Wednesday, Dec 25, 2019
Most of my workstations & laptops require a passphrase typed in to open the encrypted root filesystem. So my steps to booting are as follows:
Power on machine Wait for FDE passphrase prompt Type in FDE passphrase Wait for boot to complete and automatic XFCE session to start Since I need to know when the computer is ready to accept the passphrase, it is important the framebuffer is usable during the early part of the boot.
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Saturday, Nov 23, 2019
This most recent weekend (November 16th) I attended the Milwaukee Code Camp and was pleased with the content. There was plenty of food, coffee, and give-aways.
The Talks I attended five talks:
starting an open source project (link) 1,
how to manage work life balance as a software developer (link),
getting started with Docker and Kubernetes2 (link),
introduction to Terraform for cloud infrastructure management (link),
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Monday, Nov 18, 2019
About a fortnight ago (Nov 9th) I went to the MSOE x Google Cloud hackathon.1 There was pizza, soda, and Google Cloud gear. Each group was given a Google AIY Computer Vision kit to assemble, and build a proof of concept around.
The kit contained a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the Raspberry Pi Camera Add-on, a breakout board to provide simplified pin-outs for a button with an integrated light, an additional LED that mounted next to the camera to indicate if the camera was active, and a piezo buzzer.
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Wednesday, Nov 6, 2019
I attended the GDG Milwaukee 2019 DevFest last Saturday. This was my second hackathon. Around 6-9 teams participated. We coded for six hours, and I learned a lot about team dynamics. We formed a team of eight participants. We encountered a couple significant challenges.
The stack matters Initially we decided to use Python and the Django framework. This turned out to be a grave error, because picking up Django quickly while staying productive is challenging.
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Friday, Nov 1, 2019
I ran into a hang today with only ivy enabled and nothing else configured or installed. The behavior was such that after I typed a hostname with a TLD (such as not.existant.com1), then typed C-x d to visit a directory or C-x C-f to find a file, Emacs would hang. My mouse would turn into a pin-wheel. My only recourse was to send the ‘quit’ command via C-g to cancel the operation.
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Friday, Aug 2, 2019
Awhile back I noticed my personal mnt/ directory, my (empty) personal tmp/ directory, and a few symbolic links disappeared from my home directory. I only noticed because I use unison1 to synchronize my desktop and laptop homedirs. The actual amount of removed directories and symbolic links were staggering, and it costed me five minutes of extra effort to search through the unison UI to ignore files I don’t want to synchronize.
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Sunday, Jul 28, 2019
On my Gentoo desktops, I use Emacs Daemon via sys-emacs/emacs-daemon1 to ensure an Emacs instance is ready to go and always available from boot. This is done via creating a symbolic link like /etc/init.d/emacs.winston to /etc/init.d/emacs which will start Emacs for the given user. See the package README for more details.
A shortcoming of this setup is XDG_RUNTIME_DIR2 is not set, as this is set by my Desktop Session - maybe LightDM or consolekit set this?
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