May 2024 – Absolutely Baching

Choppy Waters...

Posted on 30th May 20243rd June 2024 by hjr

I find myself in a bit of a pickle of my own devising!

Back at the start of the year, I acquired a nice, new server and stuck TrueNAS on it (an 'appliance variant' of FreeBSD, run through a web interface). I then migrated this website off a Linux server I've used since 2014 or thereabouts and installed it into a FreeBSD 'jail' running on that machine (FreeBSD jails being that operating system's equivalent of KVM on Linux or Hyper-V on Windows: the OS's 'native', built-in and free virtualisation technology. As can be told from the fact that you're reading these words now, it's pretty obvious that everything converted across nicely and has been running well ever since. So, what's the issue? [...]

Service Interruption!

Posted on 12th May 20243rd June 2024 by hjr

A couple of months ago, I bought an old 27" iMac and installed it with Endeavour OS (an Arch Linux derivative) as its operating system. All has been fine since: Linux doesn't understand how to do the iMac's 5K screen resolution, but has no problem with the hardware otherwise and the 4K resolution I'm currently using is a delight. I've never previously used anything higher than 1980x1200, so 3840x2160 has been a (literally!) eye-opening experience. I'm never going back to 'standard high res' after this, anyway. Short version is, therefore: Apple make gorgeous hardware and an appalling operating system, but at least with Intel Macs, you can have the hardware with a sensible operating system after all!

Unfortunately, just last Thursday I attempted to install ZFS on the PC and although the installation seemed to work fine, rebooting the computer resulted in a 'no boot disk found' error state. I thought perhaps the internal SSD had failed, which would have been an expensive thing to fix... but, booting a live distro from a USB stick, the internal SSD was there, present and correct. Clearly, I had mangled its 'bootability' somehow, however, and rather than faff around with a bazillion possible fixes, I decided to wipe and re-install. [...]

Giocoso Version 3.06 Released

Posted on 1st May 2024 by hjr

A new release of Giocoso has been made available, fixing a recently-discovered minor, but annoying, bug. This brings the current version of Giocoso up to 3.06.

The bug was that if you used any of the non-default methods of selecting music to play from the Play Music menu (such as Option 2, where you specify filters to control the selection, or Option 5, where a playlist is used to determine what to play and in what order), the number of 'selections' to be played would be remembered if you halted those non-default plays early and then switched to using Option 1's 'play music with defaults' menu option. For example: take Option 2 and say 'play only music that lasts less than 10 minutes': maybe that will generate a list of things to be played that numbers 1345. After playing 4 things from that list, you interrupt the play (by issuing an Autostop request, for example) but do not quit Giocoso. Then you take Play Music option 1: the default, randomised selection of music now takes place... but Giocoso will still declare that there are 1345 items to be played (the top right-hand corner will display something like 'Selection 1 of 1345'). That's because it's a bug of omission: the default play method didn't explicitly set the limit on plays, so if another play option did, the default play method was stuck using that number of selections. [...]