Author Archives: luke

Adding a USB drive

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Start by creating a mountpoint somewhere…

$ sudo mkdir /some/random/mountpoint

Then figure out where your USB drive is now:

$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 476.9G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 300M 0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2 8:2 0 476.6G 0 part /
sdb 8:16 0 953.9G 0 disk

I recognize the 1TB drive is the one I added. If you’re not sure, unplug it and do a lsblk, then plug it back in and see what changed.

Make a partition using GPartEd. (I’m too lazy to learn parted and mkfs.) When you’re done, check lsblk again and it should be there.

$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 476.9G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 300M 0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2 8:2 0 476.6G 0 part /
└─sdb1 8:17 0 953.9G 0 part /home/exthd/pd1t

(Except you won’t have a mount point yet. Let’s fix that.)

$ blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="2802-FB42" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="d46…bda8"
/dev/sda2: UUID="789…3d1" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="root" PARTUUID="ada…00"
/dev/sdb1: UUID="5f0…d98" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="04fdf764-01"

Now copy that UUID into a new /etc/fstab entry like so:

$ vim /etc/fstab
UUID=5f0…d98 /some/mount/point ext4 defaults,noatime,nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=10 0 0
$ sudo vim /etc/fstab

More complete instructions here and here and here.

Grimmauld Place

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This is nice.

When West Anchorage resident Janna Wilcox, 12, heard earlier this year that her unnamed home street would soon get an official designation, the wizarding world of Harry Potter immediately came to her mind.

“When we got the letter that the street was going to be renamed, I’m a huge Harry Potter nerd, so I was like, ‘What can I name this that’ll be like Harry Potter?’” Wilcox told Anchorage Assembly members at a Tuesday meeting. “And I thought, ‘Grimmauld Place.’”

It ended up being approved. (The policy, when there’s a tie, is to flip a coin.) Kudos to Wilcox for seeking the goodwill of her neighbors by making them brownies.

I’m surprised it was permitted, though. The library used to have big quote above its main doors, that read “When in doubt, go to the library” and attributed to “J. K. Rowling.” About a year ago, they repainted it to attribute it to “Ron Weasley, The Chamber of Secrets.” I asked staff people about it and they professed not to have noticed. (Possibly the painting was done by stealth at night.)

Let Elon Musk Run TSA

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This is rich. One of the Thousands Standing Around who do security theater in airports says that they need a raise.

People tend to take our jobs for granted. You’re more likely to hear about long wait times or annoyance about taking off your shoes than you are about the important work we do. What you don’t hear about are the weapons we confiscate, the threats of violence we deal with, and the grueling work hours we endure in order to keep America’s skies safe.

Actually, we hear a lot about the weapons you don’t confiscate, and the snow-globes you do. And when we want to know, how, exactly, strip-searching grandma and three-year olds keeps our skies safe, you say you can’t tell us because Terrorists are watching.

What’s up with this bitching about a raise, anyway? Is it throwing out a high bid so we can negotiate back down to where we are now, instead of cutting your pay and eliminating headcount like you need? Because, as employees in a public union, you need a pay cut and worse hours.

Until 2011, our union even lacked the right to bargain over workplace conditions. While some bargaining rights were granted, we still lack many of the same rights that most federal workers are entitled to.

Organizing labor against the Federal Government is (by definition) organizing against the representatives of the people. It should be illegal. And a strike should be given the same treatment that Reagan gave PATCO.

But if I was in charge, the first thing I’d do would be to dismantle the deep state. The agency I’d start with would be the DHS, and I’d use the TSA as poster children. But if people aren’t willing to embrace my proposal, let’s at least let Elon Musk take over running it. Deadwood like this complainer would be the first ones out the door.

Raspberry Pi maintenance

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I hadn’t done any system maintenance in quite a while:

$ sudo pacman -Syu

And when I did, I got this message:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
rpi4-post-install: /etc/udev/rules.d/99-vcio-rewrite.rules exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Which means (I’m told)

Previously we added this file to fix a few issues, but it was not owned by any package. So with this update, we switched it to be owned by rpi4-post-install, which results in this file conflict. Workaround: Run 

sudo pacman -Syu --overwrite /etc/udev/rules.d/99-vcio-rewrite.rules.

CSV from the command line

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There’s a whole bunch of tools out there:

miller seems to be the most versitile (that I could install without effort)

xsv also looks good.

dasel appears to be similar, but I haven’t tried it yet.

pspg looks very good.

The instructions to install csvtk are out of date (go get instead of go install)

Most of the homepages for these list others as well (tv, visidata, …)

Psych 4.0 is broken

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That’s what I hear, anyway, that Psych 4.0 quit working.

The toolchain I’ve constructed to publish my podcast quit working after a recent upgrade I’ve been trying to get it working.

Unfortunately, while I’ve been using ruby since 2001, I’ve never had to figure out how rubygems work. I program for a hobby. It’s not my day job. For what I do, I’ve always been able to use the most recent version. I don’t even know how to use Bundler. (As a first step, I should try it in a single script.)

I did figure out that I could uninstall 4.0, but I might need something that depends on it. So I need to learn how to specify a particular version in my own scripts.