Posts

I’ve just returned from an excellent day visting The Cave and the Arcade Archive with friends.

I’ve visited the cave before, and wrote up my experience in Visiting The Cave last year. I decided since (nearly) a year had passed, it was time to visit again.

When I mentioned online to some friends, that I was planning on going, they all booked tickets for the same day. We arrived just before 11am, met the greeters who checked our tickets, showed us up the stairs, and introduced the venue.

This is the third in a series of Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me.

In the early 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. In It’s MY monitor, I told the story of dealing with an angry Partner. Today’s story is worse, as I’m dealing with the Personal Assistant of a Partner.

I run a small Mastodon instance for Ubuntu Members and related projects. If you’re a contributing Ubuntu Member, then you can have a free account on the site.

It’s been running without tremendous issues for nearly a year now. Each time a new release of Mastodon appears, I dutifully follow the guides to upgrade it.

Each upgrade requires me to ensure the backups are functioning then follow the precise steps in the release notes. That’s usually just running a few commands to get the latest release, update dependencies, and restart everything. It’s very straightforward and usually takes only a few minutes.

Back in 2020 I stumbled on Bandwhich, a “Terminal bandwidth utilization tool”, written in Rust.

More recently, I was looking for a tool to identify which processes on a box were using bandwidth, and how much. I remembered Bandwhich and took another look. I wanted an easy way to install Bandwhich on a variety of machines, running a variety of Linux distributions across different architectures.

So I built a snap of bandwhich.

Lightbulb moment

On Thursday, October 13th 2016, while on a train, slowly recovering from a pub-based night out, I had an idea!

The idea is to take a train somewhere (unspecified) for four hours, have lunch, then take another train home. The train would be my 90mph office with scenery for those four hours in each direction, and I’d get to enjoy lunch somewhere new. I’d do a full days work with the view out the window constantly changing.

Earlier today I posted a poll on Mastodon.

As I write this, there are fifteen hours left on the poll, and it looks like this with around a hundred votes:

Most people seems to think I should wait for a month. That result may change overnight, of course, but I can’t wait! I’ve got a blog post to write, and time on my hands!

So let’s upgrade now!

In a change from our regularly scheduled blogging, I present a short how-to. This is mostly for my own memory, because I’ve had to search online how to do this multiple times, and I can never remember it. Writing it down for you might aide my memory.

I found myself playing some retro games on my SteamDeck today, while the tyres were being replaced on my car. After a bit of time playing Golf in a virtual GameCube, I rolled the clock back further, and played a bit of OG Tetris on a virtual GameBoy.

Canonical is planning an ‘All Snap’ desktop next year. It will likely be available side-by-side with the traditional deb-based installation we’ve been used to since 2004.

If the “All Snap” or “immutable” platform is to be a success, Canonical needs to get a grip on the broken, uninstallable, insecure, and outdated snaps provided in the snap store.

This is a long post, so feel free to skip to the ‘Solutions’ section for my positive thoughts.

Second in my series of Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me.

In the early 1990s I worked as a Technician at a local college. I would set-up and tear down experiments for students. I’d also have to look for ‘booby-traps’ they’d set for us. But that’s another story.

I would sometimes get called upon to perform technical support for external organisations. I was young, full of hope, and had a sunny disposition. So I was always happy to help. This is one of those occasions.

Feel free to skip this blog if you’re triggered by “Old man yells at cloud” or “Grandpa tells us about his childhood” style posts. This is the second in a row after a moan about my cellphone. A more lighthearted story will follow tomorrow, I promise.

I grew up (and still live near) a small village in the UK called Mytchett. It’s not famous for much other than “housing” Rudolf Hess, who was held there for a while during the Second World War.