Guy Jean's Japan

Category: Too much like work

  • Just like starting over

    Just like starting over

    Over the past few months there’s been an enormous push (in some circles) to abandon Windows in favor of Linux. Microsoft’s decision to end support for Windows 10 in October was a big motivation, but one that didn’t affect me as such — I was already on Windows 11 at home and the office.

    But some of the other reasons were nagging at me: particularly the Copilot AI hegemony and the increasing emphasis on saving in the cloud (OneDrive in this case) rather than on the local computer.

    Cartoon showing a customer in a computer business center speaking anxiously to a service person behind a counter.
    I want to save to the Documents folder … on my computer … that I own … in my house

    Push came to shove when an update locked me out of Office 365, and when I finally got signed back in, my local Windows account (full of files I’d saved on my computer) was hosed. Added to that, Microsoft announced all content of Office documents would be copied to the cloud even if the docs were not stored on OneDrive.

    An orange USB adapter in its package atop a blue box with white writing holding an NVMe 2TB drive.
    Early Christmas
    A brown wooden desk topped by a monitor, keyboard and mouse, speakers, papers and books, and a number of small items.
    Could do with some cleaning
    Mini computer case upside down on a placement, along with the replacement drive, various screwdrivers and a cup of coffee.
    Necessary tools: coffee, drivers
    A Wera driver with a No. 2 Philips bit pointing towards one of the case screws for a mini PC.
    This takes a No. 2
    The mini PC with the cover removed, showing a single available NVMe slot.
    Unexpected finding
    A spherical black subwolfer on a wooden floor, wedged between a desk and a stack of boxes.
    Into the doghouse wit’ ye!
    Wooden desk as before, with just the monitor, keyboard and mouse, and stuffed cat toy in a yellow hardhat.
    Much less bric-à-brac
    From mess to reassembled computer

    I’d ordered another NVMe drive, identical to the one in the computer. (That’s a USB safe charging adapter on top — unrelated to this project but it arrived in the same shipment.) After taking stock of the desk, I decided this would be a good opportunity to clean it up a bit. That took longer than removing the computer and opening it up, in fact. As a part of the clean-up, I moved the subwoofer to the floor, freeing up a good amount of space.

    The drive came with a nice little screwdriver and even a spare screw, which was a nice touch. Unfortunately once I got the case open I discovered only a single NVMe slot (while the specs say four). I quickly decided to swap out the Windows drive and install the new one, and in a few minutes I had the computer reassembled and plugged into the monitor, etc., ready to go.

    First light

    Not surprisingly, it took a little longer to install the operating system than it had done to just live boot from the USB. But we’ve come a long ways from my first days playing with Linux: the installation was if anything easier than Windows, and the OS immediately recognized all my devices: graphics accelerator, audio, Bluetooth, etc. I had to pair the mouse, but I was able to do that using the keyboard.

    A desktop monitor showing the Live Boot Menu with GRUB for Debian 13, against a blue background. Adjacent to the monitor are a pair of speakers and some desktop tchotchkes.
    Get this party started
    A jumble of USB accessories waiting to be added to the system.
    The gubbins
    A blue NVMe 2TB drive standing aslant in a black USB adapter.
    Easy file transfer
    A computer monitor showing a bare Gnome desktop.
    Desktop at first sign-in
    Everything ticking along nicely

    Once the installation was finished I started plugging all the accessories back in and trying them one by one. (I haven’t yet tested the DVD drive, to be honest.) I had an NVMe adapter already, so I plugged the Windows drive into that and I was able to simply copy over all my documents, pictures and music.

    And now I’m getting used to the changes. For example,to prepare the images for this blog post, I used a command line utility to convert them to JPG, resize them and, where needed, to rotate them. I’m sure there are polished tools available for this work (the Graphics Image Manipulation Program comes to mind), but the terminal got me sorted out quickly.

  • Well, that’s one win

    A client wants to see if we can make his site more mobile-friendly (and hence improve his Google page score) without actually changing the design (a very attractive job by Greg Buckingham). I’ve built the site on a well established mobile-friendly framework, so the question becomes one of whether I’ve done something to nullify that, or if the site content (much of which predates the mobile web) is messing things up.

    I started looking into it and pretty quickly recalled that I’d set it to be a fixed rather than a responsive layout. So that’s an obvious place to start.

    Rather than mess with a live client site, my next step was to set up a test site and start modifying it to match the appearance of the current site without affecting the mobile-friendliness. There’s a newer version of the Zen framework, so I went with that. And in raw form, as promised, it has a perfect mobile score.

    Now to make some changes. OK, the new framework does away with direct editing of the CSS in favor of SASS, which is a good move, really. So I have to install some tools to work with that. The host where I have my test site doesn’t give me the ability to install these tools, so I fired up my virtual linux box. Re-created the test site (after doing a fairly big upgrade of the OS — it’s been a couple of months since I’d used it). And then installed the tools. For good measure, copied in the site logo for a start. And …

    Nothing. Nada. Zip.

    Checked the selinux settings. Cleared up all the notices. Again.

    Zero.

    Went into the server logs. SEGMENTATION FAULT.

    What in the nine billion names of God? Installing the developer tools hoses the OS?

    This sounds like a good opportunity to work on something else for a while. Like this blog. I’ve had an issue since I set it up that while the site was at www.guyjeansjapan.com, the admin pages were at guyjeansjapan.com (sans ‘www’). This has caused various issues. For example, previewing didn’t work. The site stats wouldn’t load. And every so often when I was trying to accomplish something, I’d get logged out and the browser wouldn’t remember my credentials to log me in again.

    There’s a place in the control panel for these settings, but they were disabled. So I searched around until I found a config file hack that did the trick. Back in business now. Everything works as expected.

    While I was at it I found a like/dislike button plug-in. This was a request from Nana. Also some sharing settings that I’m not sure how much use I’ll make of, since I keep facebook in a different browser and have it blocked from this one.

    Pity the client’s not paying me to sort out my own blog. (On the other hand, the mobile friendly work is all speculation at this point, as I haven’t yet given him an estimate for the job.)