Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I only have a bunch of unfinished projects I’d like to write about, but not are really ready, so I’m picking one or two and expanding on them with a mini-update. Let’s get started!
NFS
In my last photo archive post, I talked about mounting a file share manually. This is fine and all, but my intention this week was to get it connecting automatically on boot. I had a bit of a bump when I tried connecting to a share called “Photo Trunk” or something like that. When mounting, I would properly escape the space in the file path with a backslash, but the file system table didn’t get the memo. Long story short, it needs “040” instead of an escaped space. I don’t know why, but it just does. Shortly thereafter, I ran into a permissions barrier I have yet to resolve.
Update:
In a random search I wasn’t expecting to go anywhere, I managed to find that I needed to replace the space with “\040” and not just “040”. I tested it with sudo mount -va. It’s working now.
Manjaro Shakedown
Arch has a reputation of being unstable, but so up to date that software any newer is yet to compile. Manjaro Linux aims to shift the balance around to be more friendly to people who don’t know a compiler from a package manager. I’m also being a tad dangerous –or so I hear– by running the KDE desktop environment on an NVIDIA card, especially with the proprietary drivers.
I’ve noticed several times while playing modded minecraft that my desktop environment decides, “You know what? We’re just going to crash and start over from the login screen, even if login on boot is disabled. Oh, and we’re going to make it look like it might be a power blink and spook Shadow each time it happens.” –Note: I now have login at boot. I’ve reached out for help across Discord, but nothing conclusive has shown up. I managed to capture a log file right after a crash, but nobody helping me found anything conclusive. The best guess was that because the traceback for some problem in the xorg logs was handled by a library to manage input, these crashes may be related to the random stutter my wireless keyboard is experiencing, though I’m skeptical.
I’ve had this kind of keyboard for years, and I’ve always had stuttering problems, regardless of OS. Nevertheless, whenever we looked, it was the only wireless, ergonomic keyboard on the market that we could find. I’ve even experienced these frustrating stutters while writing here, now, yet I’ve put up with this particular keyboard til I’ve worn the matte finish on many keys until they’re mirror smooth.My N and Numpad_2 keys are totally missing their decals, and several other keys are already unrecognizable.
It’s possible my keyboard is crashing the desktop environment. Every time I’ve had the crash, I’ve been actively playing, and at least two of those times, I was fighting keyboard/mouse lag at the time. I’ve had another small glitch where a small, almost square rectangle of pixels along the bottom of my screen goes black for everything but my cursor. Unplugging my monitor and plugging it back in didn’t help, but the issue was gone after a reboot.
The more I use Manjaro, the more feels familiar. Really, the biggest difference from Debian I know about is the repositories inherited from Arch. The terminal acts a little differently in a way I don’t like, but I know that if I spent the time to bother changing it, I could. On the whole, I’m familiarizing myself with both a distribution and a desktop environment. A far future project may be to assemble my own experience from elements of everything I’ve seen.
Modded Minecraft Update
This one would never get a post to itself, but I’m after filler. Just tonight, I added a couple mods we were talking about, one to make the ender dragon leave an egg each time, and another to prevent endermen from making off with your grass, dirt, TNT, or other blocks they list as portable. The hardcore modding culture hasn’t moved past 1.12.2 yet, and it was 1.13 that introduced datapacks that really opened up lightly modified gameplay to otherwise strictly vanilla servers. The built-in function involving mob griefing is great, but nerfs creepers and ghasts — two otherwise harmless mobs when totally ignored. To ambitious players, endermen’s abilities to move blocks are more annoying than fun.
The Importance of Help
I’ve been chugging along regularly for three years now, and I only remember being late on a post by a single day once. I have proven to at least myself that I can write regularly. Along the way, I’ve found communities to solicit help from. At some point, I’d like to get a little more serious about my presentation because a default WordPress theme and a weekly wall of text wouldn’t insight confidence in me if I were looking at a tech blog. I know I chose this platform because I could get access to the low-level code, but I’ve only glanced at it once or twice. I don’t know any web design, and I can’t get excited about learning it. I’m not even sure I have the comments section working correctly!
Final Question
I decided to include the extra formatting this post on a whim to better separate the discrete partial projects, but I think I might use it in the future. What do you think of it?