The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: PC Tweakage

Remembering which tweaks worked

CUPS vs. HP Jetdirect 175x: Admitting Defeat

For several decades, a succession of PCs in the basement have served files and shared printers, the former through NFS and the latter through CUPS. When the Epson R380 finally went casters-up, I got an Epson ET-3830 printer with a network interface, leaving only our venerable HP Laserjet 1200 shared through the server.

For reasons I do not profess to understand, whatever magic shared the printers rotted away over the last month (or, more likely, software updates), to the extent that we could no longer reliably print to the Laserjet. Various software tinkerings being unavailing, I dropped just under thirteen bucks to make the problem Go Away™:

HP Jetdirect 175x – installed

It’s a new-old-stock HP Jetdirect 175x print server from the turn of the millennium, with an Ethernet jack on the back and a USB 1.0 (yes, one-point-zero) jack on the front. It’s roughly contemporaneous with the Laserjet and designed to work with it.

The thing started up in DHCP mode, so I had to ask the router where it was on the network. Configuration then amounted to putting it in static (“Manual”) IP mode, assigning an address, and restarting it.

Aim the CUPS servers on our desktop PCs at the new address, fire off a test page, It Just Worked™, and we’re once again printing like it’s 1999.

That was surprisingly easy.

2024-06-21
ssh_agent vs. The New Hotness
A recent Manjaro update killed whatever magic held the passwords used for public-key ssh access from my desktop box, requiring me to remember the passords and type them correctly.

After considerable thrashing around doing what I thought I knew about ssh_agent (which, yes, was being autostarted to no avail), it seems that thread applies and the fix now requires creating /etc/profile.d/gcr-keyring.sh with this burst of line noise:
```
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/gcr/ssh
```
Then tell systemd about it:
```
systemctl --user enable gcr-ssh-agent.socket
systemctl --user enable gcr-ssh-agent.service
```
Whereupon, after a reboot presumably causing systemd to make the right thing perform the right act at the right time, It Just Worked™.

I used to have some mild sysadmin mojo, but obviously if you don’t do it all the time, everything you think you know becomes wrong.

The WordPress AI did generate an image based on the above text and the prompt linux overlapping windows on monitor:

WP AI Image – linux overlapping windows on monitor

Which looks a lot like those stock photos filling otherwise empty space in spammy web pages, doesn’t it? In point of fact, the AI Feedback on Post had this to say:

While the AI-generated image may align with the content, consider using original or more contextually relevant visuals to maintain the professional look of the website.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Thank you, AI image & text generators, for your help.
2024-05-28
Moonlander Keyboard vs. Board Chow

The Moonlander keyboard has per-key LEDs that I’ve denatured enough that most show a pale gray, with a few others highlighted in orange. A few weeks ago the LEDs on the right-hand thumb cluster and the N key went nuts, cycling through a surprising assortment before settling on bright red; the obvious resets / firmware reflashing / tapping were all unavailing.

ZSA’s tech support recommended taking the thumb cluster apart to check the ribbon cable connecting it to the main keyboard half:

Moonlander thumb cluster – PCB bottom

Come to find out my unclean personal habits lodged a particularly corrosive nugget of board chow on the cable:

Moonlander – corroded ribbon cable

It’s a more-or-less standard 0.5 mm pitch cable, but only 20-ish mm long, much shorter than the cables carried by the usual sources. ZSA sells them for $2 each, plus $25 courier shipping, so I bought three; they arrived in two days from halfway around the planet.

Because I don’t foresee my personal habits changing any time soon, I tucked a Kapton tape snippet in the gap to serve as a gutter:

Moonlander thumb cluster – tape shield installation

That’s with the two hinge screws out and the cluster eased down-and-away from the keyboard enough to get the tape pressed against the keyboard.

With the screws installed and the cluster at its normal most-downward angle, the gutter closes up:

Moonlander thumb cluster – tape shield folded

With the cluster in its normal operating position (for me, anyway), the gutter is nearly invisible:

Moonlander thumb cluster – normal position

For the record, I tucked the remaining ribbon cables inside the left-hand thumb cluster against future need.

2023-10-09
Manjaro XFCE Slow File Loading
A month or so ago a Manjaro update caused all file loading to take minutes, rather than seconds. This sort of breakage seems endemic to rolling update distros, although most glitches vanish within a few days as more knowledgeable users track down the problems and apply the fixes.

File loads and program startups continued to be achingly slow, so I trawled the Interwebs in search of a resolution, tried various suggestions, and had no success until:
```
sudo pacman --remove xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
```
Some background information:
A description of what a desktop-portal is all about:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal#List_of_backends_and_interfaces
When using Free Software, when it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. In this case, I do not profess to understand how the pieces fit together.
2023-07-24
Linux Where You Least Expect It
A price / coupon scanner in a nearby CVS evidently woke up dead:

CVS Price Scanner – Linux boot screen

Yup, it’s a Linux console boot log, with the last line suggesting something horrible happened inside the device mapper:
```
A start job is running for dev-mapper-cryptswap1.device
```
The systemd timing status shows it’s been stuck for a while and has no hope of rescue:
```
(2d 1h 41min 10s / no limit)
```
I’d reboot that sucker if it had a keyboard …
2023-01-25
Numeric Keypad Repair

Having set up a cheap wireless numeric keypad as a simple macro pad at my left hand, I eventually knocked it off the desk, whereupon the screw compressing the back of the case against the membrane switches ripped through the plastic:

Numeric Keypad – compression screw pullout

The symptoms came down to erratic operation of a few keys that became worse as I continued tapping on the thing. Finally, with nothing to lose, I took it apart and, upon seeing the hole in the case, realized I didn’t have to cut the usual label to find the hidden screw.

Slathering the little donut with acetone and clamping things together might work for a while, but I’m sure the keypad will hit the floor again with similar results.

Instead, recruit some candidates from the Box o’ Random Screws:

Numeric Keypad – screw selection

Pick the screw big enough to grip the undamaged boss on the front of the case, yet short enough to compress the back again, add a small washer spanning the hole, and it’s all good again:

Numeric Keypad – screw installed

This only works because the keypad sits at enough of an angle to hold the screw off the desk.

That was easy …

2022-11-25
Epson ET-3830 Refilling

Although the blurb for the Epson ET-3830 All-In-One scanner / printer says “up to 2 years of ink in the box”, the black ink hit the bottom line of the tank near the end of August:

Epson ET-3830 – refilling black ink

Refilling is totally without drama, which is worth a couple of bucks right there.

Being that type of guy, I keep track of ink vs. time:

Epson ET-3830 – ink status

In round numbers, it looks like we use nearly all of a 127 ml bottle of black ink and a bit more than half of an 70 ml bottle of color ink every eight months.

I find it much easier to read long articles and tech documents while slumped in the Power Chair than to scroll through them on big or little screens, so we go through much more ink and paper than most folks.

2022-09-07