by modding me as a troll. Trolling is saying things you may or may not even believe because you want to make people angry. My goal is not to make people angry, although it's okay if people become angry with what I say. My goal is to support the truth, in the form of facts. I and others have provided citations which support the view of events which I remember. I'm not alone, nor does the entire discussion hinge on a single press release, and your attempts to suggest otherwise seem disingenuous.

The truth? I've thought about it again and again, and I just can't comprehend any other explanation than those we've discussed upthread why you spend so much time supporting this nonsense. You say it's not important, then you spend a ton of time on it, then you criticize me for spending time on it. Why don't you make up your mind?

I got a solid scoop on the fact that OSI members did not invent the term "Open Source Software" and Slashdot's not interested.