Spotted these signs on the outside wall of a local Big Box home repair store. It’s not as if I’ve never misspelled anything, but this required consistent effort by two of the three folks who wrote up the signs.
Which one is correct?
Tag: Rants
And kvetching, too
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KMail: The Blank Email Problem
Of late, Kmail has been turning email messages into complete blanks: the Subject, From, Date, and body are all completely blank. This is evidently a problem of long standing with Kmail and has something to do with fumbling the indexes that point to the emails within its maildir directory structure.
The FAQ blandly notes:
You have empty ‘ghost-mails’ in your inbox (or other folder)
Symptom: For some reason, certain messages aren’t accessible in KMail. They show up in the message list window but selecting them there results in a blank message window. I can’t open them or reply to them, etc.
Solution: This problem ist most likely due to corrupted index files, see issue ‘You are loosing mail’ above. So just follow the advice given there.
Well, yeah, except that rebuilding the indexes more than once a day seems excessive… and the problem is, intermittently, much worse than that.
I’m running KMail in XFCE, which introduces some complexity, but other folks with the same problem are running it in bone-stock KDE. Surprisingly the recent 4.x upheavals haven’t changed the problem in the least.
I’ve been keeping the maildir structure on the file server, rather than my local drive, and symlinking to it from my home directory through NFS. That also doesn’t seem to change the symptoms, although putting a heavy load on either the network or the server sometimes increases the number of blank emails.
Over the last few months I’ve tried a number of things, like tweaking NFS buffer sizes & timings, to no avail. Time to start writing this stuff down…
With that as prologue, here’s how to recover those blank emails.
Most important: when you see a blank email, get out of Kmail. Nothing you do within Kmail will help and many things will hurt, so just bail out.
Fire up a terminal window and cd to the directory representing that email folder. First-level folders have the obvious name, but all the second-level folders are in hidden directories. For example, I have a top-level folder called Bulk Stuff, with one sub-folder (among many) being EMC.
The directory structure:
Mail/Bulk Stuff/ Mail/.Bulk Stuff.directory/EMC/
Yeah, embedded blanks. Sue me.
Each of those directories has three subdirectories: cur, new, and tmp.
The problem seems to arise when a new message gets transferred from new to cur, although sometimes existing messages in cur go bad. The index entry seems to point to the wrong place; the actual mail message file is in cur, but the index points off into the bushes somewhere.
The solution is to manually move the file from cur back to new, then rebuild the offending index. Leaving it in cur and just rebuilding the index does not always work, for reasons I do not understand.
The easiest way to find the newest messages:
cd "Mail/.Bulk Stuff.directory/EMC" ll cur | tail
This will show the most recent few entries, which will look something like this:
-rw-r--r-- 1 ed ed 22256 2010-04-19 20:48 1271724492.2194.DbdZD:2,S -rw-r--r-- 1 ed ed 23513 2010-04-20 13:09 1271783386.2232.jxmG6:2,S -rw-r--r-- 1 ed ed 20901 2010-04-20 17:10 1271797805.2232.i6fP3
The last line shows the most recent files hasn’t been read yet, which is a tipoff that something’s wrong. If you have an older message with a rotten index entry, use grep (or some such) to find it.
Move the file back to new and delete the corresponding index files:
mv cur/1271797805.2232.i6fP3 new cd .. rm ".Bulk Stuff.index*"
Then fire up Kmail again and it’ll automagically rebuild the indexes. That’ll work fine for a while, then it’ll screw up again.
I suspect that the problem is related to either the number of messages or the index file size for each maildir directory. I have, in round numbers, 3 GB of mail stashed away. As with anything, most of it is useless , but I occasionally need one of those messages ever so urgently.
I set up a new maildir structure with only the last 30 days of email transactions, which should be enough to either eliminate the problem or show that Too Many Messages is just another dead end.
More details on that tomorrow…
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Stove Knobs: Index Marks
Reflective index markers for stove knobs The black knobs on our black-front Kenmore stove have slightly raised pointer extensions. At a glance, you cannot tell whether the knob points upward to OFF or downward to 5.
Oddly, the oven temperature knob has a nice white index line engraved (well, molded) in the pointer extension. So it’s not like they didn’t know how to do index lines. I’m guessing they had to take a buck out of the build cost and omitting four index lines added up to just the right amount.
I added tape markers shortly after we got the thing. The previous tape was fluorescent orange; the adhesive lasts several years before turning gummy. These new markers are snippets of outdoor-rated retroreflective tape and should last longer.
Run the knobs through the dishwasher occasionally to get ’em nice & shiny. Surprisingly, that doesn’t seem to bother the tape.
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Too Many Deer: Another One Bites The Dust
One Less Deer Sat down for some tech reading in the Comfy Chair one morning and spotted a lump near the road, at the foot of the deer crossing warning sign.
While I don’t know if this deer was one of that group, it’s a fair bet.
There was no freshly smashed glass or broken plastic in the area, which indicates a relatively low-speed collision, the kind where the deer’s legs snap against the bumper and the body rolls over the hood, crushing sheet metal and deforming plastic frippery along the way.
Many cars display that kind of damage around here. They look as though somebody walloped them with a huge sandbag, which is pretty much the case.
The animal huggers seem strangely silent about such events. If they had the courage of their convictions, they’d subsidize drivers (and gardeners) affected by the deer overpopulating the area. But, no, they never offer to do that.
I did find this in the driveway across the street…
Deer Whistle Before equipping your car with such gimcrackery, read that.
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Generic Sony NP-FS11 Lithium-Ion Packs: FAIL
Somewhat to my surprise, the eBay vendor responsible for those curves sent three replacement NP-FS11 batteries, commenting:
We’ve sent all your comments to the factory and ask them for a total quality inspection in this batch of batteries.
Here are the capacity curves for an initial charge, a test, recharge, and another test on each pack. The curves match up reasonably well (the top & bottom traces are nearly exact overlays), so I believe the results are accurate.
MaxPower NP-FS11 – Packs JKL One pack is the best I’ve seen yet. The other two are junk, pure and simple.
So, to summarize:
- One of three batteries DOA in first batch, others weak
- Two of three batteries DOA in replacement
Overall, that’s a 50% failure rate even if you have relaxed standards…
I decided that, despite their “customer service”, this level of quality deserves the dreaded Negative Feedback checkbox.
Now, to saw the cases open and replace the cells. I cannot imagine any way to justify this on an economic basis, but we’ll certainly have enough batteries for that camera when I’m done.
If I had any confidence that spending more on the batteries would get a higher quality product, I’d do it. The question is, would another order of magnitude make any difference?
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New Tires For the Van
So I bought 530 bucks worth of new tires for the van; it’s ten years old with 66k on the clock. Picked the most suitable ones:
- Near the top of the Consumer Reports list
- Best constellation of features for our use
- Available at the local tire shop
CR is essentially the only place that does actual across-the-board tests; you can disagree with their methodology, but it’s pretty much the only game in town.
I wound up at the local tire shop after bouncing off one of the online sources. In this case, tire + shipping + installation costs more online; the local shop was one of the online source’s installers.
So I went direct. They’re aboveboard: the balance + installation charge is the same no matter where the tires come from.
Had a 10:00 appointment and it took 90 minutes to get out of the shop. Not impressed.
The tire pressure monitor light came on halfway home. Well, OK, maybe it’s noticed the tires are bigger? But it’s a differential rotation counter, sooo… that’s not the problem.
Checked the pressure after letting the tires cool off for a few hours.
- 37 – Left rear
- 32 – Right rear
- 40 – Left front
- 34 – Right front
The pressure monitor was definitely doing its job!
Adjusted them all to 36 psi (hard, but we’ll see how it rides), reset the monitor, and it’s all good.
Factory trained and certified mechanics, my obscene-gerund deleted-noun.
Oh, and the lug nuts were evidently tightened by Andre the Giant… gotta break those suckers free before we do much more driving!
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Generic Sony NP-FS11 Lithium-Ion Packs
Sony no longer offers the NP-FS11 Li-Ion batteries required for my DSC-F505V camera, so I’ve been using “generic” replacements for quite some time. My experience has been mixed: some batteries provide a reasonable amount of run time, others provide almost none.
Feeding the appropriate keywords into Froogle gives you a range of battery suppliers, with offerings from, as of this writing, $3 to $103. Perhaps not surprisingly, the image for a $70 battery exactly matches the one on my desk that cost perhaps $15 a few years ago… although I’m certain that the actual battery you’d get wouldn’t match that picture.
I just bought three NP-FS11 batteries from the usual low-buck Hong Kong eBay supplier: six bucks apiece, shipped halfway around the world. The eBay listing claimed 1800 mAh, which seemed aggressive, and the batteries sport a 3900 mAh label, which is flat-out impossible.
Frankly, I didn’t expect much and here’s the discharge test graph to show I wasn’t disappointed. I used a 1-amp rate as a reasonable guess at the camera’s peak draw, although that might be a touch high for a continuous discharge.
Generic Sony NP-FS11 Li-Ion Batteries The top blue curve is from a two-year-old literally no-name battery (no logo, no nothing!) that still provides decent run time; it’s the one matching that $70 battery. It provides about 1100 mAh, reasonably close to its 1300 mAh rating.
The middle curves, black and purple, are two of the new cells that provide about 900 mAh: half the as-listed-on-eBay capacity, 25% of the absurd label value. Their very low terminal voltage during most of the discharge says that these won’t provide much run time at all.
The green curve piddling off on the bottom is the third new cell, which is obviously defective. As I said, I didn’t expect much and I certainly wasn’t surprised.
The red curve is an old and completely defunct batteries.com offering that never provided good service.
Here’s another plot of three successive charge-discharge cycles for just the three new batteries. The first curves (at 1.0 A) correspond to what you see above, the remaining two sets (at 0.5 A) are the next two cycles. Batteries G and I have improved, H remains a dud.
MaxPower NP-FS11 Battery Tests Given the varied offerings on the Web, I believe that there is no way to ensure you’re getting a known-good battery from a reputable supplier. It’s absolutely certain that price does not correlate with quality; the ones I bought simply establish that low-end offerings are crap.
The purchase was worth it for the amusement value alone; I don’t expect any action from the vendor, although I did send a copy of that graph with some explanatory text. The question is whether I should give them a five-star rating for prompt delivery…
As it happens, there’s enough room to slide a standard CR123A-size cell into the battery compartment. I think a bit of Quality Shop Time applied to a dead NP-FS11 battery case (and the vital Sony “Infolithium” DRM module) will provide a baseplate with all the proper connectors. Perhaps I can conjure up a “battery” containing a single cell of known-good quality?
Primary CR123A cells supply only 3 V, not the 3.6 V the camera really wants, so I can’t use disposable cells.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 