Month: December 2023

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Merry Christmas 2023

Good Morning and Merry Christmas from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project. Let’s get started!

My church has a still life Nativity we’ve been helping with since I was a kid. In our production, the story of Jesus’ birth as read in the books of Matthew and Luke is broken up into several scenes with a matching audio track lasting around a minute each. After years of my scene director calling dibs on me as a wise man searching for Jesus, I wanted to see the production edited up as a video.

It’s been another five or six years, but we finally managed to get our camcorder and tripod on the set. My father was kind enough to film all the scenes on our breaks between shifts.

For an open source video editor, I found OpenShot to be around my skill level. I took a video editing class in high school, so I’m comfortable moving things around between layers on a timeline. While I could have done with a better visual representation of the audio, it was heaps better than when I tried Windows Movie Maker.

I only had a couple technical issues this time around. The old version in the Ubuntu repositories didn’t run once installed on my father’s new computer. I found an appimage file which both has a newer version and actually launched. My second problem was how my father’s fancy new (probably still drop damaged as it turns out) computer was struggling with the preview. I found a recommendation aimed at Windows users about bumping up the audio sample rate to match a new native frequency, and that helped me.

Editing itself took a bit longer than I expected. Long story short, I couldn’t edit out all the chimes meant to tell visitors when to advance to the next scene, the addition of two scenes to the audio track last year was rushed, the lighting was poor more often than not… The list goes on. I did the best with what I had. And for the effort invested, I’d say it did pretty well.

Takeaway

My original vision I still wish to pursue is to have a special session where attention is given to the lighting and the same actors play the same parts when they show up in multiple scenes.

Final Question

Creative writing prompt: How would you infiltrate Santa’s workshop to plant the plans for a new toy?

I look forward to hearing from you on my Socials!

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Commissioning my Father’s New Computer


Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 and today my father (Leo_8472) and I are diagnosing, fixing, and commissioning the new Thelio Mira we ordered from System76. If you haven’t yet, be sure to read last week’s post where we unboxed it. Let’s get started!

Continuing on from last week where Leo and I verified receipt of the purchased hardware and started customizing KDE (desktop environment), I made my own account and began stress testing it with an old? benchmarking program called GLmark2. At no point did I hear any fans straining to keep components cool when running this test, but my first time running it, the whole system destabilized spectacularly. Effects included a hue shift and massive color depth reduction – followed by a constellation, of glitch rectangles poking through from a terminal session – and finally a seemingly irrelevant section of system log with purple (and later sometimes green) glitch lines in front of them. The system responded to system requests (alt+print screen+<command key>), so I got well acquainted with using them to reboot.

Included with the purchase is a 1 year warranty, but it cost me a day waiting for my father’s administrative assistance, which turned into the motif of the whole week. In the meantime, I ran an additional battery of tests. I ran MemTest86+ and passed the RAM. I demonstrated the crash happened while using both X and Wayland variations on the official PopOS desktop environment, but not while booted to a live session of Bodhi Linux. We had a crash while using FreeTube, and sometimes it would crash while idling.

It took a couple days, but Leo and I got in touch with tech support from System76. He talked us through reinstalling the NVIDIA driver. Initial tests were promising with the system idling for hours on end, but when I powered through Steam’s confirmation e-mail dance (see Takeaway section below) to install Sonic Frontiers, a game I’ve been looking to play, Steam downloaded it at around 94 mbps; we have gigabit service. Furthermore, it knocked out DNS service to the house. We identified the issue by pausing the download, but figured it could be solved later.

When I finally did start the game, I had some black screen issues with Proton, but after around 10 minutes of total game time, hopes were dashed with a slightly less colorful crash sequence. I showed initiative exploring the problem while waiting for daily support tag and found a Portal [1] mod with RTX that crashed it in 30 seconds. Somewhere in there, I enabled SSH it was only the graphical shell crashing.

One day, I sent the whole system log, and we confirmed the issue was with the NVIDIA card. Talks were had of possibly needing a return label, but we offered to try re-seating the card just in case it was a poor connection. While talking with support, we’d learned from the manual how at least one part of the business inside the case I was intimidated by last week was a brace for the graphics card only needed for shipping. While re-seating the card, we found some white paint transferred from the card to the brace; this matched a crushed edge on the shipping box: someone along the way dropped our box clearly marked fragile.

Fortunately for both us and System76, re-seating the card appears to have fixed the system. I about went straight for the RTX enabled Portal mod, and for the moment, we’re calling it good. The computer has been pushed into service.

As for the bad download speed: our first fear was a bad switch. It would have explained both the slow download speed as well as the choked DNS. Turns out it was a bad Cat 6 cable, and the DNS remains a mystery I lack the incentive to definitively solve at this time. My father pulled out his pocket knife and invited me to cut off the bad cord’s tips – only then did I realize it would have been interesting to run it past our conductivity tester. Oh well.

Takeaway

While attempting to make Steam happy with the new computer, I needed a confirmation e-mail. My e-mail wanted a password change, properly taking care of which would have required time working on Vaultwarden on ButtonMash, which I’ve mindfully laid aside as much as reasonably possible this December.

I had to make an effort to stay on task so I could finish the project at hand instead of doing all kinds of tech demonstrations as is my custom.

Final Question

Have you ever benchmarked/stress-tested a modern graphics card? What open source solutions have you used?

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Unboxing: System76 Thelio Mira

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

Some weeks ago, I helped my father, Leo_8472, spec up a Thelio Mira from System76, and it arrived this weekend. The first thing we did after unboxing yesterday (as of posting) was open it up and look inside the case. While everything appeared to be there, the system is very self-aware when it comes to airflow – having a dedicated duct from the side to the back for the CPU and an all around crowded feel inside the case. If you’re considering one of their systems, I’d recommend not opting to assemble your first one yourself.

We became concerned when the graphics card appeared to be the later-released budget variation on the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti one we thought we ordered. Leo found his receipt listing parts we remembered, and we set it up by my server stack for initial setup and taking inventory.

It shipped with PopOS installed – on a recovery partition with self-contained installation media. The installer appeared normal, but it skipped over/I didn’t notice it asking for installation drive, time zone, or host name – the later two of which we provided later.

When we ordered, Leo was very interested in Bluetooth, but I couldn’t find it. One of the first things he did after logging in after initial updates was find and test it. I installed SuperTuxKart to test it with his hands-free headset. He even beat a few races.

Other stuff we loaded up: Firefox data from Mint (4 tries to get right), FreeTube, Discord. I installed KDE as a desktop environment for when I need to use the computer, and chose SDDM for a login manager, and we had fun picking out themes. We found this black hole login splash screen I hacked to display mm/dd/yyyy instead of its default dd/mm/yyyy.

Over this process, we verified hardware with a few commands: lsblk (hard drive size), lspci (GPU, failed), free (RAM size), neofetch (installed special, wasn’t insightful towards GPU). Eventually, we confirmed the correct graphics card from within KDE’s System Settings>About this System.

Unfortunately, the system destabilized before we finished moving in. Leo documented the failure and we contacted support. I further noted that it still failed colorfully under the default “Pop” theme.

To do: copy over MultiMC, enable SSH, NFS mounts/automounts.

Takeaway

Even though it wasn’t immediately plug and play, I’m thankful for the time I’m spending with my father working on this system.

Final Question

Have you ever bought a system designed for Linux?

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My First Computer “Rack”

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!

So far, I’ve been assembling my servers (ButtonMash, RedLaptop, and GoldenOakLibry) on and under a foldable table. Add a workstation, and it’s getting a bit cluttered. We’ve had a set of glass shelves going unused for a while now, and I think they might do nicely to organize the servers’ room.

I started by measuring ButtonMash’s case against the shelves’ metal frame. While it was close, I estimated an inch vertical clearance once the shelves were in place. Otherwise, the tentative plan was to remove a shelf. My father and I moved the shelves in and loaded them and the setup’s UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). Wiring was relatively straightforward with the traditional wire Medusa in the back, but out from underfoot.

Unfortunately, I left ButtonMash in a precarious state such that a reboot before moving it knocked out my known house of cards supporting PiHole and Unbound. What I didn’t realize was that I never got Caddy working on that machine in the first place. In trying to fix Caddy, I wiped the containers I actually the whole house was using for DNS. As a patch, I pointed the router back at our normal DNS servers.

While I’m trying to avoid server work this month, I went ahead and looked up how to change my specific DNS settings temporarily to restart my DNS containers. From there, I did not encounter any notable issues, though I wasn’t up to testing the removal of my patch.

Takeaway

I have a rack. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Final Question

How do you organize your tech stack?

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