A while ago I had some intermittent network issues resulting in these Windows Update error numbers:
- 80244019 (some traffic made it through)
- 80072EE2 (no traffic made it through)
- 8??????? (DNS traffic didn’t make it through)
–jeroen
Archive for April, 2017
Windows update errors you get when you have a bad network connection: 80244019 and
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/14
Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »
Forcing Chrome to use google.com as search engine
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/14
I tried the obvious things to force Chrome on my Mac and Windows to use google.com as search engine when searching through the address/search box (omnibox). On Windows, this works fine, but Chrome on Mac (both are linked through my gmail account) keeps insisting to use google.nl no matter what, as all these fail:
- http://google.com/ncr or https://google.com/ncr as suggested by Google.com goes to the wrong Google page – Search Help.
- There are no “Use Google.com” or “Use Google in English” on my Google.com page.
- http://www.google.com/webhp?cr=countryUS or https://www.google.com/webhp?cr=countryUS
There are tons of reports on the google.com/ncr not working (you see the https://google.nl domain, in that search right?).
For me, google.com/ncr redirects to https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl, so it does redirect, but somehow doesn’t mark it to use as default.
In Chrome, my search settings in chrome://settings/searchEngines are these:
Google (Default) search settings
I’ve never changed it, so it still points to {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:instantExtendedEnabledParameter}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}
So basically, Chrome screws up the {google:baseURL} portion and there is no way to force {google:baseURL} to a certain value as the 2008 bug 1521 was marked “wontfix” in 2010 and nobody at Google seems to care (except a Google employee wanting expense paid trips abroad).
The totally odd thing is that when I start on https://google.com then search for say “Mac OS X start second atom instance”, I get to https://www.google.com/#q=Mac+OS+X+start+second+atom+instance
Poor mans solution
So I’ve defined two new search engine settings:
When Google.com lets you down, force it to use Google.com
In case you want to copy the text:
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Posted in Chrome, Google, Power User | 2 Comments »
.bashrc generator: create your .bashrc PS1 with a drag and drop interface
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/13
Cool: .bashrc generator: create your .bashrc PS1 with a drag and drop interface
–jeroen
http://bashrcgenerator.com/ – Joe C. Hecht – Google+
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Posted in bash, Development, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
How bad is the Windows command line really?
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/13
How bad is the Windows command line really?
The Windows command line is bad. Very bad.
But it took until recently for old Windows versions – that out of the box had either no or poor PowerShell versions – to have slowly died.
So only now PowerShell finally has become an option that really works across all Windows versions I use. Go PowerShell!
–jeroen
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NeonHorizon/lipopi: Guide to setting up LiPo batteries on the Raspberry Pi
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/12
Interesting hardware project: NeonHorizon/lipopi: Guide to setting up LiPo batteries on the Raspberry Pi
Pictures: Daniel Bull – Google+
Basically it’s a mini-UPS that works for any Raspberry Pi, but for a model 3 you have to add a tiny capacitor.
From the readme:
- Description: LiPoPi is a guide to setting up the Raspberry Pi with a LiPo battery including both running and charging it
- Project Website: GitHub
- Requirements: A Raspberry Pi (any model – see notes about the Raspbery Pi 3) and an Adafruit PowerBoost 500 Charger or 1000C Charger
- Skillset: Requires soldering skills and a basic knowledge of the command line
- License: GPL Version 3
–jeroen
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Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally – part 2 – trying to get the text and images to display
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/12
Blank imageFlair
Hosting Grumpydev Imageflair locally ended with two issues left: an empty image and my wish to include more complete StackExchange bits like the current StackExchange flair does.
I thought fixing the empty image would take a rainy day. It actually took a few rainy hours.
No text
The culprit is that I didn’t have the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web installed. Which was no coincidence as the free download of those from Microsoft terminated in 2002. The upside is that because of their licenses, they are available as open source and most linux distributions have a script package that will download these fonts. OpenSuSE has fetchmsttfonts for this.
Alternatively, you can use the web.archive.org to download manually, but that’s a tad tedious. But if you love tedious: Free downloads – TrueType core fonts for the Web.
zypper install fetchmsttfonts
That installs the fonts in:
/usr/share/fonts/truetypeThe drawback of having fetchmsttfonts is that the original Microsoft versions of these fonts are downloaded from corefonts.sourceforge.net each time the fetchmsttfonts package is updated, potentially overwriting newer versions of the fonts in that directory. If you don’t want that, use the trick at (not yet archived at the WayBack machine) font handling – install fetchmsttfonts, copy fonts, rpm -e fethmsttfonts, copy fonts back.
Having the fonts installed, I thought the only thing I needed to fix were the multiple references in config.php from that pointed to Arial.TTF. I took the poor man’s approach and just did this being in the directory of config.php:
cp /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arial.ttf Arial.TTF
Filled Imageflair
That didn’t work either: still no text showed.
So I decided to run imageFlair.php from the command line after setting $imageflair_debug = true; in config.php which then resulted in all sorts of warnings like
PHP Warning: imagettftext(): Could not find/open font
After reading I decided to build a small php-gd.tester.php script containing phpinfo(); and gd_info showing these portions for PHP GD (non-relevant bits stripped):
| Additional .ini files parsed | /etc/php5/conf.d/ctype.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/dom.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/gd.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/iconv.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/json.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/mysql.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/mysqli.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/pdo.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/pdo_mysql.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/pdo_sqlite.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/sqlite3.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/tokenizer.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/xmlreader.ini, /etc/php5/conf.d/xmlwriter.ini |
gd
| GD Support | enabled |
| GD headers Version | 2.1.1 |
| GD library Version | 2.1.1 |
| FreeType Support | enabled |
| FreeType Linkage | with freetype |
| FreeType Version | 2.6.3 |
| GIF Read Support | enabled |
| GIF Create Support | enabled |
| JPEG Support | enabled |
| libJPEG Version | 8 |
| PNG Support | enabled |
| libPNG Version | 1.6.21 |
| WBMP Support | enabled |
| XPM Support | enabled |
| libXpm Version | 30411 |
| XBM Support | enabled |
| WebP Support | enabled |
And the gd_info dump:
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
| <?php | |
| echo "<h1>gd_info</h1>"; | |
| $gdInfo = gd_info(); | |
| echo "<table>"; | |
| foreach($gdInfo as $key=>$value) { | |
| echo "<tbody>"; | |
| echo "<tr>"; | |
| echo "<td class='e'>" . $key . "</td>"; | |
| echo "<td class='v'>" . $value . "</td>"; | |
| echo "</tbody>"; | |
| } | |
| echo "</table>"; | |
| ?> |
| GD Version | 2.1.1 |
| FreeType Support | 1 |
| FreeType Linkage | with freetype |
| T1Lib Support | |
| GIF Read Support | 1 |
| GIF Create Support | 1 |
| JPEG Support | 1 |
| PNG Support | 1 |
| WBMP Support | 1 |
| XPM Support | 1 |
| XBM Support | 1 |
| WebP Support | 1 |
| JIS-mapped Japanese Font Support |
Too bad though: no information on where it sources the fonts from.
No image
Having no solution for the font rendering yet, I focussed at the lack of profile picture.
In the past, the images were generated with gravatar information in the JSON, but now that is empty. See for instance the output of http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.json versus his image http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.png
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| { | |
| "id": 1, | |
| "gravatarHtml": { | |
| }, | |
| "profileUrl": "http:\/\/superuser.com\/users\/1\/jeff-atwood", | |
| "displayName": "Jeff Atwood", | |
| "reputation": "14,561", | |
| "badgeHtml": "<span title=\"24 gold badges\"><span class=\"badge1\">●<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">24<\/span><\/span><span title=\"79 silver badges\"><span class=\"badge2\">●<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">79<\/span><\/span><span title=\"109 bronze badges\"><span class=\"badge3\">●<\/span><span class=\"badgecount\">109<\/span><\/span>" | |
| } |
That reveals quite a change in the JSON that imageFlair expects. Actually there is a lot of HTML in there.
So decided to try http://superuser.com/users/flair/1 in addition to http://superuser.com/users/flair/1.json with this result:
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| <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> | |
| <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> | |
| <head> | |
| <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> | |
| <style type="text/css"> | |
| .valuable-flair .userInfo .username a, .valuable-flair .mod-flair | |
| { | |
| color: #1086A4; | |
| } | |
| </style> | |
| <link rel="stylesheet" href="//sstatic.net/flair-Default.css" /> | |
| </head> | |
| <body> | |
| <div class="valuable-flair"> | |
| <div class="gravatar"> | |
| <a title="See my profile on Super User" target="_blank" href="http://superuser.com/users/1/jeff-atwood"><div class="gravatar-wrapper-50"><img src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/51d623f33f8b83095db84ff35e15dbe8?s=50&d=identicon&r=PG" alt="" width="50" height="50"></div></a> | |
| </div> | |
| <div class="userInfo"> | |
| <span class="username"><img src="http://superuser.com/favicon.ico" width="16" /><a href="http://superuser.com/users/1/jeff-atwood" target="_blank">Jeff Atwood</a><span class="mod-flair" title="moderator">♦</span></span> | |
| <br /> | |
| <span class="reputation-score" title="reputation score">14,561</span> | |
| <br /> | |
| <span title="24 gold badges"><span class="badge1">●</span><span class="badgecount">24</span></span><span title="79 silver badges"><span class="badge2">●</span><span class="badgecount">79</span></span><span title="109 bronze badges"><span class="badge3">●</span><span class="badgecount">109</span></span> | |
| </div> | |
| </div> | |
| </body> | |
| </html> |
Two downsides here:
- This doesn’t work for the combined stackexchange flair: http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1.png works, but http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/1 gives a 404.
- Rendering HTML servers side to PNG requires a lot of work.
Time for another rainy day (:
–jeroen
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, Development, Linux, openSuSE, PHP, Pingback, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Stackoverflow, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »
Having one Raspberry Pi reset another Raspberry Pi through relay or transistor
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/11
I’m going to build this later, but as the follow up on shortening the RUN pins of a Raspberry Pi to reset it in The woods and trees of OpenSuSE on single-board computers – image abbreviations – and getting it installed using OS X, I want to see if the below will work for me to have a pair (maybe trio?) of Raspberry Pi devices watch each other and reset any hung one.
The need comes because sometimes a Raspberry Pi either hangs or just won’t finish a reboot sequence:
- Raspberry hangs at reboot · Issue #626 · raspberrypi/linux [WayBack]
- Raspberry Pi • View topic – No boot after reboot command [WayBack]
Basically a Raspberry Pi has GPIO pins that can drive electromechanic (like mechanical relay) or electronic (like transistor+resistors or SSR solid-state relay). Examples:
- Most solid state relays work with 3V-30V input signals, so these work:
- Topic: Raspberry Pi – Using Crydom D24XX Solid State Relay | Tinker Labz [WayBack]
- Some only work with “zero cross” which means the switched output needs to be AC
- Prices vary between USD~1 and USD~50 and there are both AC and DC versions: The Raspberry Pi Hobbyist: Solid State Relays [WayBack]
- Some have zero for off others have one for off: Raspberry Pi • View topic – Python and solid state vs mechanical relay [WayBack]
- Ensure you always put a resistor on your GPIO pints to prevent a “fried Pi”; Properly wiring a solid-state relay to the GPIO pins? – Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange [WayBack]
- Mechanical relays:
- Are cheaper than SSR
- sainsmart relays is that they are NOT UL or CE approved: Raspberry Pi • View topic – Help selecting relay to switch 110V power from Pi [WayBack]
- you need an extra diode around the relay input to protect the low-power part during switching: Control a Relay From Anywhere Using the Raspberry Pi – Open Home Automation [WayBack]
- Sometimes you also need a transistor to increase the 3.3V GIO to 5V for the relay: Raspberry Pi – Driving a Relay using GPIO | SusaNET [WayBack]
- gpio – How to add isolation between raspberry pi and relay board? – Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange [WayBack]
- 433 Mhz – How to control mains electricity safely: Simple home automation using the Raspberry Pi – Electronics information from PenguinTutor [WayBack]
- GPIO pins
- Do not draw more than 16mA per GPIO pin or 50mA for all GPIO pins:
- Resetting:
- Raspberry Pi • View topic – Hardware reset and P6 riser (rev b / 2) ? [WayBack]
- Raspberry Pi • View topic – Orderly shutdown your RasPi using a hard disk jumper [WayBack]
- Raspberry Pi • View topic – Wake from halt [WayBack]
- Using a transistor and two resistors to reset another Raspberry Pi: Raspberry Pi • View topic – Hardware reset and P6 riser (rev b / 2) ?
So basic steps:
- Get switching gear (relay+diode, transistor+resistors or solid-state-relay)
- On each Pi modify the RUN holes so it has a header
- Connect header to switching gear
- Write watch-dog code to monitor other Pi and flip GPIO pin
- Test, test, test
And since I’m relatively new at electronics:
- Can someone explain this simple schematic? (capacitor with voltage regulator) – Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange
- LED Resistor Calculator
- IC Voltage Regulators
- Power is important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA9Ol6q9Xmc
- NPN transistors part 1: basics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn2NEZC5dEM
- NPN Transistors part 2: GPIO and resistor values calculated by beta value of transistor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nCNXY98qyE
- PNP transistors and switching 5V with GPIO pins by adding an NPN transistor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdAnUc7nXYs
- GPI / 3.3V / 5V power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgmgobDqms
- LED and resistors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UApKArED3JU
- LED through GPIO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9cEAGTLaC8
- GPIO voltage levels for off/on: 0.00-1.10V / 1.34V-3.30V; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr49ia3oID4
- switches and pull-up / pull-down resistors to prevent floating values: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqk6M_XdIC0
- RGB LEDs: different resistor values for each colour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4_R1eX9K6s
- PWM LED: frequency and duty cycle; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUn0KWwwkq8
- GPIO-on to 0V or 3.3V to GPIO-off to light an LED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNiX6Swu1MY
- Vbe is about 0.70: amplifier – Why is Vbe a constant 0.7 for a transistor in the active region? – Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange
–jeroen
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Posted in *nix, Development, Hardware Development, Linux, openSuSE, Power User, Raspberry Pi, SuSE Linux | Leave a Comment »
Getting your local IPv4 addresses, netmasks and CIDRs
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/11
In order to scan some local networks for unknown hosts (yes, on some sites you need to perform archeology), I needed the local IPv4 addresses, netmasks and CIDRs on my Mac running OS X.
Part of that is using ifconfig to get local inet information which however uses hexadecimal network masks and delivers no CIDRs.
SoI was a bit premature when I wrote about “This could be done by creating bash functions mask2cdr and cdr2mask, but that’s a bit too convoluted right now” in Getting the IP addresses of gmail MX servers – via Super User – dig isn’t enough.
netmask to CIDR and CIDR to netmask conversion
I need mask2cdr now, so lets start with these two bash functions and their aliases:
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, bash, Development, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, OS X 10.11 El Capitan, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
version control – How can I run “git status” and just get the filenames – Stack Overflow
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/10
git status --porcelain | sed s/^...//
Source: version control – How can I run “git status” and just get the filenames – Stack Overflow [WayBack]
–jeroen
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Posted in Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management | Leave a Comment »
Ext2 File System Driver for Windows download | SourceForge.net
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/04/10
If I ever need it: Ext2 File System Driver for Windows download | SourceForge.net
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The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 