Category: Housekeeping

Spring Cleaning

Posted on by hjr

A glance at my software downloads page will tell you that it wasn't just Giocoso which had lately developed a problem with accented characters on Manjaro+KDE. In fact, every piece of software I've written which uses the metaflac utility to read FLAC metadata tags suffered from the same problem. Accordingly, all needed to be fixed and all now have been fixed; each utility can therefore be updated whenever you're ready, using the utility name plus the --checkver run-time switch.

In other words, if you wanted to bump AES to its latest version, you'd type aes --checkver. If you needed to upgrade Niente, it would be niente --checkver. And so on. [...] 

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Geoblocking Enabled

Posted on by hjr

Not that it makes much difference in the great scheme of things, but just in case you use a VPN service that has servers in either Russia or Belarus: I've blocked visitors from both those countries from accessing this website, until further notice.

Of course, any Russian or Belarusian citizen will be able to VPN their way around such a block, fairly trivially, in their turn... but maybe every little helps. [...] 

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PC Change... One More Time!

Posted on by hjr

Four months in, and for some unknown reason, my Minisforum UM250 running Kubuntu decided to go all graphical-glitchy on me, as it had previously done in Manjaro and Arch. It then seemed to get better after a while, before going all wonky once more. Currently, it's in an 'OK' phase, but who knows how long that will last! I assume some software got updated somewhere along the line -maybe a driver of some sort- and this introduced instabilities where there were none before. But, frankly, at this point I don't care any more: the Minisforum is destined to be retired from desktop duties and instead will be translated to the loft, where it can run something 'server-like' that doesn't require a GUI nor day-to-day interaction with it. I haven't thought what, precisely, it might end up doing, but I'm sure I'll think of something before too long!

It's a shame (not least, because it wasn't cheap!), but I can't be having my daily driver desktop doing random things at random times. [...] 

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Tweaks and Twiddles

Posted on by hjr

Another round of software tweaks and twiddles -mostly minor, some a little more significant.

First, AMP has been bumped a couple of notches to 1.16. It's mostly to do with a few colour tweaks, but also an annoying bug dealing with distros that don't have the 'bc' utility installed by default.  Those should all now work fine (so that's OpenSuse, Endeavour OS, Debian, Arch and Raspbian). [...] 

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A couple of changes...

Posted on by hjr

You will perhaps have noticed a dramatic change to the 'look and feel' of the website: the result of getting bored with what had been the look-and-feel for nearly 2 years, I'm afraid! I've gone minimal and, I hope, more 'punchy' and easier to read in consequence.

There may be a few colour/font tweaks and twiddles in the days and weeks to come, but I think most of the disruption is done and dusted. [...] 

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