Posts
Cervantes on Criticism
The following explains much of the commentary on Youtube and other forums on the internet: “Men who are famous for their talent, great poets, eminent historians, are always, or almost always, envied by those whose particular pleasure and entertainment is judging other people’s writings without ever having brought anything of their own into the light of day.” – Cervantes, Don Quixote, Second Part, Chapter III
June 13, 2018
Disable low toner error in Brother printer
#Printers#Crapification of Everything
Our library has a Brother MFC-8950DW laser printer / copier device that started complaining recently about its toner cartridge being low on toner. The cartridge was nearly new and the print quality was still quite good. Then a couple of days ago, the printer stopped printing, saying that we needed to replace the cartridge. This was clearly ridiculous. After some poking around I found this video that showed how to disable the low toner error and get thousands more pages out of the cartridge:
April 24, 2018
Using the Coce book cover cache with Koha
Earlier I described how I installed the Koha library software system on Debian 8. Koha can display book cover images in search results by fetching the images from Amazon, if you enable the OPACAmazonCoverImages preference in Koha. But Koha needs to query Amazon to get the URL for the images. Furthermore, clicking on the image sends the user to the Amazon site for the book in question. I believe this behavior is required by Amazon’s terms of service, and I consider it incompatible with the goals of a public library. To avoid the use of Amazon entirely, and to speed up the queries for image locations, I installed Coce, a cover image URL caching server.
April 15, 2018
Extending MicroEMACS with Ruby
#Linux#Software#Microemacs#Ruby
Years ago, when I had planned to rewrite MicroEMACS in Ruby, the motivation was to have support for Rails built into the editor. Eventually I did add some very minimal Rails support without rewriting the editor. But it was never quite satisfactory. Some things that are easy to do in Ruby, such as converting singular names to plural or camel-case names to underscores, are not easy in mimimal C, and I did not attempt all of them. The solution was to allow new commands to be written in Ruby.
April 15, 2018
Progress in California
I thought it would be interesting to compare my income and costs as a fresh college grad in 1976 with those of today. Are things really so much more expensive in Silicon Valley now than they were way back then? When I graduated from the University of California in 1976, annual tuition was $630. I was able to pay these fees by working a crap summer job at a warehouse in Redwood City. In 2012, the annual tuition was $14,460. So tuition has increased by at least 2295 percent.
March 23, 2018
Linux Mint 18.3 hang on ThinkPad T420i
#Linux#Software#Linux Mint#Ubuntu
I tried installing Linux Mint 18.3 on a ThinkPad T420i yesterday, and ran into a serious kernel problem that forced me to revert to Mint 18.1. The problem was a hang that is due to a bug in the driver for Intel graphics chips (such as that used in the T420i). The hang caused the desktop to freeze at random times, sometimes permanently, requiring reboots using Alt-SysRq magic keys. Occasionally the hang appeared after logging out, and several messages like the following would appear on the text console:
March 22, 2018
Koha Configuration
Once you’ve installed Koha, you’ll need to do some configuration in Koha itself to get ready for use in a library. All of this can be done in the staff client, so log in with the same user name and password that you used to log in during installation.
March 4, 2018
Adding Undo and UTF-8 support to MicroEMACS
I’ve been hacking on the original Conroy version of MicroEMACS for over thirty years, and every so often I add new features that I need. In the last dozen or so years I added support for ctags, cscope, and Ruby on Rails (the latter very minimally). But for many years I’ve been wanting an undo function, and the ability to view and edit UTF-8 text files.
March 1, 2018
Mac OS Sierra and secd hogging CPU
A friend with a 2011 Mac Mini running Mac OS Sierra was complaining that the machine was running very slowly. Was the machine too old and needed to be replaced by a new one? Was the problem due to opening large numbers of tabs in Firefox? I was skeptical that either of these was the problem. My ThinkPad is even older (2008), has similar specs (Core 2 Duo processor, 8 GB RAM) and is plenty fast (Linux shouldn’t be much different from Mac OS in this regard).
February 15, 2018