Rick's b.log - entry 2026/02/22

Fixing Diodon

I copied each word in the first sentence to the clipboard one by one. I can now paste the fifth word "fish" by clicking the fish icon, then choosing the word from the menu that pops up (shown on the right) that lists all of the things on the clipboard.

It is a little bit like GBoard's multilevel clipboard, and - honestly - when you're used to having a clipboard that works like this, simple one-thing-at-a-time clipboards feel like mere toys.

Except... it froze. After months of competent work holding pictures and paragraphs of text and code - entire blog articles even - I went to click on it and... the menu popped up but that was it. No options worked, not even the one to Quit.

So I called up the task manager and ended the Diodon process, then restarted it in a terminal. Nothing.

Next step, press F2 and then type r to restart Cinnamon. Still no joy.

After a reboot, time to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in.

rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ sudo apt reinstall diodon

And... nothing.

This was starting to get weird.

rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ sudo apt remove diodon
[...]
rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ sudo apt autoremove
[...]
rick@Rick-E200HA:~$ sudo apt install diodon

This removes the Diodon app, then removes the dependencies no longer required (a Diodon core and something called Zeitgeist). Then the whole lot is reinstalled.

And... that did eff all. Still no little orange fish.

Last ditch attempt before I bang my head on the table.

Diodon uninstalled. Dependencies removed. Then I scoured the filesystem. I knew that Diodon is mostly the front end, all the background stuff is whatever Zeitgeist is, so I concentrated on finding anything to do with that.

Eventually I found some MySQL files at ~/.local/share/zeitgeist and I deleted them.

Then I cautiously reinstalled everything, rebooted the system and...

Yes, it's the same picture. 😉

Result!

The problem wasn't actually Diodon, it was Zeitgeist failing on what must have been some sort of duff data in the SQL file, and it not being smart enough to cope (or, perhaps, to recognise and ignore old obsolete data that predates its installation?). Either way, with the Zeitgeist database removed, it was recreated and everything works as expected.

I'm writing this so that if your Diodon suddenly just stops doing anything...it may well be Zeitgeist's panties in a twist...

Components

I took steps to rectify that situation.

A pile of components.

I think it was about €18 from Amazon, and they assured me it was a next day delivery. I wasn't overly convinced because it was dispatched from Artenay at half eight, but somehow it made it to Goven (parcel centre near Rennes) for three in the morning, out for delivery at 10, and finally in my letterbox at twenty to three in the afternoon.

1,390 pieces! Some six hundred ¼W 1% resistors, 300 ceramic capacitors, 120 electrolytics (all µF with seven values at 50V and the five larger ones at 16V), 100 tiny 3mm LEDs in five colours (G/B/W at ~3V, R/Y at ~2V, 20mA max), 170 transistors, and 100 diodes of varying types from the dinky little glass ones to BIG MEATY ONES.

In short, this:

All the bits.

And, no, there aren't 10 of 17 types of transistor equalling 180. Duh! Still, correcting that to 170 and it all adds up to the announced 1,390 pieces.
At any rate, while I'll likely never use most of these, at least now if I'm looking for x to pop into a circuit, there's a good chance I'll have one now.

ESP32 function generator?

At any rate, it's an idea to ponder, but one to push to the back because, well, because neither of the DACs are tracked out on the ESP32-Cam board. The DACs are on GPIO25 and 26, and these are used by the camera interface (camera VSync and SCCB data respectively).
So, alas, this idea comes to a pause at this point.

Aaargh!

I expected to find, after the great amount of rain and flooding in 2024, and some more in 2025 to make the ground saturated (rather like now, actually!), the room full of mould and other noxious things.

Well. There was a noxious thing, a rather alien noxious thing.

You know, you'd have thought that I'd have heard the wasps, so...? 🤷

As there were still wasps around, I quietly closed the door and left it. The temperature would plummet and they'd all die off. As for the stain on the curtain, and I'd imagine the smell, basically "bug shit".

I had wanted to do something about it for a while, but a combination of being "too cold" and "bad back" meant that I never quite got around to it.

Alas, Spring is coming. If it's not kept on top of, something somewhere will hatch and this will happen all over again. I don't care if there are wasps in the loft so long as they leave me alone. But in mom's bedroom? Dude, that's just offensive.
Since it's nearly Spring, not cold, rubbish day tomorrow, and I didn't feel that bad after my third tea... everything came together. Today would be the day that thing goes.

So I positioned the bin underneath the thing and poked it with the Dutch Hoe. That's basically a scraping blade on a long handle, useful for skimming the ground to decapitate weeds or to lift up moss.
It was... weird. Like a cross between paper mâché and the dust that staked vampires leave behind. But I was able to get in between the underside of the window surround and the nest itself and loosen it until the thing fell into the bin. Then, with a lot of care, using the hoe because I had no desire to actually touch any of this, I folded the curtain into the bin. I'm not even going to attempt to wash it. Tant pis, it goes.

That's better.

An average wasp nest can hold somewhere between four and six thousand wasps (that's a ridiculous number) and as you can see it wasn't actually held up by much. Something of a marvel of engineering given that it was a bunch of insects that constructed it in a season. Inside there should be rows of stacked honeycomb, though I had no desire to open it up and look.

I'll need to go back in to vacuum up the rest, and the bug bodies on the floor and windowsill. And to pick up a large pile of books that mysteriously fell over by themselves.
But, whatever, it... still feels like a sort of trespass. It's been six and a half years, and her room is like a time capsule really. Clearly closing the door and pretending it doesn't exist isn't a viable plan - that's how this thing happened in the first place. But I'm probably not going to go in there that often. Too many memories, too much mom junk around reminding me of things.

Still, it has been sorted. I can now sit and write this and make a nice Mac&Cheese for dinner by way of self-congratulation. Or maybe linuine with a creamy butter sauce? I'm undecided, but liable to Mac&Cheese because that's just 25 minutes in the microwave or... hmm... maybe I could really push the boat out and oven it properly?

Daffodils and reminiscence

Anna and the daffodils.

Last year, the almond blossom was out for March 10^th (that's only 18 days from now) and the cherry blossom started on March 30th (38 days), with the sakura cherry being quite spectacular by April 12th.

Oh, and looking at my photos, my letterbox system is now a year old.
Also last year, we had a week off because February is a quiet period. Lucky it didn't happen this year, because it's been something like 37 straight days of rain. There's quite a lot of flooding along the Loire in Loire-Atlantique and Maine-et-Loire and whatever rivers flow through Charente-Maritime. We're on yellow alert, which is better than orange. But, yeah, it has rained quite a bit. Luckily as it was continual and not all at once, around here it flowed someplace else to present a problem. Nothing flowed across the road, but the ground is waterlogged - walking to feed Anna is squish squish squish. She's not fond of going for walks when it's like that.

There will still be cold nights (maybe even some frost), but there's heat in the sun and the days are notably longer and, well, I think winter is pretty much over now. I still have the fan heater on in here, because I don't fancy sitting here feeling cold. It's the damp, you see. Dry cold isn't really cold. But damp cold just goes right through you...

As I was tidying up the crap in order to get to mom's room, I had a pile of random assorted clothes. And a pair of cotton trousers I didn't know I had. 🤷 So I have put it all in the washing machine. The drum is full, it's a fair number of things, so I'm running it on the Eco 40 cycle. Most of the cycles work up to 3kg. The Eco 40 will go up to 6kg. Which is amusing given that this machine has a larger capacity but smaller drum than the previous machine. Anyway, it measures, it adjusts itself automatically, all that fancy tech nonsense. But, alas, being the ecological programme, it will take something like three and a half to four hours to do it's thing. I'm not entirely certain how "heat water to 40, rotate the drum a bunch of times" is supposed to save energy when it's doing it for two and a bit hours instead of three quarters of one, but I'm not a washing machine designer.
Looking at the service manual for the TDLR 65231 and the TDLR 70112 (as my exact model doesn't have an available service manual, but there's a lot of similarity), it looks like it runs lukewarm for 23 minutes, then gets up to temperature and runs for two hours, then will perform three rinses of 13 minutes each (normally two but I selected the extra rinse option). Then it'll do a four minute medium speed spin, toss the clothes around a bit, and finish with a 24 minute main spin on the ES2 profile where it'll go to 100rpm to check the balance, then 300rpm, and if the balance is still good it'll go up to around 800rpm, sliding up to 900rpm and it'll stay there for a couple of minutes before cranking up to maximum and pegging there for the remaining twenty one minutes.
It's a lot more technological than the previous "two clicks of three minutes at the maximum 500rpm setting", isn't it? But I think the main benefit of this machine is that it won't destroy itself if the balance is wrong. If you recall, the previous mechanical machine would trip out the main breaker when spinning because a wire had rubbed too much, and eventually the drum bearings gave out, maybe due to washing all of mom's towels...

Free speech

The United States is banging the "free speech" drum and hollering about the EU stifling it. Again.

Dear America - please allow me to put this as tactfully as possible: Piss off.

A country where books are banned (sometimes burned), often because they contradict the bible or some fervent notion of "decency" (which is why The Catcher In The Rye is still controversial, even now), a country where a visitor was refused access because of a "bald Vance" meme, a country where people were fired for pointing out that Charlie Kirk waas not a nice person, a country where the President removed all language relating to gender identity from government websites, not to mention Trump himself having performed numerous acts aimed at censoring the media and universities (often restricting funding or lobbing around sueballs)... a country where all of that is happening right now is not a country that is in any way eligible to lecture others on what may or may not be freedom of speech.

I trust this obviously AI generated image is obviously AI generated...

Also, Europe is not "trying to censor Americans". We simply expect content that is posted and available within the EU to respect EU laws on what can and cannot be said. Funny thing is, "free speech" is not a get-out-of-jail-free card here in the EU. Generally speaking, us Europeans have pretty free speech.
But, and this is critically important, we also have the consequences. If I were to tweet "Death to [insert some minority group]!", well that's both discrimination and hate speech. I should expect the post to taken down, my account to be terminated if it's not the first time I've said such a thing, and a visit from the boys in blue. Because - and here's a shocking thought - the ability of "whoever" to live in peace and not be discriminated against trumps somebody's right to blather hate. You just don't get to yell about free speech and then say whatever crap falls into the one remaining braincell. That's not how it works in civilised countries.
And if Americans can't handle the EU telling them to shut it, well the solution is simple. Geo-restrict the garbage so we don't get to see it. Most of us don't care what you say in your own country, we just don't want you thinking you have the constitutional right to say it in ours, you don't, your constitution doesn't override our laws and concepts of what's right and wrong.

And if that's censorship to you, well, The Catcher In The Rye would like a word about censorship. Y'all can't have it both ways.

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David Pilling, 23rd February 2026, 00:03

Does your clipboard send the contents to some place in the cloud, like the Win 11 one does...    Next you'll be telling me you don't have an OS that saves screen shots to the cloud.    Electronics always ends up as stock keeping, what got me involved in software, never run out of DO loops.    At the end of the day you have squillions of boxes, never make anything, just spend time looking through boxes.    I did well with wages envelopes with labels, in rectangular shape boxes, make a little file system for resistors etc.

Rick, 2nd March 2026, 18:02

Nope, the clipboard contents are stored in that SQL database, the one that somehow got mangled.    Screenshots also go into ~/Pictures. So, yes, I'm telling you I have an OS that doesn't save stuff to a cloud.    Nothing is stored on any cloud other than stuff I have explicitly put onto Google Drive. I have even turned off backing up my photos on my phone, because I can plug the thing into the computer and copy them onto a USB harddisc and maybe then onto a DVD-R...

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