jc blog - tales of a modern-day nomadic hunter-gatherer

Follow jcomeau_ictx on Twitter This is the weblog of Intrepid Wanderer. You never know what you might find here; graphic descriptions of bodily functions, computer programming secrets, proselytizing for the antichrist, miscellaneous ranting and kvetching, valuable information on living off the land... if you don't share my rather weird interests you may want to try slashdot instead.

You can consider my Del.icio.us links an extension to my blog, as are my LifeTango goals and my other to-do items. My to-buy list is also public, but only for sharing any useful ideas that might be there; I'm not requesting charity, neither do I offer it.

You can find me easily in google searches, as jcomeau, jcomeau_ictx, or jcomeauictx. There are lots of other jcomeaus, but AFAIK I'm the only jcomeau_ictx out there so far.

If you want to comment on anything you see here, try the new Facebook comments, reachable by clicking the "[comment]" link at the end of each post. If for some reason that isn't working, go ahead and email me, jc.unternet.net. You know what to do with the first dot. Make the 'subject' line something reasonably intelligent-looking or it goes plunk! into the spambasket unread.

This RSS feed may or may not work. Haven't fiddled with it in forever. RSS Feed


2020-04-30-1538Z

Bank of America processed my refunds overnight! Suck on it, Volaris!

Yesterday we took an Uber to LAP for the flight to Tijuana. It had been canceled. They don't give refunds, just vouchers for other flights that may or may not happen. Volaris is still advertising and selling tickets every day for flights they know aren't going to happen.

They used to be a great no-frills discount airline. Now they've gone full bandido. So when we got back (after another Uber ride) from the airport, I logged on to bankofamerica.com and requested refunds for the plane and BMX tickets. Got confirmation this morning that the refunds were applied to my account. [comment]

2020-04-29-2113Z

I was having a hell of a time putting two dropdown boxes side-by-side on my studytimer app. the "years" spinner (that's what Android calls them) seemed to be overwriting the "schools" spinner, and both had the same value of "1". I finally tried putting them vertically instead of horizontally, and the "schools" spinner was still set to "1", and the "years" spinner showed nothing! Turns out I had copied-and-pasted the code for the former into the latter without editing. Stupid, stupid error that cost me hours of Googling and experimenting.

Anyway, now it's working for both listening and other study. But I have to flesh out the "listen" code because right now it only plays the first file found. [comment]

2020-04-26-1710Z

Last night after watching one of the Bourne movies, my browser crashed hard.

The error showed in my log as:

[8212:8261:0426/100054.478202:ERROR:browser_gpu_channel_host_factory.cc(137)] Failed to launch GPU process.
[8212:8341:0426/100054.887705:ERROR:object_proxy.cc(615)] Failed to call method: org.freedesktop.Notifications.GetCapabilities: object_path= /org/freedesktop/Notifications: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.Notifications was not provided by any .service files
[8212:8261:0426/100056.084194:ERROR:browser_gpu_channel_host_factory.cc(137)] Failed to launch GPU process.
Received signal 4 ILL_ILLOPN 555bfd9b1d5b

Anyway killing and restarting was no help. So I apt updated and apt install chromium and now it's working again. Weird. [comment]

2020-04-26-0051Z

yesterday I ignored a slight putrid odor in the "leftovers soup" I ate and posted to Instagram. instead I spiced it up so it tasted good. bad idea. I felt gastrointestinal distress all night, and this morning had a very foul-smelling BM. so I've been taking Silybum marianum (milk thistle) tablets, about 12 since last night. [comment]

2020-04-24-1936Z

went jogging today, down Madero to the park at the north end, then over to the bike path. there was a police checkpoint right there at the park entrance, but neither of the cops said anything to me. there was a bunch of municipal police sitting at a picnic table on my way back, too, but they also were absorbed in their own lack of social distancing and didn't bother me.

I went to Los Paceños and El Killiki for beer. the medias, 12-ounce bottles, had gone up from 13 pesos a couple weeks ago to 17; and Killiki's Ballenas had gone from 35 to 40. but I'm set for beer until my flight leaves next Friday, or until mid-May if it doesn't. [comment]

2020-04-24-0337Z

While cooking the last couple of days, I'd periodically hear a "whoosh!" from my camp stove, but the flame didn't noticeably change, so I didn't overly worry about it. But today the frequency was such that I got concerned, and put my ear down closer to it. It turned out there was a leak in my jerry-rigged adapter, and there was a small flame coming out of the solder joint. I disassembled it and am using my last two butane canisters until my plane leaves (hopefully) in a week. [comment]

2020-04-19-0316Z

Finally got my studytimer app alerting me every 6 minutes. That's a start, but now I actually have to keep track of the time by course name and week. And a whole lot of other shit. The big question is, will I actually use it to study law? Or abandon my studies to flesh out the app? [comment]

2020-04-14-2237Z

well, this is embarrassing. I hadn't revisited my Apache configuration for years, and it turns out I had old SSLCertificateChainFile directives in my configs pointing to an obsolete cert. I was thinking that directive had to do with client certs.

Well, anyway, I pointed that to my letsencrypt cert fullchain.pem, and now all my websites check out at DigiCert. [comment]

2020-04-08-1923Z

with argparse, one specifies the options with underscores, and actually calls them with hyphens. took me around 24 hours to figure that out, for the umpteenth time. [comment]

2020-04-08-0007Z

It's been a major annoyance that, while I've been able to use certbot (Let's Encrypt) for my webserver certificates, and they work in most browsers, they haven't been working with openssl s_client or curl. So I finally did a lot of googling... there is lots of useless info out there on this.

What I finally ended up doing is googling the hash of the file that shows up in the strace -o/tmp/curl.log -f curl https://jcomeau.com, which is /etc/ssl/certs/4f06f81d.0. The cert I googled up is at github.com. First I verified it with openssl x509 -in letsencrypt.pem -text, then placed it into /etc/ssl/certs, then ran sudo c_rehash, which rebuilt the symlinks to hashes. finally now I can use curl. [comment]

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