kaberett | Entries tagged with computer :-(

For lo these many years (i.e. basically since I got a smartphone) I've been using Swype as an onscreen keyboard. Some time ago it was announced that it had reached end-of-life-and-support, but it wasn't until I went looking earlier today that I realised that happened in 2018, that being when I posted asking for suggestions for replacements.

And then I didn't think about it again for, apparently, approximately eight years, through several new phones and quite a lot of new major versions of Android... and then a few-ish weeks ago Fairphone rolled out Android 15 to the Fairphone 4 and alas That Was The End Of That.

Recommendations back in 2018 were for Gboard and Swiftkey; a question posted to reddit in 2022 garnered similar responses.

Since the Abrupt Keyboard Failure I've swapped to Gboard more or less by default. I don't hate the bit where language switching is now automatic (for the purposes of language learning apps, at any rate), but good grief I am missing the ability to e.g. type < or | without needing to go like three clicks deep in menus. Yes, when I have "Touch and hold keys for symbols" enabled -- as far as I can tell that only gives me one symbol per key, not "now select from a variety of them" as with the much-lamented Swype. I'm also missing the gestures I know for "yes, that word, but change the capitalisation", and still grumpily adjusting to the shift key mode cycle being in a different order to what I'm used to.

I've experimented briefly with AnySoftKey but rapidly got annoyed by the total lack of any Irish language pack (and how difficult it is to navigate the app listings to establish this fact). I'm trying to persuade myself that it's worth giving SwiftKey a try even though it (1) is now Microsoft, (2) has gone all-in on Bundling With Copilot, and (3) apparently "contains ads".

Eheu, alas, etc; all is woe; ... unless anyone knows of any other Android keyboards that provide ready access to All the punctuation...?

Even I am ... mostly moved in.

I need to copy some e-mail data over from the one account I can only access via POP, and Mate is not behaving... brilliantly... in terms of "the touchpad doing what I tell it to" or "letting me have All the screen resolution" or for that matter "doing sensible things with system themes and program icons", but it's not yet annoyed me enough to cause me to seriously consider switching away from it.

I have not yet applied stickers but thankfully A's is already covered with stickers so it is possible to tell the two of them apart while closed.

It is as ever an enormous relief to not be stuck with the Sad Dell as my primary machine. Long may it continue.

(The delay in getting all the way set up -- it arrived on Thursday -- was in no small part that I had blithely trusted A when they told me they'd got the hard drive out of the previous laptop. I had not gone digging around in it myself and I was not in great brain day-of so when I hit the point where New Laptop wouldn't boot off Old Drive, and the partitions made no sense to me, so I put it to one side to be an A problem when they got back from away-for-work.

... they stared in utter perplexity for A Bit, in a "this surely could never have possibly worked" way, and eventually went "... I'm going to check whether there's another hard drive in the old laptop, because that's the only way I can think of that this could have worked, ever."

... they had indeed ADHDed an entire hard drive.)

(No this is not a proper bug report. No I have not characterised behaviour well enough yet to make one. No that is not a priority this week.)

So. Got a new-to-me laptop on Monday. I decided, for reasons, that I wasn't going to set it up yet, and then somehow ended up with Adam bootstrapping the thing three times over. Some observations: 1. I am. going to have to work to unlearn the Thing I Have Learned on How To Type A Damn Colon (where it's not working reliably on what appears to be a software level, in that ; is always recognised and shift is mostly recognised but the combination is never recognised until I have spent at least fifteen seconds mashing it interspersed with semicolons. this is not the titular bug.) 2. it has a numpad. because Adam was Extremely Pro the concept, which means I can palm it off on him if I decide I hate it, and much as I am firmly at Never Dell Again... good GRIEF I am missing having PgUp and PgDn either side of the up arrow. Did not anticipate that. 3. still extremely getting used to the keyboard layout. 4. I had totally failed to clock that Restoring From Backup would transfer all [mumble]-hundred browser tabs over, and I am feeling extremely ambivalent about this fact.

But. The bug. Okay. So. Bootstrap #2 was because, on round #1, I observed that the hotkeys for screen brightness adjustment worked (in the sense that the Screen Brightness Adjustment Indicator came up, and responded appropriately to input), and also very much did not work (in that the screen brightness did not adjust but was instead set to PERMANENT MAXIMUM YELL). (Observation #5 is that I also really miss the function keys for brightness adjustment being right there.) So I did the obvious thing i.e. installed the nvidia drivers... whereupon! screen brightness toggling worked! and COMPUTER DECIDED TO PERMANENTLY ZOOM EVERYTHING EXTREMELY UNHELPFULLY. Which was the precipitating event for bootstrap #2, because Life Is Too Short to fuck about with replacing nvidia drivers with nouveau when you could just &c.

Today was the first time I actually made use of the damn thing suspending.

You will NEVER GUESS what MAGICALLY AND INEXPLICABLY WORKS once the thing has woken up from suspend.

So that's way more usable than I expected it to be! And maybe I will try to work out what the fuck is going on... next week. sometime. I think I have space in my schedule next week.

(In case you want to play along at home, again with insufficient information to do this properly, and also for my own future reference because the model number is only present on the sticker on the bottom of the damn thing: Lenovo Legion 5 15IMH05, Debian bookworm.)

I did my system an upgrade.

My wretched keyboard layout sodding changed.

Specifically, and this is literally the only thing I care about, my compose sequence for ğ no longer works because the relevant diacritic is no longer present on the keyboard and my previously functional keyboardsmash now gives me \g instead, which! is not helpful!

I don't need another backslash! I especially don't need another backslash I access via Alt+Shift+# because I've got one over the other side of the keyboard that only requires me to press one key! I recognise that a backslash is more useful to most people than ˘ but I use Debian precisely so that shit like this doesn't change under my ~~feet~~ fingertips with no warning that I notice!

This is possibly going to be the thing that finally pushes me over the edge into either customising my own layout or finding something that will give me dotless i out of the box.

But also: WHY. WHAT WAS THE RATIONALE. I have been completely unable to search up an answer to this existential wail, possibly because migraine and possibly just because search terms are hard yo, but also. w h y

(I am using English (UK, extended, Windows), if anyone actually feels like hunting down an answer...)

As I have previously groused about, the ebook version of The Ladies of Grace Adieu that I borrowed from my library was riddled with errors. I mentioned at the time that I'd been surprised and pleased by how rapidly Overdrive support got back to me with "we're getting in touch with the publisher".

Well, the publisher got back in touch with them, apparently, because on the 27th I received the following:

Our content team spoke with the publisher about this, and the publisher has confirmed that this title is written in the form of an old diary, so the text includes archaic spellings. What you're seeing appears to be the publisher's deliberate stylistic choice.

I can understand how the odd formatting and spelling/grammar choices in this title could be seen as an issue with title files, and again, I appreciate you reaching out.

I was sufficiently Outraged and Indignant about this that I went and bought a dead-tree copy of the book (second-hand!) so that I could write back to the effect of "the publisher is bullshitting you" WITH CITATIONS.

I grumbled about this to

simont, and in the ensuing conversation we decided that the most emotionally satisfying response to this would be to buy a copy of the ebook (inevitably DRMed), strip the DRM, make all the necessary corrections, re-DRM it, and then send it to the publisher with a cheery cover letter -- on the grounds that either they could then pay me for the de-DRMed version for their own use, or it would be a sufficiently emphatic Fuck You to mollify my feelings. Clearly it's not always a zero-sum game, but in this specific instance I am really quite comfortable with balancing out "less pay" with "more fuck you".

Anyway, my second-hand copy of the book arrived in the post today (old stock from Stirling Council Libraries!), so this afternoon I sat down with it & the sample of the ebook I could get in Libby (having already returned the full book, with around a four-week wait to borrow it again), and transcribed every. single. obvious. OCR. error. in the first twenty-odd pages of the book.

( Read more... )

Anyway, the customer support individual at Overdrive who's Dealing With Me has graciously and very kindly said (I paraphrase) "... good grief, is somebody Having An Autism?" [mildly entertained] and is passing my list back to the content team to be passed in turn back to the publisher. Naturally, I expect to be VINDICATED. Completely! Any day now!

Specifically, about Kobo.

I buy ebooks from them when (1) they're not available on hive.co.uk, and/or (2) they're sold without DRM on Kobo but not on hive.co.uk (which inexplicably insists on DRMing everything, including from publishers who request that their books be sold without DRM).

I am also running Adobe Digital Editions in Wine because I Cannot Be Having with booting up into a Windows partition for the specific purpose of downloading an ebook.

... I have now spent rather longer trying to troubleshoot what is going on here than it would have taken me to boot into Windows, several times over, and I'm not sure I'm actually any closer to a solution but I am, perhaps, more convinced that a solution isn't actually possible, at least not for me to implement.

-- backing up. I am still using

sebenikela's Get ADE Working Under Wine guide. In a fit of grim fatalism, I even updated my version of ADE, such that I am now running 4.5.11, even. And, nevertheless, whenever I try to load an ACSM from, specifically, Kobo, I get the error message

Connection Error Detected

Digital Editions could not connect to the fulfillment server. Please make sure you are connected to the Internet.

I have, subsequent to a bunch of poking around at things, established that ADE perfectly well can still download DRMed ebooks from other sources (the Adobe sample books page; ... hive.co.uk) and, therefore, the problem is presumably specifically With Kobo, which is further supported by its total inability to redownload any of the other DRMed books I've ever bought from Kobo.

On the one hand, I did buy about seven other books at the same time and it is not like my to-be-read pile is particularly small anyway, but on the other I am mildly annoyed that I currently own a copy of The Vela and no actual way to tolerably read it.

(Because, yes, I also tried Kobo-for-Android, and that... does not count.)

Computers! Why are they! With any luck Kobo will get their shit together at some point I suppose!

The... good... (...) news is that the Recently-Developed Issue with my laptop failing to cope with waking from sleep isn't Just Me, and for that matter isn't just Debian, and my associating it with a kernel upgrade was Correct.

The bad news is that this means there is limited anything I can do to fix it, and also I've totally failed to track down a Debian-related bug for it, and also I very much do not have the brain to file any such bug and then Deal With People Asking Me Questions, so booting into one of the older kernel versions I've kept lying around Just In Case it... probably is, then, given how much the behaviour is annoying me.

(At the point I was aiming to be Done With Thesis by the end of Jan I was willing to put up with it and think about it Later. Now I'm... not... I decided I should have another go at investigating fixes. Unfortunately while it's now somewhat more widely reported, as far as I can tell everyone is still at ??? over the entire situation.)

is there any way to make it stay not-fullscreen? I'm half-heartedly attending a conference (though I could tell you... very little about the talks I've attended so far), which is fine except that the way this works is a screen gets shared for the duration of a presentation, then stops being shared for questions, then resumes being shared for the next talk whereupon the thing auto-fullscreens itself again and I haven't thus far even managed to find the hotkey combo that makes it Not (Esc doesn't, F11 doesn't, I was equally half-heartedly working on thesis so I haven't checked beyond that).

Is there magic? somewhere? that I'm just Missing?

Alright, so, Zoom. Zoom for Linux.

Today I attended a departmental workshop on Understanding racism (a really good workshop! I was surprised by how good! my department's previous gestures at acknowledging and discussing racism have included e.g. a "listening exercise" facilitated by... a middle-aged wealthy white woman! this facilitator was Lesley Aitcheson, who on two hours' acquaintance I would cheerfully recommend enthusiastically) via Zoom, and experienced Technical Difficulties.

The specific technical difficulty was: every time I got switched from a breakout room back to the main meeting, Zoom lost all incoming audio. Incoming video was fine; laptop audio was fine; people's microphones were on and they were audible to others; but I didn't get incoming audio back until I dropped out and rejoined the meeting. (This also happened on one occasion when I was moved from the main meeting into a breakout room, but only once.)

I'm running version 5.1.412382.0614 under debian testing (current codename bullseye). I have more (related) workshops upcoming & would like to Solve This Problem, though obviously I'm not going to manage it by... 9am tomorrow, which is when the next one is. A quick shake of the internet doesn't reveal any obvious bug reports. Suggestions extremely welcome...

Things this robot has:

"cliff detection"
that can't be turned off in software
and, consequently, little blinkers made of tinfoil.

You see, A fell down an internet hole a couple of days ago and discovered... an entire subreddit talking resentfully about how the problem, right, the problem with light-coloured rugs--

[fx: pauses to look at the light grey rug on the living room floor]

-- is that they're light, right, so your tiny pet robot, it goes up to the edge of them -- and then it STOPS, because the ground underneath it has just got LIGHTER, and (I feel a great affinity here) it's kind of shit at depth perception, and therefore Suddenly Lighter means PROBABLY A CLIFF, ABORT ABORT ABORT.

Which is why it was managing to get up the rug if it started out half on a corner and half not, and actually just had a panic, followed by beating a considered yet hasty retreat, if it hit the edge any other way.

Consider, said reddit: blinkers.

(Why, said reddit crossly, isn't there a software setting, I live in a single-level dwelling, cliff detection is ACTIVELY COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE, I know it's TRYING but can it NOT.)

Apparently they've got to be made out of something reflective, or it panics about that, too.

A started out by taping tin foil over two of its six sensors. This worked pretty well on the occasions when it approached the rug head-on: it was already on the rug by the time the side sensors started going ???????! and therefore decided that either It Was Fine or It Was Flying, as the case may be.

But, um, it kept hitting the rug edge-on. In particular, having got up the rug one way, and bimbled back and forth on the rug a bit, it would get back down onto the floor and then decide it wanted to go back and do a spot-clean of something On The Rug... and conclude that the shortest route between it and the spot in question was a straight line. Fair enough, you might think, except that this means it hit the edge of the rug on the diagonal; paused to take a deep breath and reassure itself everything was fine really; and then, because it was convinced it could Go On That Bit, because its internal map told it it already had been and It Was Fine, made its slow and cautious way along THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF looking for the Safe Route Back Up.

Which is why it now has blinkers on all six of its relevant sensors, like some sort of inverse tin foil hat, and also by the way I think we're keeping it.

These being a technology I considered suspiciously newfangled, and generally regarded with deep distrust: when I started out with KeePass, with

me_and holding my hand, I explicitly did not try to shift everything over into it all in one go.

Instead, I gave myself the opportunity to hate it.

I set things up with the password database and a key file both stored in Dropbox. And then I started out with two passwords in it: my institutional password, which needs changing regularly but typing infrequently, and a financial password, which needs typing fairly frequently but which I wanted to be much higher security than I was managing with just trying to keep everything in my head.

And then every time I needed to log into something that, well, I don't need to log into terribly often -- every time I ended up grumpily hitting the forgot-my-password link -- I generated a new password with KeePass, and gradually moved things over that way.

It is now several years on and... almost everything is now in my password manager. The executive function involved in switching to (and logging into) another program every time I wanted to log in somewhere was a big conceptual barrier to me getting started, but at this point I've got the keystrokes sufficiently ingrained and enough of my life shifted over that, well, it is definitely less hassle than regular password resets were.

I am happy to answer questions about my personal experiences with & approach to all of this if you have any! But my advice basically boils down to "make it as low-stakes as possible, and as easy to back out of as you can, and take it from there".

It has been a bit of a saga, this week.

I've been actually using my desktop more: it's better for Playing Portal On, because it's got An Actual Mouse. Because I'm me, it's running Debian testing. Also because I'm me, it's got a Windows install on it that won't let me Do Anything unless I'm connected to the work network, and won't let me connect to the work VPN until I've logged in, and won't let me log in until I've connected to the work network, so I've just not... touched it basically since bringing it home (though, to be fair, I also barely touched it while it was at work, and especially now I've got

sebenikela's wine-and-Adobe Digital Editions thing working I have very little call for Windows, at all, ever).

Which means I've been periodically updating it, as one does.

Which means that I had a Grand Old Time earlier this week when nvidia-legacy-340xx-driver=340.108-1 landed and... suddenly my graphical desktop manager was so broken that I couldn't even swap to a tty and try unfucking things from there.

( Read more... )

(with thanks to

vass for my new tag.)

some time ago

sebenikela wrote a guide to getting Adobe Digital Editions playing nice with wine, Calibre and DeDRM, and it is super useful (in that I just got around to playing around with it, n months later, and have Made Use Of It). Sharing for the class, etc.

(I started down this path this morning because Foyles e-mailed me a notification about a sale,

cesy gave me book tokens for my birthday, and I got sidetracked while trying to work out how to spend the money...)

I note, with amusement, that I started out convinced I must have an Adobe ID signed up somewhere; entering all the base e-mail addresses I thought might be associated with said account, and getting nowhere; giving up and starting to sign up, with the obvious plus-modified variant address, and... was told I already had an account. The reset password is... now stored in KeePass: apparently I hadn't got that set up yet at the point I signed up with Adobe.

To my disgust this hard drive came with Windows Vista installed, where the previous one had Windows 7; I'm getting an e-mailed receipt tomorrow and might grumble at them. In the meantime, this evening has mostly consisted of getting a usable Debian install set up (because for bonus points, I ended up overwriting my install media on Tuesday before the drive death because that was the convenient USB stick I had on me).

Doubtless I will complain endlessly about sharks, including sharks I'd previously solved but not bothered making a note of.

Other things this evening included: takeaway dinner from Roti King with A, in the vicinity of Granary Square, followed by ice cream, because the shop I got this laptop from in the first place was on Tottenham Court Road, so by the time we'd got there sitting by the canal eating dinner while the sun went down seemed like an excellent idea.

... but for right now probably I should just do some Duolingo quickly and then head to bed...

Any suggestions on enabling support for mp3 playback in Firefox ESR under Debian Buster? I ask because, you see, it would be really nice to have Duolingo usable on desktop, but I appear to have exhausted my ability to google usefully. (Everything else is trending toward working! But I have installed all the possible relevant permutations of gstreamer1.0 plugins, and...)

Web console errors on attempting to play mp3 files:

HTTP "Content-Type" of "audio/mpeg" is not supported. Load of media resource https://d1vq87e9lcf771.cloudfront.net/linguatec_de_w/5f06f63b98551aa077592a7b612d1e26 failed. 1
Cannot play media. No decoders for requested formats: audio/mpeg

The laptop hasn't crashed in nearly 24 hours! It's still showing some intermittent slightly odd behaviour but it's entirely recoverable from! I don't really understand what's going on but I'll take it!

Meanwhile, we've swapped the bedrooms around. This has involved moving my desktop computer.

It will no longer boot into Debian. The Windows install -- which I can't do anything with, as I'm not on the work network -- is fine! Debian... gets partway through boot and then hangs forever a little while after "failed to start Create System Users" and a long while before I appear to get a useful terminal. GUESS WHAT I'M DOING TONIGHT.

(I mean, I'm also making baba ganoush to Ottolenghi's recipe because Of Course I Am -- though I'm probably skipping making pineapple upside-down banana bread...)

My Toshiba laptop (purchased by the DSA) finally had the keyboard finally give up the ghost entirely (this being the proximate cause of the trigger finger, which is doing very nicely with copious overnight splinting), having already had substantial problems with various other bits of its hardware in addition to overall slowing down a lot, and it was just... time for a new laptop.

So I went and bought a new-to-me refurbed Dell laptop (Latitude 7280) and it's generally doing rather well. Except that it does this fascinating thing, after a few but inconsistent hours of use, of just... losing ext4 and everything on it, and also producing the error message [drm:gen8_irq_handler [i915]] *ERROR* CPU pipe A FIFO underrun.

Which shows up a lot with not much concrete by way of obvious fixes, so herewith a list of things I've experimented with so far:

checking the SSD health, all of which is fine
swapping from "RAID On" to "AHCI" in BIOS (because some people suggested this might help; changed the precise nature of the symptoms in terms of things staying usable slightly longer and also getting an exciting blue-green screen gradient, but didn't actually fix the problem)
looking for any sort of auto power-down on the SSD that Debian might be handling inelegantly (and failing to find one)
confirming I'm really definitely on a later kernel version than the one that seems to be associated with this bug being introduced
confirming that I have the various xorg bits of video-intel that might reasonably be expected, and that they are (as these things go) up to date
actually updating my BIOS

... so now I get to wait a day or so and see if the BIOS update magically fixes things, and if not I probably need to start faffing with my x11 config in slightly greater earnest.

is there a current way to get it to disgorge a list of all the tags you've ever used? I'm running searches but not managing to turn up anything relevant to the current site layout.

I remembered from last time that several of these points were trivial to resolve but I didn't remember how they were trivial to resolve and my wry comments didn't actually include details. ERGO.

( Read more... )

1. I want the AO3's download-this-work-as-an-ebook option to be better. Specifically, I want to be able to download an entire series as a single ebook (why could I possibly want that, I wonder); and, more trivially achievable, I want chapter breaks to actually act as chapter breaks where the downloaded format supports navigation-by-chapter. Unfortunately it does not look like getting involved with dev work has got any easier or more sensible since last time I checked.

2. I have made smitten kitchen's apricot-pistachio thing again, this time with vanilla sugar-lemon pastry as previously threatened. I also glugged some rosewater into the pistachio frangipane this time, and will report back on same. ETA I am actually indifferent to the rosewater,

sebastienne will probably be pleased to hear. ;)

3. I am tentatively not hating the combination of Wunderlist and Regularly for managing my mental stack of shit-that-needs-done. I am still slightly suspicious. I will let you know how things progress.

4. This week I am mostly subsisting off half-arsed shakshuka. Recipe herewith for

sebastienne and

shortcipher in particular. ( Read more... )

5. ... there is probably in principle a thing five. In practice I think mostly I am sleepy.

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

the inexorable passage of time and end of all things

new laptop! \o/

... bug of the day

muttergrumble

"fuck you, pay me" as a zero-sum game

this time my :| is about computers

while I'm grumbling about computers--

query re zoom (for linux)

[plague-related tech support] ugh, Zoom

further adventures in robot ownership

a quick note on password managers

[computers] In which I don't really know what I'm doing

[books] hey so

I have a laptop back!

yet more sharks.

SHARKS.

[computer] adventures in *nix

a tumblr grouch

Notes-to-self on a Debian upgrade

Miscellany

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January 2026

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