🦆 lil' blog

Linux as a Gaming Console

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:14:00 -0700

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20251126-linux-console-gaming/ -

Three years ago I built a computer for couch gaming. The build was straightforward, largely comprised of the last bits of now discounted but very performant hardware as AMD moved off of the AM4 socket and DDR4 memory, and I installed ChimeraOS on it based upon an anecdote about it I had heard on a certain wonderfully nerdy podcast¹.

Since then, the machine has just kept working and updating itself. I say that not as a brag, but to highlight how far Linux has come as a platform. I loathe faffing with computers to get them to work. In spite of appearances, I switched to Linux roughly a decade ago precisely because I found I spent less time screwing with the computer to make it work when running Linux than when running MacOS or Windows. ChimeraOS has been a clear example of where this extends not just to my personal/technical needs for a computer, but also to a computer as a box for entertainment.

All of this is to say there hasn’t been zero fiddling, but it has been very small. For anyone considering setting up a console-style PC, ChimeraOS is a viable and my recommended option. I haven’t bothered to try another system such as Bazzite, but that’s largely because ChimeraOS has just worked, and I haven’t wanted to screw around with the setup again.

Things That Work

Graphics acceleration (AMD-based)
- I knew that AMD has had better support on Linux, and opted to pickup a used 6000-series AMD GPU when I built the machine. It just worked. No special driver setup, no fiddling, nothing. I later upgraded to a 7900XTX, which also worked without any changes on my part.
HDMI audio
Wireless Controllers
- both Bluetooth based (various 8BitDo), as well as Microsoft’s Xbox controller with the Microsoft-specific USB dongle.
- Again, no faffing, no drivers, just worked.
VR Gaming from Steam
- Yep. This too. The only rub is SteamVR doesn’t work in Steam Big-Picture mode, so launching VR games involves first switching to desktop mode, then launching SteamVR. This isn’t a Linux limitation though, simply a Steam limitation.

Required Fiddling

Desktop switching impacting audio sink numbering
- One area that cropped up for a few months in late 2024, was that switching from Big Picture to Desktop mode and back would re-number audio outputs in a strange way, resulting in the system putting out audio via the analog ports on the computer rather than the HDMI ports. I ended up solving this with a minor configuration setting to set the default audio output, but it was so simple I forgot how and haven’t had to touch it since.
Non-SteamVR VR Gaming
- When I started using VR earlier this year, Steam shipped with a bug that didn’t properly let OpenXR games use SteamVR due to some improperly setup file associations. Ultimately adding the .desktop files from this Github bug (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/457) fixed the problem for me. It may be fixed out of the box now, as I saw some comments about this a few weeks back in one of the SteamVR changelog posts.

What Doesn’t Work

Sleep. I cannot figure out why, but the system tries to go to sleep, but will immediately wake itself back up. I don’t really need it, but it clearly doesn’t work.

And that’s it. My hope in highlighting all this is that I’ve been able to just use the system without messing with it. It isn’t perfect, but I’m pretty happy with only having one paper-cut to deal with. I used this machine to play a substantial amount of The Witcher 3 after many years, beat Chronos in Hades II while it was in early access, watch movies via the Jellyfin Flatpak easily installed via the ChimeraOS web interface, and finally sink some time into trying out a host of games I never got around to playing while they were relevant from my years in graduate school.

I don’t think most outsiders would see the discourse that dominated Linux when I first started using it in 2006 and could even imagine Linux reaching the level of polish that’s around today. I would encourage anyone wanting this type of setup to simply give it a try, because its probably less painful and less opinionated than the kids running around web-forums would have you otherwise believe.

The writeup and discussion largely centered on this post: https://wimpysworld.com/posts/steambox-vs-steamdeck/. ↩︎

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20251126-linux-console-gaming/ -

Summer of Failing to Propagate Roses

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 15:38:00 -0700

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20250928-rose-propagation/ -

up front: If you are in the Pacific Northwest, and have had luck propagating roses and have any concrete recommendations for success, by all means reach out on mastodon @siriusfox@social.treehouse.systems or via my bridged (info) Bluesky account @siriusfox.lil-bird.xyz with recommendations and guidance.

In the early few weeks of Spring this year, I set out to try to propagate my roses. It didn’t take long after moving in to realize (as I should have known) living in the suburbs is inconvenient, not particularly pleasant, and wildly isolating. That said, I also learned I really liked having established plants, and became determined to take some semblance of my roses with me when a move eventually does occur.

Growth Attempts

My first attempts came from looking for any sort of reputable writeup on how to propagate from cuttings. I first found a since removed website from the North Carolina State (internet archive link: Plant Propagation by Stem Cuttings | NC State Extension Publications) that lead me down a path of rotted out plants.

I diligently prepared the not-soil rooting medium, and planted a subset of each of my cuttings with (2-3 nodes each) in pots wrapped much like figure 1 in the link. The roses stayed moist, and happily rotted to nothing within 3 weeks.

deterred, I searched and found a few videos recommending both improving air circulation, and giving the cuttings small wounds near the base cutting, Other people recommended trying to root them in a glass of water.

In my case, neither produced roots. In spite of constantly watering only by letting water collect in the spill-tray of each pot, all of my cuttings for each family of rose I tried rotted away and died on various timelines. The cuttings in water remained green quite well, and even occasionally sent out new growth from the tops, but none ever produced any calluses or roots.

I’m now at the end of the season, trying one last attempt before the fall chills set in and the inevitable freeze ends my attempts for this year. Spurred by some guidance from a local grower, I’m attempting a few more shoots with a more controlled focus on humidity, as well as another soil-base.

Rather than watering the pots to keep the drip trays moist, I’m attempting some indoor growth with shoots in the same perlite mixture I used for my first attempts, but using a humidity monitor in the enclosure to try to prevent rot. This is the method I’m the most hopeful for, but still not optimistic.

Additionally, I’m attempting a similar approach in a smaller container, replacing the perlite mix with an akadama (Wikipedia) growth medium, typically used in bonsai if the search results are to be believed.

Finally, I’m taking a crack at outdoor growth with a few shoots in a small pot of the same akadama soil and regular misting and watering. I’m not optimistic about this method as I cannot keep the moisture levels in any particular window, or protect the shoots from heavy rain should it come through, but the local grower I met insisted that roses should be fine outdoors.

Pests and Treatments

Additionally, I’ve been hit by a couple common rose pests. Black spot (fungus), and the well known aphid.

I’ve had no particular luck with typical copper fungicide treatments, but I’ve found both the commonly prescribed treatments on both blog spam and “real” search results of mildly soapy water and neem oil sprays seem to keep the aphids away without harming the plants.

I recently found another written resource which seems to suggest that copper treatments are preventative, but not really effective as treatments to suppress an outbreak of fungus. It sounds like (strangely) neem oil is a modestly effective treatment for outdoor plants with black spot, and other sulfur-based fungicides are more effective as well. I’m hoping this page from the University of California system is less snake-oil than other webpages: Roses: Diseases and Abiotic Disorders (internet archive link in case this dies too)

Final 2025 Attempt

As the season ends, I’ll be trying out both treatments along with selective trimming to see if I can beat back the fungus and get a few more clippings in a few weeks for one more propagation attempt, but for this year I suspect I’m on my last attempt already.

If I have any luck I’ll report back, but given the claims of “its so easy,” I suspect either propagation is highly sensitive to temperature/humidity in a way that I’m not supporting, or is a heavy function of the specific plant genetics.

At this point I will gladly take concrete recommendations for both this year, potential over-the-winter methods, and alternatives to start out successfully next year for methods that work in the Pacific Northwest. Feel free to reach out if you’ve had success or guidance.

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20250928-rose-propagation/ -

For The Future: Donations and Subscriptions

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20250802-for-the-future/ -

One of my personal frustrations with the general state of the internet is the reduction of discover-ability of things that I might be interested in, or feel I want or need to support. Early StumbleUpon was a major component of my internet browsing habits in high school, and collections of things that aren’t ultimately referral links seems to dwindle. In the interest of trying to help support the mild corrective force of just being a damn web site again, I’m pointing out a few folks and projects I’m following/supporting and why.

This list is in no particular order, and some people and groups are just interesting, while others are clearly working to improve the world.

Molly White’s Citation Needed

The first I heard of Molly White was as a leader of the rather large hachyderm.io Mastodon instance. I didn’t really learn who she was until she gave a recent interview on Late Night Linux earlier this year. Since then I’ve been following the audio version of her Newsletter, and realized the messages she is broadcasting, advice she provides, and the invaluable journalism and research she performs is exactly what I want to see more of in the world. Its thanks to her writing that I realized concretely the connection I had never really made between my disdain for the current raft of political corruption in the US, and the ponzi schemes that grew out of crypto-currency and blockchain-obsessed financial scammers.

You can find her work, and support that work at citationneeded.news/.

KDE eV

There isn’t much I want to say about KDE specifically, but as a Mac refugee, I have a continual fear that my tools will be taken away from me and replaced with something terrible or nothing at all. I lost most of what made the Mac great as a platform as Apple re-worked the Mac and the majority of their first party software in the early-mid 2010’s, and I still lament the loss of services like Google Reader even earlier than that. While there are more layers than I can realistically keep track off in the stack of software that keeps my computer out of my way, the top-layer of applications and UI tools are all KDE-based these days, so I do a tiny bit to fund their work with a bit more than what would have been the equivalent of buying the regular releases of Mac OS X back when Apple charged for them.

Beyond the KDE Plasma Desktop, and the major KDE components like the Dolphin file manager, and Kate text editor, tools like KAlgebra (a graphing calculator), KMyMoney (a personal finance tool),

You can support KDE work financially at kde.org/donate/.

Well There’s Your Problem Podcast (WTYP)

WTYP is a podcast about disasters (usually tied to engineering, society, and in some senses policy), with slides. The episodes recant details of a disaster with context about how the disaster came about, and who was involved with a humorous bent. The show isn’t for everyone, but its likely to put a smile on the face of people who can relax with the humor and reflect on the disasters without wallowing in the doom.

Their shows are on YouTube at youtube.com/@wtyppod, and they do periodic bonus episodes with a broader set of topics available via Patreon at patreon.com/c/wtyppod.

Main Engine Cut Off (MECO) Podcast

Anthony Colangelo does a favor to anyone who follows rocketry, space news, and space policy by reading basically all of the big news in space, and summarizing it in a set of regular audio shows. He frequently interviews big players in the space arena (NASA administrators, leaders of major companies, leads of major programs and science projects, etc.). As someone in this industry, I find everything Anthony provides useful and interesting, and regularly find myself naturally pulling information he collects when talking with coworkers who are new to the industry, or trying to contextualize why we do or don’t do specific things.

You can find his work at mainenginecutoff.com/. I also highly recommend the show he does with Jake Robinson each week, Off Nominal, at offnom.com/.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

I view the EFF as what the ACLU would be if it were founded in my lifetime and buy someone who’s world view was shaped by the internet rather than by the newspaper. In many cases they are taking action in spaces I would expect the ACLU to act with the aim of defending the civil liberties of people in the digital age. Like the ACLU they’ve had egregious miss-steps, and they have been reticent to backtrack on some of those miss-steps, but I haven’t really seen an organization that shares the view and general goals of defending the rights of the people in a similar way.

You can read more about the EFF and support them at eff.org.

David Revoy

I should probably do a separate post just artists that are doing particularly compelling work these days, but David takes a particularly special spot because of his commitment to the commons and providing free (libre) access to his works. That wouldn’t be all that compelling if he were just someone releasing “stuff” for the world, but David is two-fold exceptionally talented with a distinct and recognizable artistic style and sense of humor, and committed to sharing his workflow for using historically Linux-unfriendly tools like graphics tablets and drawing displays under Linux. David’s various guides to how he setup his computers were the the original set of guides that I used in 2014 when I stopped screwing around with MacPorts and Linux on-the-side, and dove into making Ubuntu my day-to-day operating system, with a Mac on-the-side.

David’s work is found on davidrevoy.com. His recent “Retaliation” piece is part of why I’m writing this piece today. Reproduced under CC-BY-SA 4.0 below.

PhotoPrism

There is a whole set of tools I let silently run to keep my digital life out of my day-to-day fiddling, and PhotoPrism is one such tool. When paired with a recommended iOS or Android application that will perform regular uploading of photos from a phone, the whole process makes dealing with having a camera in your pocket a no-brainer.

PhotoPrism provides an easy interface for both storing and sorting my photographs, and also makes useful use of machine learning to do facial recognition and subject identification using local computing. If you used iPhoto in the early 2010’s, you’ll find PhotoPrism has all of the major non-editing features. I can browse a map of my photos by location, find photos of particular people, and browse by various tags and dates. Best of all, the storage on the backend is just a directory of photos. If someday the project up and dies, I’m not locked into a database format I cannot recover from.

PhotoPrism’s free tier is more than sufficient to decide if you like the tool for an extended duration, and their subscription for additional features is modestly priced.

PhotoPrism is available for download at photoprism.app.

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20250802-for-the-future/ -

Projects

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/projects/ -

You might find the following projects/domains of mine handy or interesting:

a countdown to Spring for the northern hemisphere.
git
- including a bashrc.d utility used to “build” a .bashrc for a given host from a common configuration.

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/projects/ -

Lenovo Yoga 7i Aura and Linux - Alpha Days

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20241127-linux-lenovo-yoga-7i-aura/ -

I’ve been limping along for a while now on an old Intel i5-4200u based laptop that I picked up in graduate school back in 2014. These days I’ve taken to doing more and more light work away from my desktop, and dealing with the machines anemic CPU has started to exceed my patience, to say nothing of some of the fixable annoyances like a defucnt battery and a terrible physical experience in the form of weight and a non-responsive touchpad.

To that end, I spent some time this fall scoping out potential replacements as essentially a text processing machine. My view has always been that a laptops first and second jobs (in either order) are to be functional enough for non-primary use (to whatever extreme you personally decide is adequate), and readily portable to travel where you want to bring it. For me, that means being light enough and small enough that I’d lug it around without a second thought.

The laptop I opted to go for was a Lunar Lake-based Yoga Slim 7i Aura. I won’t get too much into the specifics about the specs, you can look that up yourself, but my end goal is to run Linux on this thing just like all my other machines, with as few compromises as possible, and no fuckery. The bottom-line-up-front unfortunately is that at all of 8-days past the release of Linux Kernel 6.12 (which enables most of the Lunar Lake initial support functions), this laptop is nowhere near being Linux ready.

Windows Setup

As a Linux nut, the first thing I needed to do was to get the laptop into some sort of functional state, independent of my desire to run Linux on the thing. To try to avoid the whole Microsoft Account shenanigans, I opted to avoid connecting the laptop to my network until after I had finished the OEM setup process. This turned out to be relatively painless overall. I followed the steps at the following website: How to bypass internet connection to install Windows 11 - Pureinfotech

In the event the website goes away. The instructions amounted to going through setup until you reach the screen that tries to force you to setup a network connection, then to press Shift-F10 to open up a command prompt. Typing OOBE\BYPASSNRO will trigger a restart. From then you’ll repeat the first couple of setup steps, but at the WiFi setup screen you’ll see an “I don’t have internet” text non-button button to continue through the setup process. Eventually you’ll end up at Windows 11 proper.

Physical Impressions

I’m happy with the overall product. The display isn’t OLED, but I didn’t see any light bleed (after using it more, there is very slight bleed near the “bump” around the web camera), and the contrast is quite good. One of the reasons I picked this thing up was for the 500 nit display knowing it would give me a brighter experience overall.

While I was tinkering with the machine at a local big-box electronics store, I noted the good but not class leading track pad responsiveness. Frankly, the pointing precision is a tad better than the multi-thousand dollar Dell machine that my employer pushes on me over using a Desktop workstation, which was really the bar I had for acceptability. The pointer is precise and fast enough to do the subset of things that I can’t fall back to a touchscreen to work with, and pushing up on good enough that I might be okay without a touchscreen or proper mouse entirely. Not quite, but close.

The audio visual experience is very good. I pulled up a personal rip I had of the Lord of the Rings HDR Bluray to quickly test it. The audio was immersive, and the added dynamic range of the display pleasantly enhanced the opening scenes of the Fellowship of the Ring. With a hour or two of futzing with Windows, it was time to get underway testing Linux.

Linux Steps and Plan

I knew that the Lunar Lake series of Intel processors really only came around in kernel version 6.12, which by my luck released only a week or so before I’m writting this post. I’m a don’t-fuck-with-it kind of user though, so my plan was to try to find the least annoying way to get up and running.

On my decrepit 2014 Acer laptop, I’ve been trying out Fedora Silverblue as a not-my–primary-workstation operating system, living with Gnome rather than my favored KDE, and leaning on Firefox Sync, and Seafile as the two main ways to get this mobile system working the way I want it to work.

Fedora Silverblue v41 is the current release, with a 6.11 series kernel, just shy of my needs. So to get started, I pulled the latest nightly of the Fedora rpm-ostree image (which to my understanding eventually becomes Fedora Silverblue), and booted into it to see what I could get working.

To go through this process, I ran into one item to do before I even tried an installer, disable windows drive encryption. While I don’t mind the drive encryption in and of itself, if the drive is/was encrypted the odds of me successfully partitioning it to give Linux some space to exist were/are slim to none. I didn’t even try to resize the partition without decrypting the drive.

Next, I wanted Windows in a “healthy” state. While I don’t want to use it, in the event Linux turned into an outright faff, I wanted Windows to be only prickly and not thorny. To that end, once I’d disabled as much adware as I could find, I ran the full suite of Windows updates. Which took most of the evening.

Actually Trying Linux

To get into the BIOS, this machine uses an undocumented F2 key which allows for a limited set of boot options. One of these was to enable Microsoft’s third party certificate bundle, which allows major Linux distributions using a signed kernel to boot without disabling Secure Boot.

Once that was done, F12 will bring up the boot menu for attached and internal drives. This has to be done to boot any installation media as the default boot order always places known items (read, internal storage) before attached items.

Lets just say it was not a great success out of the gate. Fedora’s rawhide releases were the most promising given the kernels were the most up to date, but each boot left me with a non-functioning track pad and touchscreen when in the installers, and enough unfamiliarity that I wasn’t about to try re-partitioning my one working disk with a temperamental installer.

The very next day, Lenovo’s Windows software pushed out a firmware update for the track pad, the touchscreen, and the BIOS proper, which I was hopeful would clean up the install pain. Unfortunately, the bugs gating booting most consistently for me are NetworkManager.service startup failures that are unrelated to all three of the above. The long and short of this for me is that the major Hardware Enamblement kernel only dropped 8 days ago, and until the boot situation has settled down I’m unlikely to make much headway.

Next Steps

In the short term, I would like to modify a live ISO and trying to trim down the NetworkManager timeout from the default 10 minutes (yes, because Fedora designs these images with monster network machines in mind) down to 15 seconds to see if I get a bit more sane behavior with a more aggressive timeout. The snag being when unsquashing and resquashing the filesystem for use, the boot begins to fail earlier in the boot process, presumably because it’s unable to find the modified squashfs.img due to some sort of UUID based identification that I’m not setting up quite right.

I’ll post back once some more distributions are rolling out their nightlies with 6.12 series kernels to see where we’re trending, and hopefully contribute to the hardware enablement. In the short term I’ll pull what information I can out of Windows for the various hardware elements with the goal of writing up what I can about the hardware in the device.

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20241127-linux-lenovo-yoga-7i-aura/ -

KDE Neon's Teething

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20240406-neon-teething/ -

I wanted to highlight my experience with the March KDE Neon upgrade from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6. It is far from noteworthy that so many folks have run into a sea of different bugs and pain points right after the launch, and I am no exception.

Of note though, is I’ve had two instances where my system was rendered pseudo-unusable by failed upgrades. I say pseudo-unusable because in each case I could get a browser and core software working, and in the better case even the full desktop with minimal wrangling.

Ultimately the problem in both cases was a package as part of the upgrade was not upgraded, and the process stopped halfway through. Fixing was always as simple as using apt or aptitude to find the borked package (originally the full plasma desktop package, and recently a libkcolorpicker package), purging the offending legacy/blocking package by using dpkg --remove <package name>, followed by either an apt upgrade or an apt --fix-broken install.

As it stands, while I’m annoyed by these bugs, they’re far from show-stopping. In neither instance have I needed to reinstall the operating system or roll back to a legacy version to get things working, and the bugs I’ve seen have been less severe than similar bugs I’ve encountered during upgrades on Windows and ye-olden-day’s on the Mac.

For folks seeking a generally stable, user focused, and highly-usable desktop, I still recommend KDE Neon as the OS of choice, in spite of the recent Plasma 6 upgrade pains. Ultimately the Neon team clearly heard the wailing of their install base, and is unlikely to do something that they think could incur vitriol and scorn being thrown at them again. The larger problems that plagued the upgrade by in large part weren’t even bugs in the KDE software itself, but were problems caused by inappropriately failing to purge now transitional/deprecated Plasma 5 packages that were superseded by a different package name. As such, new installations aren’t going to run into the same upgrade pains (and upgrade residuals pains) that current users are very rarely still stumbling into.

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20240406-neon-teething/ -

Anki Mozc Failures

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 11:00:00 -0700

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20231006-anki-mozc-failures/ -

Just a quick note for fellow users of the Anki SRS software specifically running on Linux. Since my update to Jammy (Ubuntu 22.04) a while back, I ran into an issue where some subsets of words or input combinations would cause ibus to barf with rather annoying consequences. Until this last week, this would only manifest when typing a specific subset of katakana words.

Typing スル for example, would die right after typing the ’s’, and then the input manager would start typing directly in Latin characters until I re-invoked all of the keyboard shortcuts to effectively restart mozc and ibus.

Fast forward to today, and non-katakana words starting with ’m’ started giving me grief. As it turns out, this is a bug in mozc that was fixed sometime last year. Thank you to one mvf on this thread on the Anki Web forums. Their guidance indicated the bump to somewhere around mozc 2.26.4472 would clear up the issue.

The default version of the mozc packages that ship with jammy are out of date, but fortunately a new enough version has been brought into Jammy backports for use.

The Fix

To get said fix without any shenanigans, I needed to:

enable jammy-backports
define the “pinning” behavior for the mozc family of packages
update, and re-login.

Enable Backports

The following assumes you’re a KDE user, but the fix should work just as well if you’re using gedit, nano, vi, or emacs.

Open up a new text file to add the backports line

kate /etc/sources.list.d/jammy-backports

And add the jammy-backports repo. Strictly speaking you only need universe here, but with the package pinning we’re about to setup none of the non-mozc packages should be affected

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jammy-backports main restricted universe multiverse

Enable Pinning for the `mozc` packages

Open a configuration file for the pinning of packages.

kate /etc/apt/preferences.d/52-backports-jammy-manual

In my case, I wrote some verbose comments for future me. The wildcards on line 5 below will capture (as of writing) 10 packages in the ubuntu repositories. I’ve only got 8 of the packages installed. The syntax is described ab it more in this debian/ubuntu documentation. In my case I’m saying any package that has a name matching the wildcard syntax on line 5, should utilize a package contained in the archive (because of the a= syntax) named jammy-backports with a priority of 500. A priority of 500 means (per the documentation linked above) obey the pinning if the version of the package in the pinned repo is newer than the version requested otherwise.

Because I’ve put the source definition in sources.list.d the backport should be automatically disabled when I upgrade to 24.04 sometime next year, but in the event that fails for some reason, the pinning configuration here should prevent me from being stuck on an “old” version in the jammy-backports repo, assuming there is a newer version of the mozc packages in the mainline repository.

# Added 2023-10-06 to bring in a Mozc backport to fix a really annoying bug
# where Anki would lose MOZC imput some times. Notably when typing スル but
# suddenly also when typing words that sart with "m"

Package: mozc-* *-mozc *-mozc-*kate
Pin: release a=jammy-backports
Pin-Priority: 500

Update and profit

At this point you can use your usual update mechanisms. In my case this was first to check that this was going to upgrade only the 8 mozc packages a had installed, then to invoke the KDE neon upgrader, log-out, and log-back in.

sudo apt update
sudo apt list --upgradable

Inspect the listing above. It was good for me, so I ran the update

sudo pkcon update

Finally!

Low and behold, my woes are fixed.

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20231006-anki-mozc-failures/ -

3D Printing

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20230806-printer/ -

I don’t know if there has honestly been an uptick of it recently, but of late it seems a not insignificant fraction of the folks I interact with online have selected now as the moment to either get into 3D printing as a hobby, or to dramatically upgrade their setups.

3D printing was just taking off when I was in college. My recollection of it was always that the process was very cool, but finicky and unreliable at all times. The things people produced were always little trinkets, and it never really struck me as a practical tool. In 2018 when I started work professionally, I found my new employer made heavy use of laser sintering based 3D printing to produce valves, nozzles, and pressure chambers of unusual shape and size. It still seemed very niche, but the applications to high-performance metallic structures where machining could be either prohibitively expensive or impossible made more sense than what I had seen to date.

Fast forward to today, and I finally succame to my curiosity and purchased a 3D printer. I wasn’t sure how much I really wanted to get into it, and I opted to pickup a Sovol SV06 based upon okay reviews, and the minimal up-front cost investment.

I’m very glad that I did.

There is something fantastically mentally empowering about being able to sit down one morning, hash out an idea in a CAD tool, and by the end of the day hold a working solution in your hands. I haven’t even spent a week with the printer yet, but I’ve found myself interacting with it in some way every evening since I set it up.

I assume everyone getting into the hobby gets into printing odds and ends other people have made, and I’m no exception. My house already has a few one-inch animals hiding on the frames of photos, clocks, and shelves.

More importantly though, I’m curious about something outside of work in a way I haven’t really been in ages. There are lots of topics I want to dive into outside of work, but they tend to be of the same mental engagement as the things I do at work (i.e., textually and analysis heavy, and execution light), and printing represents a tangible thing that plays well with having low physical energy and limited ability to push my body physically.

For anyone who has been curious about giving 3D printing a try, given how cheap it is to get started, and how much it can empower you to build small things quickly without extensive tooling, I would strongly encourage diving into the hobby to check things out.

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20230806-printer/ -

Modifying Edraw's Save Location

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20230724-edraw-home/ -

This is a relatively quick post. I’m a Linux user pragmatist. I firmly believe in the ideals of Free and Open Source Software, but I’m not opposed to paying for my software. Furthermore, when it comes down to it if I absolutely need to, I can accept having to use some proprietary tools provided they are functional and don’t inherently violate my privacy and my rights as a person.

All of this is a long winded way to say I’ve been looking at tools that are Visio-esque to help plan out the area I’d like to function as my office. Historically I would have done this with a tool like Inkscape, but I really wanted something a little more focused on the task at hand. I’m not a fan of having to manually manage the scale of the room.

Enter EdrawMax. They ship a Linux version, have a free trial, and offer a “pay once, use forever” version of their license, even if it is a bit expensive. This isn’t a review of the tool, but to a first order I’ve been pretty happy with the trial thus far. The big annoyance I’ve run into is Edraw’s insistence that all of its junk goes in the root of my $HOME directory, without offering a configuration option to place it elsewhere. Fortunately, Edraw uses a little bash script to run their tool, and a trivial modification fixes this problem.

To redirect the save point for the Edraw data, override $HOME in the context of the executable in this script. In my case, this means changing the script they provide from listing 1 below, to listing 2.

As-Shipped (Listing 1): /opt/EdrawMax-12/edrawmax.sh

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH='/opt/EdrawMax-12/lib/'
/opt/EdrawMax-12/EdrawMax "$@"

Modified (Listing 2): /opt/EdrawMax-12/edrawmax.sh

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH='/opt/EdrawMax-12/lib/'
_LOCAL_FAKE_HOME="${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}"
if [[ ! -d "$_LOCAL_FAKE_HOME/Edraw" ]]; then
    mkdir -p "$_LOCAL_FAKE_HOME/Edraw"
fi
export HOME="$_LOCAL_FAKE_HOME"
/opt/EdrawMax-12/EdrawMax "$@"

With the above modification in place, both calling the script, and using the .desktop launcher the application installs onto your system will redirect that junk into ~/.local/share/Edraw.

Enjoy.

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20230724-edraw-home/ -

Don't Grad School

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 12:45:14 -0700

🦆 lil' blog http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20230703-grad-school/ -

Back in December, when I got re-started in Fediverse as Twitter started into its decline, I took the anniversary of my Ph.D. defense to briefly comment. Not much time has passed since then, but I felt the need to reiterate and put a stake my statement at the time.

Every time my group at work brings on a new graduate, I keep my mouth shut about grad school as long as possible. I don’t think anyone should be required to take on the baggage I’ve built up, or to listen to me yell at the clouds about it without active prompting. I don’t see value in trying to highlight my Dr-ness to get work done, and I want to save everyone the wasted time. My existing coworkers eventually let the new hires know about my Ph.D., spoiling the illusion I maintain of “just being another engineer.” At that point, the new graduate will usually ask about going back to graduate school for a theoretical Masters or Ph.D. I’ve found myself continually reaching for this statement, to read in full to them, to minimize the ranting I would fill their ears with otherwise.

Coming up on the 3rd anniversary of becoming a Ph.D.

Obligatory reminder: Graduate school is nearly universally a terrible, horrible, awful decision. It’s a career decision that will give you largely pseudo-prestige among groups of people with authoritarian values. It may give you some limited advanced knowledge, but that is not assured.

Most importantly, it is very easy for the environment to destroy your ability to regulate emotions, work habits, and to meaningfully rest your mind.

- siriusfox¹

Beyond that short advice, I’m take a moment to highlight the bizarre ways graduate school screws with my thoughts today. In spite of my coworkers, managers, family, and friends all providing reaffirming praise for my work, attitude, and outlook, I’m plagued by irrational fear of failing to meet expectations eventually. This isn’t inherently unique, but impostor syndrome doesn’t magically go away upon crossing the Ph.D. finish line. I also have visceral reactions to anything associated with my alma mater. If I see so much as license plate holder or window sticker when commuting referencing my college, my mind will crawl with rage and hatred for at least a few minutes (this is made worse by the painfully assertive attitude most alumni of my college typically have), and words that were once just part of my vocabulary are effectively off-limits in my own speech, owing to how concretely they are bound to a phase of my life that was so destructive.

Roughly 1/6th of my life was spent in a destructive and dysfunctional environment, but the impact it has on my mind is significantly larger than its relative duration. There are people I knew from before grad school, that intimately know who I am, that I have forgotten sans the ability to recognize their faces. These people know how I behave, what makes me tick, where my skills are, and where I will need help. I may see them at friends’ weddings and they might ask how I’ve been; I don’t even know what to tell them. Grad school is my river of styx, blocking both some of the painful baggage but also obfuscating nearly twenty years of all but the strongest and most long-lived of my friendships.

With all of that in mind, I don’t for a moment let someone waste so much of their youth considering or pursuing something as clearly worthless as an advanced degree without a eyes wide open to how easily the process can break people, and how little is likely to be gained from obtaining that degree.

2022 Dec 03: https://social.treehouse.systems/@siriusfox/109451912449258082 ↩︎

- http://blog.lil-bird.xyz/log/20230703-grad-school/ -