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Linux issues
Cinnamon fails to start
Sometimes when I start my Linux machine, the kernel boot does its thing. Then Cinnamon starts up. There's a little "LM" (Linux Mint) logo in the middle of the screen that is slowly (barely) animated. Then the screen flashes black and the logo returns, but this time not animated.
Normally after a few seconds, the screen goes black for a while, then the pointer appears, and finally the desktop itself is drawn along with the startup sound, and it's all ready to go.
Instead, it just freezes at the non-animated LM logo.
 Linux Mint start logo.
I give it a while, like 30-60 seconds just so I'm not being impatient. Then I have to hold the power button to kill the machine and reboot. But, as I'm sure you can understand, that's a bit of a "nuke it from orbit" option.
Is there some sort of way to bomb out of that back to a command line, maybe to look at tail | dmesg to try to work out what is upsetting it?
Using sudo journalctl -b 2 --no-pager -n 10, the final three entries are...
Jul 25 15:31:30 Rick-E200HA systemd[1]: Finished systemd-random-seed.service - L
oad/Save OS Random Seed.
Jul 25 15:31:30 Rick-E200HA systemd-modules-load[323]: Inserted module 'msr'
Jul 25 15:31:30 Rick-E200HA systemd-journald[310]: Time spent on flushing to /va
r/log/journal/108969fdc13a415ba49ca84eef8a7be5 is 1.091936s for 823 entries.
That doesn't make an awful lot of sense to me, so I'm wondering if something is missing (wasn't flushed due to hard reset).
Usually it starts on a reboot, but today was a "third time lucky". It's as if the machine doesn't like starting from cold (me too, computer, me too) but a better diagnostic would be useful.
Nemo folder changes
Let's say I open the file manager (Nemo) and I go to a folder containing a number of items, such as Pictures (180 items). The view will change immediately to the relevant directory, and it will then refresh itself something like five times, at about half second intervals, as it loads all of the file information. Accordingly, during this time, all of the files will move (as they are set to be sorted to descending date order).
Is there a way to tell Nemo to just pause until everything is loaded? I'd rather wait a second or two for the information to appear, than to have everything jump around when changing folder.
This is especially annoying when connecting to my phone's filesystem using ftp as the link is, obviously, a lot slower than a local harddisc so Nemo is effectively both unusable and like it is having a nervous breakdown for a good while - and since it insists upon sorting and drawing partial data, it may well actually take longer to do anything this way.
I am also slowly starting to get the hang of doing basic stuff in Gimp. Wow it's convoluted. One of the main things I had to get my head around was that "Canvas" doesn't mean anything more than "image boundaries". Changing the canvas size and telling it to use the background colour only affects what you see on the screen. It is not a background. If you want a background, you need to explicitly provide one:
- Change the canvas size. If there is anything already there, use the offsets to adjust its position.
Layer → New layer....
- Bucket fill the layer to the desired colour for your background.
Layer → Stack → Layer to bottom to put the background at the back.
- Finally
Image → Flatten Image to merge everything together as a single entity.
Negative scanner refresh
Now that I have a way to better program the ESP32 devices, I updated the one that had my LapseCam firmware to run the regular camera web server (my enhanced version). I then opened up the negative scanner and removed the original camera board and installed the ESP32 in its place.
 A slightly modified negative scanner.
In order to get the camera to focus down on something as close as the negatives, I grasped the camera module in a pair of pliers, and twisted the lens with another - it's a delicate operation. Once it was suitably loosened, I could then fiddle with it until the focus was good. I'm not 100% certain it is spot on, but it's good enough for testing.
 The camera module looking down.
Here is the original image captured by the sensor. Setting the image to Negative and the image size to 800×600 made it easy to use the streaming MJPEG mode to view and position the negatives.
 The as-taken-by-scanner picture.
Then I could crop the good part of the image, here set to 15×10 aspect, and enhance the image slightly to make it more vibrant.
Notice, by the way, the cluster of white dots in the water just above the back of the upper boat. These are damaged pixels in the camera. Normally they would be black, but being inverted they appear bright white. I have a couple of other cameras. I suspect this might have happened when I set the camera up to take a timelapse of tree-guy and something happened (I don't know what) that when I came back the µSD card and ESP32 module were burning hot. I know these knock-off ESP32s do seem to have an issue with heat dissipation, but that really took the biscuit. This was more a test than anything else, to see if/how it worked.
 The final processed picture.
And mom... has an alice band? That's a little girlier than expected. ☺
This picture, and various others, were of Spanish buildings and many pictures of sheep. I guessed that it was likely to be Mallorca, as mom went there numerous times. A photo that had a road sign saying Palma 38 and Manacor 10 the other way suggests that it was Vilafranca (de Bonany). Mom liked Mallorca, and being fluent in Spanish (though Catalan is the proper language of the island, but because Sapin...it's complicated...) allowed her to go and visit places and people that the tourists never saw.
I then came across a picture of a potter at work. And saw on the wall in his studio...
 The names of the winds.
That is hanging on the fireplace just to the left of me, behind the speaker. Yes, it's the same one. It is a compass giving the names of the winds according to their direction. I remember mom talking about this when I was on half term, so this would have been early summer in 1989.
There are numerous photos of flowers that look like giant daisies - called Margalida (I think this may have been a local dialect as the word is Margarita in normal Spanish, Margarida in Catalan). Related to Marigold in English, maybe?
Anyway, she liked the name and even had a name plaque that she was thinking about putting on the house (in the UK, not here, this place already has a name). Accordingly, the plaque is sitting on the counter in the kitchen and it's still there... ☺
 The "Margalida" plaque.
Unfortunately, these photos were developed by Moss Chemists, the local pharmacy in Yateley. I say unfortunately as unlike the Kodak development that happened at the photo shop in Fleet, Moss simply put all of the negatives together in a little paper envelope (rather than slid into a folded plastic protector). Thirty years of a damp old farmhouse and, well, some of them are stuck together and most of them show some signs of damage.
The original scanner camera is a SPCA2080A hooked to a camera that worked at 1344×896 natively, the ESP32's OV2640 can manage 1600×1200. Not only that, but the image can be inverted in the camera itself, and different quality levels chosen. A big issue with the original camera was the overprocessed blockiness.
Not to mention, there's an obvious benefit to being able to control all of this from a browser. No more need to have something with a USB port and an appropriate driver - my Android phone works happily with the scanner, my Linux PC not so much.
The original hardware is still attached and powered. This is because the LED backlight runs from the main board. I'm guessing it is simply wired directly to the 5V (or 3.3V?) supply. This would need to be changed to be a method of powering the ESP32 and the backlight. Shouldn't be too hard to mod that.
If/when I come to do this properly, I think I would need to create custom firmware, something like:
- Start up with negative mode set as default.
- Only two on-screen buttons. One to start/stop the stream (that will automatically reduce the image size to 800×600), and one to take a picture (automatically setting the image size to full size).
- If the image acquisition fails, then step back the image quality until it works - I wonder if/how I will be able to determine if the image is good or not. Maybe it would be better to have a button to adjust the quality? But by a method that's just a touch more useful than a slider that goes from 5-63 and has little in the way of finesse. To look into...
- I think the current version of the firmware can adjust the active image area, so maybe using that I could restrict the "visible" area to fit the photo, rather than have all that additional stuff visible. This would mean usable pictures right away, with no need to crop out the rubbish.
Speaking of overheating, I can't switch the camera module for an OV5640 with it's enhanced 2560×1920 image size, because the OV5640 runs pretty hot. Like "needs heatsink" hot. And, anyway, mine has a wide-angle lens that would cause much distortion.
Of course, there are other possibilities too, such as affixing one of my tiny OLEDs to use for status and also to report the IP address so I don't need to scan for it.
But, whatever, as far as a basic "will this work?" test goes, I think it was pretty successful.
Age verification
Children in the UK will now apparently be better protected from the evils of pornography. The adults that might enjoy a good pair of perky melons, on the other hand, will be required to hand over personal information in order to "prove" their age. Some sites may ask for ID, others may try a zero-value debit on a credit card, and some may try to guess your age based upon a selfie.
You may even receive a reminder from various services by email, with a handy link to where you can complete the verification. If you're really lucky, this email might even have come from the service involved, but I cannot help but think that a good few people are going to get scammed as a result of this.
There is no easy solution. Perhaps the least risky would be to have a central government resource that could provide some sort of verification token that encrypts a person's date of birth. But you know how these things go - they would want to involve themselves in the process for your security so the government would get to record that you like to fap to animated girls or you have a thing for female kickboxers, or whatever.
Instead, we are handing off all of this to third parties. Bluesky, for example, appears to use the zero-value debit or selfie-scan methods, provided by KWS (Kids Web Services), an international service run by Epic Games.
The KWS Privacy Policy (that won't even show without enabling JavaScript) says that they maintain a hashed version of your email address and verification status for use in the future, which doesn't sound bad until you read a little further down the "Personal information we collect" section. Furthermore they may share information with partner companies and potentially if they are acquired.
It also says:
Countries where we and our service providers and Partners operate may not offer the same level of data protection as your home country. We use specific contracting frameworks approved by the UK Government and European Commission which are designed to give personal information protection essentially equivalent to that in the UK and EEA.
Weasel words. The US categorically cannot offer equivalent protections, just ask Max Schrems. The reason for the "EU Safe Harbor" agreement is, well, it's basically a fudge because far too many European businesses depend upon American products that outright banning data transfer to the US would be catastrophic for business, so everybody pretends to play fair and nothing ever changes.
To give an idea of intent here, they had an opportunity to do the right thing, and failed gloriously:
Your browser settings may allow you to automatically transmit a "Do Not Track" signal to online services you visit. There is no industry consensus as to what site and app operators should do with regard to these signals. Accordingly, unless and until the law is interpreted to require us to do so, we do not monitor or take action with respect to "Do Not Track" signals.
This, alone, should be taken as a pretty strong indication of how much they value our privacy.
And, of course, how long until all sorts of information gets leaked in a breach? These days, it's a case of "when" and not "if". But don't search for "Epic Games breach" because last spring they were hacked and 189GB of customer data was stolen...only it wasn't, it was a ransomware gang trying a low-tech scam of claiming to have pulled off the hack.
Will this help children? Honestly, I don't get why all this fuss over some on-line pornography. When I was young, it was issues of Playboy hidden in a plastic bag in the cistern of a toilet in the senior block. Sometimes there were VHS. Sometimes they were from overseas, although to be honest grunting and moaning doesn't exactly need subtitles. And being from overseas, well... let's just say my mom would have had a conniption fit if she knew that I knew how many holes a girl has when I was eleven... but I didn't turn out to be a sex-crazed misogynistic nutjob. Why? Because there was never any specific taboo on sex-related matters so long as it wasn't out in public - like that time I loudly asked mom "what's a dildo?" in the middle of a Little Chef. I heard the word in the playground and due to how my mind works it popped up weeks later during mealtime. "We don't discuss anything between the elbows and the knees while we're eating" was the reply, and later that evening mom found one in a home shopping catalogue and showed me what it was, gave a brief explanation of what it's for, and she then said no more questions as she's never used one, but Annette has so if I want to know more, go ask her. Annette, it should be pointed out, would tear my head off, take a dump down the neckhole, and then slam my head back on upside down if I dared to be so impertinent. I didn't ask.
But, here's the thing. Children and sex are intertwined. Most children's first introduction to their sexual organs is peeing in their clothing when they really don't want to. Then it gets ignored for a few years. Then they start to realise that there are more differences between girls and boys than "girls don't wear trousers and seem unusually attracted to the colour pink". And then in the late tweens/early teens, things start happening; and it only gets worse as they progress through the teenage years and into maturity.
Now, you can either pretend that sex never happens and the child got delivered by a stork, or you can guide them into understanding what it is all about - in a non-icky way (because while it's pretty obvious that parents bonked because that's how babies are created, nobody wants to actually think about that happening) but most importantly in a responsible way so they don't need to learn whatever rubbish is trending in their playground or find sneaky ways to look at boobies on the internet (because, clearly, Googling for "boobies" and turning safe search off isn't good enough, that mostly gets pictures of birds ☺), and most importantly in a trusting way so they know that they can ask you if they have questions or concerns. Which may be difficult (because parents don't like to think about their children bonking either) but it's better than leaving it to peers or the school, neither of which are going to be especially useful.
But if an enterprising child really wants access to icky stuff, there are workarounds from taking a photo of their parent's credit card and trying that to simply using a VPN.
And, you know, between you and me, if my child was to be looking at unsavoury things on the internet, I'd much rather have them staring at a sexual organ wobbling in the breeze than have anything to do with the likes of Andrew Tate, Alex Jones (the American one, not the Welsh one) or similar. Having the likes of them living rent free inside a young impressionable mind is going to be far more damaging than I am *never* eating chocolate spread ever again ... oh sweet summer child, that is not chocolate spread ... aaaargh!
How we're all going to die horribly
This coming Wednesday, BBC Four is having a Nuke Night. At ten o'clock Michael Aspel will look at one of the most controversial programmes ever made for the BBC, The War Game, which ten minutes later will air. To put it into context, it was made in 1966 and then immediately withdrawn because of its unrelenting horror as to the effects of a nuclear strike on an unprepared populace. It would finally be aired nineteen years later in 1985.
Forty five minutes later, the director Mick Jackson will look at Threads, which was an equally horrific film, this one being made in 1984. Unlike the already unpleasant documentary style of The War Game, this one plays it entirely straight and runs for a little under an hour and three quarters and, let's just say, it's a typically British low budget affair with stock footage as the threat of war looms. Then the bomb drops, and in a moment of possibly unintentional levity we see a woman wetting herself at the sight of the mushroom cloud (leading to a black-comedy IMDb profile) and from that moment on things get real bad real quick. And then they get worse. And even more worserer. You might complain that "worserer" isn't a word, but if you have ever seen this movie, you'll understand that this film looks at potentially realistic effects of a nuclear weapon being dropped on Sheffield (and other places). It takes a much harder, much longer view. And honestly, you'll be watching it in some degree of fascination as to "how much worse can it get?". A lot. Really a lot. And then some more. Then, as the credits roll, you'll just want to sit somewhere quiet for a while.
Threads is the film that traumatised a generation. And now as macho leaders posture about using their nuclear weapons, it's definitely time to dust this off and look at it again. Even though the effects are very of their time and it's all a bit Doctor Whoish - well, it is a British production, we're not known for big production values - but honestly if that's what you notice, you've pretty much missed the entire point.
So, if you too would like to be traumatised by the reality of what a nuclear strike would actually mean, the only difference these days being the additional 5% that would die immediately as they'd be out trying to livestream it, then Wednesday night from 10pm on BBC Four.
Sleep tight!
A new laser printer (sort of)
I went to a vide grenier on the 1st of May 2022. When I was there I got an HP Laserjet 15a dirt cheap, and came home and fixed it.
And there it sat, on a bench in the living room, because it didn't have WiFi and I didn't get anywhere with having RISC OS talk to it, so...
Today, just out of the blue, it dawned on me. I'm using Linux on a little PC. It has a free USB port. I wonder, I wonder.
I didn't bother to clean it off. I just shoved it in, aiming to print the test print if it got that far.
 A compact laser printer...on the floor.
The print seems clean and crisp. The quality isn't bad, and the built-in PDF software looks as if it can cope with pamphlet style printing (shrinking pages to put two on a sheet side by side, printing only evens or only odds).
Even more AI music (5 songs to download)
Eternal December
This was inspired by the above (Threads), it's about the aftermath of a nuclear war. I was very verbose in my description as I wasn't sure if "nuclear war" would trigger some sort of "nope!" filter, and I asked for a darkwave eighties style synth-led song. The AI took numerous phrases from my description - Eternal December, twilight of humanity, it'll all be over soon, and in the dark we fade away - nothing special, but it was pretty nifty that it absolutely understood what I was aiming for, and delivered.
As I'm sure you can guess, I really like this song.
Shadows Awake
I was looking for another dark song, this time piano led, about the fact that all those monsters under the bed and in the closet are real and once the lights go off - that's when you're their prey. This was supposed to be a female vocal, but I guess the AI felt that a male vocal was better for this song.
Shadows into Light
And just to show that it's not all darkness and fear, here's a quirky piano song about... tea. Are you surprised? This is about as joyful as a nice cup of tea.
The Spellbinder's Dance
This was my attempt to get the AI to create a Celtic flavoured song. This is pretty good, but it required a lot of editing at the end as it would do an ending sound flourish only to carry on. I had to whittle out about twenty seconds of weirdness to get the ending using Audacity. I hope I did an okay. There's also a missing word at 1:34, it's supposed to say "Blood and root" but the word "blood" is missing. I don't know if it's a hiccup or some sort of content filtering (so, like, songs about vampires might be problematic? ☺).
Here's an extra bonus. This isn't one of my proper AI songs, this was just me messing around.
Udderly Immortal
The concept is simple. It's a power metal song told from the perspective of a cow that is happy to be pumped full of hormones to make endless amounts of milk, and when it gets too old for that, it is ecstatic to be slaughtered for hamburgers and beef steaks, the latter being cow Valhalla. I actually burst out in giggles at work when I came up with this idea, and my cow-orkers were "huh?" because, well, it was all a bit of a catastrophe and my response was unexpected. Hey, do you think when I'm doing rote work at work I'm going to give my full concentration to something that could be an autonomous passed off to a cheap little eight bit low-bandwidth thinking unit? Oh, no, I think about billions of other things. And once in a while, weird ideas to try making songs (or AI art) about. And sometimes I even remember them by the time I get home. Whether or not I should have remembered this concept, I'll let you be the judge.
I told the AI to go completely over the top with this one.
It did.
Since this is the original MP3 from Suno (I have only added tags, no reencode), it may have a screwy duration.
If you don't understand what she's screaming about, here are the lyrics. They are also embedded in the MP3 file, along with the following epic album art (also generated by AI).
 An AI generated image of a cow with sunglasses
and a sombrero dancing atop a huge barbeque.
And since there's not a cow on the planet that doesn't want me roasting on the coals at this moment, I think I'd better bring this blog to a close...
Your comments:
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| C Ferris, 27th July 2025, 08:50 |
This sort of reminds me of wandering around a museum in Nagasaki - very graphic - about the after effects of the Allies nuke - Hmm |
| jgh, 27th July 2025, 12:21 |
I've been having problems getting CentOS to boot on VirtualBox. I think I've worked out some steps to get it working.
* It will only run on my XP system, it refuses to run on Win7 or later. Another reason I keep my XP machine going.
* Double-click on the *.ova file, do not run it from Start->Programs
* In the 5 second boot countdown, (e)dit the boot sequence
* Add SELinux=0 to the Linux boot line
* Ctrl-X and cross fingers.
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| jgh, 27th July 2025, 12:40 |
Oo, Threads. I'll have to get around to watching that again, see if I can get a screen capture of my 0.5seconds of fame. :)
I was in Sheffield city centre recently, and with all the concrete road blocks and dereliction it looks like a bomb has gone off.
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| Rob, 27th July 2025, 13:36 |
Lots of chat on Mastodon about how kids after using various games/photos of parents, etc, to get around the age verification thing. Even BBC News published an article detailing exactly how a VPN can be used to get around it.
In the meantime, completely innocent services are outright closing down because of it since complying is so onerous.
and then.. Believing that your ID is safe because a site says they delete them after checking? https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/tea-app-breach-exposes-72000-selfies-id-photos-and-other-user-images/ |
| C Ferris, 27th July 2025, 15:00 |
Back to Parents leaving a copy of 'Playboy' around and getting kids to ask questions:-/
StarDot seemed to have closed it's doors unless one is signed in :-( |
| Rick, 27th July 2025, 17:02 |
JGH: Where were you in the film? And how old?
Rob: Exactly that, keeping kiddies safe (allegedly) by forcing adults to hand over far too much personal info to international outfits that only have to pay lip service to our laws (not that the UK isn't still trying to backdoor encryption, like they don't understand basic mathematics).
The law is, unfortunately, far too vague. For example, the "I'm not UK resident" is mostly because one can, technically, communicate with other users in these comments, despite that not being the intended purpose *and* it being a dumb and painful (and public) way to run a user to user service. But, alas, there doesn't appear to be any descriptive difference between this comment box and the likes of Bluesky. It's almost as if the hidden agenda is nothing to do with children and a lot to do with interfering with the ability of people to talk to each other.
As for the children, how about mandatory sex ed (with *no* exceptions because angry little sky fairy) and better parenting?
Just a thought...
Colin: While the timing of the closing is suspicious, the excuse they're going with is "because bot spam", and honestly given the shítshow that I'm seeing in my logs, it's perfectly believable. Unfortunately it is likely to push more to using CDNs like Cloudflare, and Cloudflare do *not* give a crap about unusual browsers (like Netsurf). I can no longer access the W3C RSS checking tool using Netsurf because Cloudflare sits in the way now.
We had a mostly open web, and then big rapacious corporations ruined it more than foreign hackers ever did. 😡
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| jgh, 27th July 2025, 18:29 |
The StarDot block is because of the other threat de jour, being overwhelmed by spam bots. It's taken a lot of amateur computing forums down, I've been fighting them on BeebWiki as well. I was getting 4 gigabytes of logs per day, most of which were AI bot crawlers, and at one point was so thrashing the wiki server it took my non-wiki site down as well.
SABRE was been attacked from both directions, they've been having to put age verification in place, and at the same time have been fighting spam bots and had to put challange and login block in place.
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| jgh, 27th July 2025, 18:35 |
Yes, I can no longer access SABRE from my XP system because they use a challenge system that refuses to talk to Firefox 52. But I have to keep my XP system going because so much software that I need in order to keep working craps itself on other systems.
Re: Threads. I was 13 I think. There's a shot in the third act, I think, of survivors in the distance walking across Hallam Moor, I think. Near Fox House anyway, as that's where we got off the bus and assembled.
There isn't a section on IMBD for radio appearences, so I only have one entry. :( |
| JAD, 27th July 2025, 19:41 |
The IMDB link above 404's for me.
TOR Browser appears to work for bypassing the UK checks on dodgy sites. |
| Rick, 27th July 2025, 20:07 |
JAD: Sorry, the idiot that wrote the HTML forgot the closing double quotes after the URL... 🤦🏻♀️
Fixed now.
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(Felicity? Marte? Find out!)
- This is not the future we were promised, Coming Home to Tea (AI song x13), Bonus music, My 0.02 on RISC OS, DDE Update. (2025/11/02)
- Yeah just drive over my lawn why don't you, Abusing a pumpkin, YouTube error 153, Toussaint. (2025/11/01)
- Scanning a directory, Extended BBC BASIC,ReadCurrentTimeZone failure, Misery, Storm casualty, Pasta. (2025/10/26)
- Tea v0.26. (2025/10/25)
- A little more Tea. (2025/10/23)
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