Accretion Disc Blog

Category: Technology

  • Raspberry Pi maintenance

    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 filesystemErrors occurred, no packages were upgraded. Which means (I’m told) Previously we added this file to fix a few issues, but it was […]

  • tidyview

    tidy-viewer (tv) format json into table view N.B. there’s another program (tv-cli) that installs the ‘tv‘ table viewer for json that can wind up in your .cargo/bin – if that happens, then you’ll need to set up aliases or something so you can use the one you want.

  • iMovie files

    Apparently it’s safe to throw away the ‘Render Files’ (and sub-folders) from iMovie projects: Yes, and iMovie can even delete (all) of them for you. Go to iMovie > Preferences and click “Delete” next to Render Files (last item on the bottom for me).

  • CSV from the command line

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 The instructions to install csvtk are out of date (go get instead of go install) […]

  • Psych 4.0 is broken

    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 […]

  • Unicode on the Mac’s APFS is Insane

    That’s what I hear, anyway. I inherited a bunch of files created on a Mac that have Korean names. On a Mac they look like this: ’13 주문 MIROTIC.m4a’ and ’01 Hook가 HookGA (feat. 화사).m4a’ But on my Linux backup system, they look like this: ’13 주문 MIROTIC.m4a’ and ’01 Hook가 HookGA (feat. 화사).m4a’ . […]

  • OpenSSL problem on (older?) Macs

    I had a whole bunch of problems break my podcast all at once, and I’m slowly figuring them out, one by one. One of the problems is keeping both ruby 2.7.4 and 3.0.2 from building: Because I’m the next thing to a Normie, I never discover a new problem. This one has been observed since […]

  • Maybe Get Some Coffee

    I got this message when I was rebuilding my father-in-law’s 2007 iMac. It happened at one point when I was trying to install on OS on the boot drive. This might be the most realistic time-to-complete estimate I’ve ever seen in an Apple installer: (I haven’t talked about that computer. I got it a couple […]

  • Bash / Zsh customization

    AAPL changed the default shell from bash to zsh in either Mojave or Catalina. I ignored that, since nothing they’ve done lately betrays any understanding of Unix. But even after I moved back to bash using chsh, my Mac keeps reminding me that I’m doing it wrong. So I thought to myself: what if I […]

  • Developer Fonts

    Here’s a nice directory of developer fonts (monospaced, many with ligatures).