Wrote a HTML ping-like something. Uses fetch to fetch a page and measures time until 404 returns to js. Here's my http ping. The challenge was writing code to calculate standard deviation in multiple languages and making sure it matched, d'oh.

podman build (user namespace) and Rename. It seems like Debian bullseye, if I run podman, it runs in user namespace mode if you run it inside a regular user. That's fine, but it uses fuse overlayfs driver. Now I am yet to pinpoint what is happening, but rename() is handled in a weird way, I think it's broken. os.Rename() in golang is copying the file and not deleting the original file.

Already September. Trying to update first devices to bullseye. Many raspberry pis.

openvpn client configuration with systemd. Spent a while trying to figure out why my configuration file /etc/openvpn does not take effect. It was because I needed to tell systemd to reload the daemon stuff and trying to restart openvpn only did not have any meaningful effect. After I learnt how things work it made some sense, but I expected /etc/init.d/openvpn restart to do the right thing.

Wrote a tool to parse /sys/block/*/stat. It's probably impossible for a human brain to appreciate the numbers so I made a web page that you can paste the contents and parse it from JS to emit some processed numbers. Probably iostat is the tool you want, but hey, sometimes you need this kind of stuff.

August comes. Kids are on summer staycation. This is not sustainable.

Added memory to ACER Chromebox CXI3 (fizz/sion). Got 2 16GB SO-DIMMs and installed them. I could not find correct information on how to open this box on the internet. They seem to be explaining similar boxes from HP or ASUS which seem to have simpler procedure to opening. I had to ply out out the 4 rubber pieces at the bottom, and then open the 4 screws. Then I could ply open the front and back panel by applying force where the screws were. In the front panel there's two more shorter screws that needs to be opened; after taking out the two screws (that's 4+2), I could open the box into two pieces. Be careful they are connected, I think there's audio cable. After opening you can access the memory chips. Pull the metal piece open on left and right hand side of the memory chip so that it raises. Make sure the metal pieces latch closed when you insert the new memory, that should signify memory is in place. I didn't do that at the beginning and the machine didn't boot. So far so good. No longer using zram.

KVM switch. I am using ES-Tune KVM switch to switch Linux and ChromeBox. The Linux side seems to be unreliable. Sometimes it complains USB cable is bad. Reboot doesn't fix it and reconnecting seems to improve the state. Unplugging power from the KVM switch seems to fix the situation sometimes. Could be the KVM switch issue.

Bought BEHRINGER U-PHORIA 2-Channel UMC202HD. My previous Q1002US mixer seemed to have unreliable right channel bus and was getting worried. MIDAS preamp, simple to use. Connect it to Linux box and it works as a USB audio device with two channel of input. It has two inputs and hence it will probably look like a stereo recording. If I connect my XM8500 it turns out to be on the left channel, for example. Looking at the waveforms, the noise floor is lower than Q1002US and I love it so far. Used my hack yesterday to confirm its behavior.

Made my FFT view stereo. I can now tell if sound is input in my left channel or right channel and if my mic is stereo as it claims to be.

Fixed multi-track audio recording web page that was broken for a while. here. But I think I wasn't satisfied with the synchronization.

Created a web page for recording game play. For mixing video and audio from HDMI input and grabbing audio from mic. Basically just configuring the two audio and video tracks. here it is.

Can't remember what I thought was interesting in memtest code.

Updated my simple web recording app to support multiple cameras and selecting from it. WebRecord. I didn't need it until today because I didn't use a device with more than one camera as often, but I got hold of a HDMI USB capture device and that changed the game.

Wrote a quick hack to open chroot in emacs tramp. I wrote a mode for cros_sdk and it was relatively simple. I figured that chroot must be easier. I could write one in about 30 minutes. I need to mount proc and home inside the chroot to make it useful, but here goes. chroot-tramp.el

emacs tramp mode for chroot. I saw tramp for docker and lxc so I figured it must be possible to write a mode for chroot. I wrote one for cros_sdk and that made my life much easier. I can build and run inside chroot from emacs transparently. Seems like it should also be possible to write something for dchroot.

memtest86+ did not work on my machine. Looking at the changelog the version was last updated in 2014. Checked their website and apparently there was a new version last year. Might be worth a try. I saw at least some code to handle memory modules with memory more than 32GB.

Last weekend I had Debian meeting. I presented how Golang packages work. I don't really know how they work and I learnt how they work along with preparation for the material. I noticed that I couldn't present a window from Chrome browser. After playing around a little bit more Filed a bug, seems like unable to capture the display or the wayland window, only X11 windows, but I wonder what will come out of it. I have issues with IME keybindings not reliably working, and this. Wayland is not dependable for me yet.

Memo on using a KVM switch with my Debian desktop and ChromeBox. KVM these days mean Kernel virtualization things but before it used to mean KVM switch; where PS/2 and DSUB15 pin was a popular interface. These days it's USB + HDMI; USB-C with dP alt mode would make connections simpler including power supply, but that doesn't exist as much. This ends up 3 cables each for PC and display, with 2 USB cables and 1 HDMI cable per endpoint. I bought a cheap manual switcher. Automatic switcher can be annoying especially when suspend-resume case, there's no rational behavior, especially when I want to wake devices through keyboard. Having a wired remote control was good because although the device itself is compact, the 9 or so cables running out of it is bulky and I moved it under my desk to hide it from my view. Sometimes suspending / resume causes issues with the USB hub, it's recognized as SuperTop USB Hub, and from Linux kernel it seems like hub is disconnected and reconnected, however on reinitialization sometimes USB hub fails to be initialized. That results in keyboard not working, but re-connecting the USB cable fixes the issue. Sound is recorded via USB mixer, and played back via HDMI audio, video is recorded via USB camera. These things didn't exist back in the old KVM days, maybe they used audio cables.

Waiting for network to be up from a service on Debian. I've noticed that when I observed in journalctl that many services were starting before dhclient started running and configured DHCP. They are waiting for network-online.target, however network-online.target seems to be triggered before networking is available. After a few internet searches, ifupdown is the default network manager for Debian, and it seems like there's a specific systemd target for ifupdown. /usr/lib/systemd/system/ifupdown-wait-online.service contains that service. So, I could do this to fix the situation. Now, should this have been the default? filed a bug: 988533.