timkingman

[timkingman]

One bootable USB for all the images (x86)

Most people can handle one or two bootable USB drives, but beyond that, it's a mess of sticky notes and keychain tags, and I end up just creating a new drive every time.

Ventoy is a bootable drive that lists a folder of ISOs and boots from them. I'm a little disappointed that there isn't a way to create the drive from macOS, but the linux version worked fine for me. (There's probably some trickery around the bootable partition and hiding that so you only see the bucket-of-ISOs partition, but it seems like it shouldn't be impossible.)

Why have I been booting a bunch of old PCs with installers? Stay toned.

[timkingman]

Spaces keyboard shortcuts

I built one of these https://github.com/andyclymer/minikbd (and actually bought three sets of everything, so this was an expensive soldering training kit, but got to inhale lead with a buddy) and it was interesting, and I ended up using it for some Spaces/Mission Control navigation, but if I left it at work and didn’t have it at home, I probably wouldn’t build any useful muscle memory.

So, recreate the same 6-key layout on the main keyboard

Set up Caps Lock as Hyper using BetterTouchTool: https://docs.folivora.ai/docs/1004_hyper_key.html (BTT can now do this itself without Karabiner). I also use the Escape shortcut, which only bit me some of the time if I hesitated on a Spaces switch, but I haven’t tested how that feels with just BTT. If it fires Escape on longer presses, I don’t think I’ll like it.

That seems kinda goofy, and why would I do that? I have plenty of available key combos. But the 6-key QWEASD block is pretty convenient. (and you get a real escape key on a butterfly laptop, which isn’t a huge deal and I never remember it because I have a full keyboard at work anyway)

Create keyboard shortcuts in BetterTouchTool:

shift-control-option-command Q -> Switch to Desktop 1

shift-control-option-command W -> Mission Control

shift-control-option-command E -> Show Desktop

shift-control-option-command A -> Move Left a Space

shift-control-option-command D -> Move Right a Space

I added my IDE’s Build to to hyper-S and Lock Screen to hyper-L for the one thing I miss from Windows

[timkingman]

Installing Ubuntu on old laptops

I tried to install Ubuntu 18.10 and 19.10 on some old HP EliteBook 8560w laptops, and after installing and rebooting, I got “BootDevice not found” errors.

Not a ton of useful info, but this thread https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=242282

included:

sudo sfdisk -Y dos -A /dev/sda 1

which did the trick.

I had some other goofy issues with the BIOS on these laptops, but pulling the battery and holding down the power button for 15 seconds was enough to clear and get me back into the BIOS settings.

I don’t think I needed UEFI (not fully supported anyway), but I may have left it on and it worked too, after that sfdisk trick.

[timkingman]

More little git tricks

See all branches that have been merged to master, so you can delete them:

git branch -r --merged master

-r shows remote, so I can clean up someone else's branches too.

[timkingman]

All Volume Management should be Logical

It's almost too easy.

$ sudo lvextend -L +500M /dev/vg/tmp   Extending logical volume tmp to 2.39 GiB   Logical volume tmp successfully resized

$ sudo resize2fs /dev/vg/tmp resize2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010) Filesystem at /dev/vg/tmp is mounted on /tmp; on-line resizing required old desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 1 Performing an on-line resize of /dev/vg/tmp to 627712 (4k) blocks. The filesystem on /dev/vg/tmp is now 627712 blocks long.

[timkingman]

Growing LVM in a VM with extended partitions

I had a 20GB virtual disk. I partitioned it with the debian installer and LVM, which gave me one primary boot partition and one extended partition for the rest. The large extended partition was my one LVM physical volume.

As you do, I didn't allocate all of the LVM space right away, so I had room to expand /usr/local and /home the first time I ran out. When I needed more than my initial 20GB space, I should have just asked for a second virtual disk, create one big primary partition, add it as a pv to the vg, done. Instead I asked for the virtual disk to be expanded, which took more work:

Expand virtual disk in VMWare

Boot VM from gparted

Expand the extended partition wrapper (sda2 for me) to fill the new space.

gparted wouldn't let me expand the existing LVM partition, but that's fine.

Reboot to debian

Add a new extended partition to fill the new space. (I don't remember if I specified it as type LVM or if vgextend did that.)

Add the new partition to the vg with vgextend

Use lvextend to grow the logical volume that needs space (live)

Use resize2fs to grow the fs on that logical volume (live)

Oh, and maybe you should have backups before attempting this. I live on the edge.

[timkingman]

git snapshotting before rollback

I had a bunch of uncommitted in-progress changes that I didn't like, wanted to rip out, but still wanted a snapshot of what I had in case I wanted to come back to it later.

Make a new branch

Checkout that new branch

Add any untracked new files

Commit

git reset --soft HEAD^

Checkout previous branch

Now I'm back where I started (with those new files still added to the index), with a bunch of uncommitted changes, and I have a committed branch with all these changes and additions if I want to refer to them again later.

[timkingman]

There is no script engine for file extension ".vbs"

Another google seed on my site that nobody reads or links to...

My Windows 7 machine had this dialog pop up after login (trying to run AD-pushed login scripts), and has done so for months (years?). The other Win7 users at work don't see it, so it was probably me.

Most of the search results give you some goofy registry or association changes, but none of those solutions worked for me.

Turns out, I had .vbs files associated with "Windows Based Script Host" wscript.exe, which sounds entirely reasonable and was mentioned repeatedly in my search results. The correct association for these .vbs scripts is "Console Based Script Host" cscript.exe.

[timkingman]

Multiple tomcats on different ports and session cookies

We're running several tomcats on different ports on a test server. We eventually discovered that they were all setting JSESSIONID cookies scoped to the hostname and path (not the port, which looks like it's part of the cookie spec). So if you log in to our app on one tomcat, then log into the app in another tomcat on the same host, your first session gets wiped out. If you bounce back and forth, you're kicked to the login page almost every time.

Most of my searching found

org.apache.catalina.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME

but that wasn't working. Turns out</marco> that Tomcat 7 replaced this system parameter with an attribute on the Context in context.xml.

http://tomcat.apache.org/migration-7.html#Session_manager_configuration

<Context sessionCookieName="JSESSIONIDA">

Maybe some day the googles and bings and ducksducksgo will learn this answer so I don't spend all morning digging for it.

[timkingman]

Siri

I won a Kindle Keyboard in a raffle, and I remembered that Marco just used a padded envelope as a sleeve for his.

"Search the web for Marco Kindle envelope". Correct transcription, even though I said ehn-velope and Siri read it back as ahn-velope. Siri opened a Google search, the first hit was the post I wanted, and the snippet even had the envelope size.

I switched to Nebulous Notes and opened my shopping list file. Then I tried transcription. My first try blinked the purple dots then didn't give me any text, but when I tried again, I said "six by nine bubble envelope" and the transcribed text was "6 x 10 bubble envelope".

Later, "Play podcast the talk show" worked, and Siri even responded "Playing The Talk Show 63: Skyping a Deuce". Siri actually said (and properly pronounced) the show title "Skyping a Deuce". (Though I'd guess the phonemes probably came from sky and ping, rather than conjugating Skype as a verb.)

Early in that episode, Siracusa sent Dan a defaults write command to enable AirDrop on Gruber's old MBP. I turned off the car radio, opened Siri, and said "Remind me to enable air drop when I get home". "Here's your reminder: 'Enable AirDrop'".

Another fun one: "Remind me to call my parents when I get home" caused Siri to show both of my parents and ask which one, then asked which number. (I was hoping it would detect that they both had the same home phone number and skip this questioning. Maybe I could have said 'call my parents at home'?) Later, as I pulled into the garage, the reminder notification popped up, and the default button was Call. Pretty slick.

[timkingman]

The other day, I wanted to post something, but tumblr was down. Again today I had something I thought about posting here, but I forgot. On the internet, nobody wins.

[timkingman]

AdBlock

After several weeks of running my own local Privoxy at work and at home as a system-wide ad blocker , I've reinstalled Windows at work, and haven't reinstalled Privoxy. It wasn't a huge pain, and it was really flexible (not just block rules, but content-replacement rules to completely remove various sections/elements from sites), but it was probably overkill. With AdBlock extensions now available for all the browsers I use, I think I'll switch back to just using that.

I had always been using EasyList (sometimes with EasyElement, I think), and today I found EasyPrivacy, which claims to block a lot of the non-ad annoyances like trackers and those double-underline or clipboard-modifying scripts.

EasyPrivacy has rules for Apture (the like/share bars that appear on sites like MacNN), but not one that actually blocks the initial script that creates the bar. I added to my custom AdBlock filters: ||apture.com

I'm mostly doing this for my recordkeeping, since nobody reads this blog. Maybe I'll create my own ABP subscription to share these custom filters across my browsers/machines.

Update: Adding meebo.com also handles the popup/share bar/iframe on allthingsd.com. I also have a couple dozen custom AdBlock rules in Firefox, so maybe I will get those converted to my own filter file.

[timkingman]

“I hate blogs. Blogs are for angry people who are sitting at their computer with a glass of wine at midnight with nothing better to do. No companies use blogs anymore.”

(via clientsfromhell)

[timkingman]

cvs2git

It seems I either don't use this or talk about git, so here's a git post.

We have a CVS repository that goes back to late 2004. I've been playing with a local git repo for almost a year and have really enjoyed being able to throw branches around without any of the fussing and manual tracking CVS or older SVN required.

I tried tools like cvs2git and its parent cvs2svn before, but I ended up with weird issues like a few files that managed to lose one change in the conversion. I could see those changes in CVS, but the resulting git or svn repo didn't have it. Since these changes were pretty old (2007?), about half of the converted history wasn't accurate.

Today, I tried cvs2git again, and it looks like that problem has gone away. A fresh checkout from the resulting git repo matches a fresh checkout from CVS, and the resulting history looks good. The commit IDs don't match my local repo, but that's to be expected because my repo didn't have 2004-2008 history, and commit IDs are cryptographic hashes of history.

Very cool, should be fun to finally get this adopted. (For a 2-person, 2-server project.)

[timkingman]

iPhone apps

Games I actually play:

2 Across Strategery Orbital Five Dice Rock Band Tap Tap Revenge One Two Three METALLICA Ramp Champ Marple PuzzleManiak Boggle Dark Nebula

Games I still keep on my phone but don't play:

StuntCopter FreeCell Pocket Tanks (Deluxe) MotionX Poker Scrabble Enigmo One Two Cannon Challenge Eliss Wolfenstein 3D Edge Lite Trivial Pursuit

Internet humor:

Texts From Last Night I Can Has Cheezburger someecards

Social:

Facebook Twitterrific Tumblr AIM

Utility:

1Password Weightbot AT&T myWireless PCalc (Lite) iStat Dropbox VNC TouchTerm iSSH MTelnet iDisk

[timkingman]

Really, it works quite well otherwise.

(Dragging to the Dock gives this error. File: Open actually does work.)

[timkingman]

Yeah, that new naming scheme helps a ton.