Originally I was going to mess around with Silverblue in a VM before considering using it on my HTPC. In theory it sounded like it would work very well - an immutable, rollback-able OS seems like the perfect thing for the one computer that ALWAYS needs to work for less tech-savvy folks in the house. But the first release of Silverblue seemed to still be a bit rough around the edges. Lots of recent blog posts on Fedora Planet (a blog aggregator for folks who participate in the Fedora project) seemed to indicate that things were in a better place now for Silverblue. Still, I was going to first mess around in a VM. But then I had to reboot the computer after things went awry with the display and this time I wasn’t able to get around the Free Magic issue that had been plaguing me for a few months now since upgrading to Fedora 31 (in anticipation of Fedora 30 being out of the support window). The Free Magic issue basically would appear after the grub menu and while others’ reports on bugzilla seemed to indicate that a kernel upgrade fixed it for them, such was not the case for me. For a while it worked such that if I was there on reboot and hit enter on the grub entry, it would work (while it would fail if you left it to boot on its own). But tonight it would not yield. The computer had gone catatonic. So, I figured it was as good a time as any to try and move to Silverblue. As a bonus, I was going to move the installation to an SSD, so I still have the old, borked installation if things go completely wrong (although I’d still need to fix the Free Magic issue).

As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.

Brown Sugar Cookies

While I did a lot of cooking in March, I only made one new dish - Brown Sugar cookies. I’d had regular sugar cookies my entire life. I’m pretty sure this is the first time I had sugar cookies made with brown sugar instead. The brown sugar definitely took these cookies to a whole other taste realm where the molasses in the sugar added another dimension to the taste. I’m not saying it’s supplanted [white] sugar cookies in my heart, but that there’s a place for each of them. If the kids ate more cookies or if I didn’t care about my heart health (most cookies have a LOT of butter) I’d make these a lot more often.

Recently upgraded my server to Fedora 31 as the Fedora 30 support window had closed. All I had to do was disable the bat Modular Repo. It wasn’t obvious I needed to do this at first, but I found a bugzilla that covered it. Then everything proceeded.

I also updated my main laptop to Fedora 32; it’s always my first upgrade since it’s not my main machine. That one required a few modular repos to be disabled as well as a bunch of conflicts from Python 2 packages. By using dnf’s –auto-erase (or whatever the command actually is), everything proceeded and seems to be running just fine. I was a little worried at first with the warning about coming back from a locked screen in KDE, but I decided I could live with it on the laptop. So far, either the issue doesn’t affect my laptop or I haven’t triggered the conditions.

Being a male, who’s racially white, I never had any trouble with finding representation on TV. This hasn’t always been the case for everyone, although it’s only recently (last 5ish years or so) that folks have begun to speak out on how important representation is. When you rarely see yourself in media, I’ve been told, you feel left out by the culture. Disney started rectifying this in its Disney Junior line; first with Doc McStuffins.

You can watch the following video. There are also text instructions below the video. (including getting sddm working)

https://youtu.be/JBd7R4YDWPA

I started off with just a boot install of CentOS 8, so I wouldn’t have Gnome or any other unnecessary cruft installed. After installation, I enabled the EPEL repository - latest directions for that are here.

After that, I had to install KDE by typing:

sudo dnf groupinstall “KDE Plasma Workspaces”

systemctl set-default graphical.target

A little over a year ago, I put CentOS 7 on my Acer Aspire One. We had no idea when RHEL 8 was coming out (turns out just a few months later when I was at the Red Hat Summit, it was the release party for RHEL 8), so 7 went on there. And at Red Hat Summit I learned that, while running CentOS 7, suspend worked on that netbook. However, it was already pretty old by the time I put it on the netbook and it was missing certain libraries and had old versions of libraries like Go so I couldn’t do something like install Weechat-Matrix on there.

Somewhere around 15 years ago, I started learning Python because I’d gotten deep into genealogy and started using the free and open source project Gramps. As I was also pretty deep into free software (somewhere around that time I became a supporting member of the FSF for a few years - and I think my smile.amazon.com still donates to them) I got interested in the idea of helping projects by contributing code. Python seemed like it wasn’t too hard to learn (compared to C++), so I started learning. I never did end up contributing to Gramps as I found GUI programming incredibly hard. In fact, it was something like 6 years ago before I created some useful GUIs (that weren’t copied out of tutorials) and only last year that I started making good, competent GUIs using the QT toolkit.

For my btrfs snapshot program, snapintime, I have reached version 1.1.1. About six years after starting this project, it now covers all the cases I wanted to back when I started. I’m very happy with where it’s now at.

For my Extra Life Donation Tracker ( PyPi page here), I’ve reached my v4.2.0 release. This release fixes some of my oldest issues (#s 13 and 14 - while the current highest issue is #95), and allows users maximum flexibility in the way they want to set up their tracker window. They can change the font face and color of the text that displays the latest donation and they can change the background color if chromakey green doesn’t work for their use case.

Recently I got a bunch of manga through a Humble Bundle sale. Having read “authentic” style manga before, the Kobo Clara HD seemed to be about the right size to read manga without having to do any zooming. So, naturally I uploaded the .epub for the Kobo. It was HORRIBLE. It cut off part of the image and made it impossible to read. After a bit of Googling around, I found the suggestion to use the .CBZ file, as the Kobo was capable of reading it. That worked very well. The only real bummer is that it has a margin around the page that makes it just SLIGHTLY reduced in size. It’s not a problem for the text, but some of the fine details can be a little hard to make out. Overall, it worked VERY well and I recommend it as a way to read manga in ebook form (allowing you to carry all of a modest run on your device). (But might not fit all of, say, One Piece or Dragon Ball.)