Geeky

It has become apparent, to me, that Android is clearly the superior platform on which to listen to your own local music. And, maybe I kinda knew this already but it’s all coming back to me again as I will probably hop onto the Pixel 10. I go back and forth between Apple and Android at least every two upgrades, but sometimes every upgrade. Particularly with how the new Apple Music app handles your library–e.g., like a freaking walled garden–there’s just no substitute for having all of your playlists saved off in xspf or m3u files. I even exported one of my playlists from Plex via API…that was quite a journey to get that cleaned up, but at least now I have that playlist externally defined. No such hooks with Apple, of course.

Particularly when you pair your library and its playlists with a player like Poweramp. I tried a couple of OSS solutions, but they just didn’t have the playlist management (namely import/export) that Poweramp does. Now, that being said, maybe I’ll tweak one of those OSS solutions to handle such things

To get my playlist out of Plex ended up being a simple curl command. I got the API key for Plex for my managed user account via DevTools, along with the playlist id, and then ran this in a BASH prompt:

curl -s "http://<myip>:32400/playlists/<playlist_id>/items?X-Plex-Token=<api-token>" | xmllint --xpath '//Part/@file' - | sed -E 's/ file="([^"]*)"/\1\n/g' | sed '/^$/d' >> <playlist-name>.m3u

From there, I did have to massage the resultant m3u a bit to contain the correct path information for Android. I have also been sanitizing file names in my library to get rid of special characters that are perfectly usable in Windows (and even Linux), but Android freaks out over–namely ‘!’ and ‘?’, which I simply replaced with ‘_’.

Preparation and Installation of the base system

Connect the USB drive and boot from the Arch Linux ISO
Make sure the system is booted in UEFI mode. The following command should display the directory contents without error
- ls /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
Connect to the internet (if not already). Assuming wireless:
- iwctl
- station <interface> scan
- station <interface> get-networks
- station <interface> connect <network-name>
Run fdisk to create Linux partitions
- fdisk /dev/<your-disk>
- Create an empty GPT partition table using the g command
  - # WARNING: This will erase the entire disk.
    
    Command (m for help): g
    Created a new GPT disklabel (GUID: ...)
- Create the EFI partition (/dev/<your-disk-efi>)
  - Command (m for help): n
    Partition number: <Press Enter>
    First sector: <Press Enter>
    Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size{K,M,G,T,P}: +250M
    
    Command (m for help): t
    Partition type or alias (type L to list all): uefi
- Create the Boot partition (/dev/<your-disk-boot>)
  - Command (m for help): n
    Partition number: <Press Enter>
    First sector: <Press Enter>
    Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size{K,M,G,T,P}: +512M
    
    Command (m for help): t
    Partition type or alias (type L to list all): linux
- Create the LUKS partition (/dev/<your-disk-luks>)
  - Command (m for help): n
    Partition number: <Press Enter>
    First sector: <Press Enter>
    Last sector, +/-sectors or +/-size{K,M,G,T,P}: <Press Enter>
    
    Command (m for help): t
    Partition type or alias (type L to list all): linux
- Print the partition table using the p command and check that everything is OK
  - Command (m for help): p
- Write changes to the disk using the w command. (Make sure you know what you’re doing before running this command)
  - Command (m for help): w
Format the EFI and Boot Partitions
- mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/<your-disk-efi>
  mkfs.ext4 /dev/<your-disk-boot>
Set up the encrypted partition. You can choose any other name instead of cryptlvm
- cryptsetup --use-random luksFormat /dev/<your-disk-luks>
  cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/<your-disk-luks> cryptlvm
Create an LVM volume group
- pvcreate /dev/mapper/cryptlvm
  vgcreate vg0 /dev/mapper/cryptlvm
Create LVM partitions; We create logical volumes for swap, root (/), and home (/home). Leave 256MiB of free space in the volume group because the e2scrub command requires the LVM volume group to have at least 256MiB of unallocated space to dedicate to the snapshot.
- lvcreate --size 4G vg0 --name swap
  lvcreate -l +100%FREE vg0 --name root
  lvreduce --size -256M vg0/root
Format logical volumes
- mkswap /dev/vg0/swap
  mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg0/root
Mount new filesystems
- mount /dev/vg0/root /mnt
  mount --mkdir /dev/<your-disk-efi> /mnt/efi
  mount --mkdir /dev/<your-disk-boot> /mnt/boot
  swapon /dev/vg0/swap
Install the base system. We also install some useful packages like git, vim, and sudo
- pacstrap -K /mnt base linux linux-firmware openssh git vim sudo
Generate /etc/fstab. This file can be used to define how disk partitions, various other block devices, or remote filesystems should be mounted into the filesystem
- genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab
Chroot into the new system
- arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
Set TimeZone
- ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/<Region>/<City> /etc/localtime
Run hwclock(8) to generate /etc/adjtime
- hwclock --systohc
Set Locale
- vim /etc/locale.gen #uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
  locale-gen
  echo LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > /etc/locale.conf
Set hostname
- echo <new-hostname> /etc/hostname
Create a user
- useradd -m -G wheel --shell /bin/bash <your-username>
  passwd <your-username>
  visudo # ---> Uncomment "%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL"
Configure mkinitcpio with modules needed to create the initramfs image
- pacman -S lvm2
  vim /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
  # ---> Add 'encrypt' and 'lvm2' to HOOKS before 'filesystems'
  mkinitcpio -P
Setup GRUB
- pacman -S grub efibootmgr
  grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB
  
  In /etc/default/grub edit the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX as follows. Don’t forget to replace /dev/<your-disk-luks> with the appropriate path.
  
  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="cryptdevice=/dev/<your-disk-luks>:cryptlvm root=/dev/vg0/root"
  
  Now generate the main GRUB configuration file
  
  grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Install networkmanager package and enable NetworkManager service to ensure you have Internet connectivity after rebooting
- pacman -S networkmanager
  systemctl enable NetworkManager
Exit new system and unmount all filesystems
- exit
  umount -R /mnt
  swapoff -a
  
  Arch has been installed! Reboot
  
  reboot

Configuration of NetworkManager

Run nmtui from console
Connect to desired WiFi network, supplying passphrase

Installation of yay (AUR)

sudo pacman -S base-devel git --needed
cd ~
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

Installation of Cinnamon (optional)

After reboot, login
Install Cinnamon and some basic extras
- sudo pacman -S cinnamon nemo-fileroller xdg-user-dirs gnome-terminal gnome-system-monitor gnome-screenshot lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings lightdm-slick-greeter
You can either roll with the default greeter, or install slick-greeter
- sudo vim /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
- Look for greeter-session and change its value
  
  greeter-session=lightdm-slick-greeter
- Save and quit vim
Reboot

Installation of KDE (optional)

Install Plasma
- sudo pacman -S plasma-meta kde-applications-meta kde-gtk-config
SDDM (KDE Display manager)
- sudo pacman -S sddm sddm-kcm
- sudo systemctl enable sddm
Enable Network and Bluetooth
- sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager
- sudo systemctl enable bluetooth
Reboot

And there you have it! Arch Linux with your Desktop of choice. Enjoy!

Found this out on the Interwebs. It’s a DOS music player from 1998, long before I had frequented the halls of Napster. Of course, the MPAA smacked us all down and 86’d all of the sharing for most of us. I’m pretty sure they would have litigated mix tapes, had they the ability to. Anyway, kind of cool to be able to run this in DOSBox and experience how people first experienced extracted music.

So, the BASH downloader worked well enough for what it was. Then I decided to do some functional upgrades. It got so complex for a BASH script that I decided to make it a C# app. The whole dotnet platform is kind of the new Java, so why not roll with it? Besides, I’m getting pretty good at this dotnet on Linux thing–all my servers that I run are Linux (mostly Debian). I used to be pretty big on PHP on that platform, but as dotnet has matured that’s gone by the wayside.

The end result was pretty good, I think. Fairly simple service-layer architecture, with one service for dealing with episode management, and one for managing the metadata. I have it set up as a scheduled task that runs every four hours on my Plex box. It’s done fairly well, after ironing out the kinks over a couple weeks.

The neat little part of it was Main was as simple as:

private static async Task Main(string[] args)
    {
        var serviceProvider = ServiceConfiguration
            .AddServices()
            .BuildServiceProvider();

        using (var scope = serviceProvider.CreateScope())
        {
            var episodeProcessing = scope.ServiceProvider.GetService<IEpisodeProcessing>();
            if (episodeProcessing != null)
            {
                await episodeProcessing.ProcessEpisodes();
            }
        }
    }

Much like the BASH script, it pulls from a list that I define–though, I threw that list into a SQLite db. Still thinking about how I want to manage the list. Possibly a web app, possibly an Electron app. A web app would be pretty simple, but I’ve poked at Electron a bit and I do dig how it’s pretty much a web app in spirit. We’ll see. It’s not like I add podcasts to my list very often, so I can ponder a bit.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…in the late 20th century…a young chap started out in Computer Science at the University of Colorado in Denver.

Things were going pretty well. Second semester hit, and the adventure really began. There was a course in object oriented development in C++ in this lad’s early CS career. He hadn’t seen objects before, and only had a notional understanding of what they were—if even that.

A project that took pretty much all of the semester was to create a set of classes to manipulate and display a linked list. This was his first foray into abstract data types. It was quite the effort across that semester, but it got done—and, not only was a program which handled CRUD for a linked list the end result, but an indexed one—to allow you to access values non-sequentially as if it were an array.

It was a cool project in the end, and this lad looks back with fondness at those early days, when all of it was so new.

Flash forward nearly three decades to the advent of LLM, Large Language Models.

It’s become a bit of a hobby of mine to throw things at ChatGPT, one of the more popular LLM generators these days, to see what it can do.

I gave it the basic requirements of that very same semester project freshman year. It generated a whole class, complete with a main driver, in mere seconds. You can’t help but feel a mix of fascination and a bit of melancholy as you watch all of that effort (which I could now do in less than an hour, myself) do it all in just a mere moment.

Also makes me wonder how creative professors have to get these days to come up with a project that can’t be easily generated 😂

ChatGPT
ChatGPT helps you get answers, find inspiration and be more productive. It is free to use and easy to try. Just ask and ChatGPT can help with writing, learning, brainstorming and more.

The Marriott Marquis
Con-goers show off their ribbons
Atlanta Radio Theatre Company
The Hyatt
The Hyatt Atrium Tower, Ballroom Level
Firefly
Dr. Teeth
Female Ferengi
Andorian
Cylon
Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Gargoyle
Dooku and Friends
View from The American Hotel
Jack and Rose (Titanic)
Mandalorian Bobbleheads
Blue Screen of Death
Beetlejuice
The Hilton
Mars Rover Perseverance Panel
Borg
Creepy Girls
Marriott Atrium Level
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Panel
Adam Savage
The Marriott
Beaker
Fountain Outside Marriott
Barbenheimer
Wookie
Futurama Panel
Lion-O
T-Rex
Atrocious Line Outside of AmericasMart
Cute TV Head
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds costume
Strong Bad
Flight Attendant Bunny?
Among Us
Bumblebee
Taking off from Huntsville
The Steed to Dragon Con

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” – Carl Sagan

Windows Terminal handles opacity better than any other CLI ever did. I played with opacity some time back with Powershell before Windows Terminal came along, but the whole window became opaque, as opposed to just the content pane. I tend to set console opacity first-thing whenever I get a Mac, and it’s good that it can now be integrated into my Windows setup habits 😀 One can do this with the entirety of Windows Terminal, or narrow it to any specific command-line app you want.

So, one thing I’ve really gotten into over the years has been emulation. It’s the best way of going back to the things you used to love in computing without actually going back in time–and without having to put a boat anchor of a CRT on your desktop 😉

VICE is one of those emulators I really dig. Our first family computer was the Commodore VIC-20. Using VICE, I can run the very first software that I ever ran (and even coded).

While I guess I wouldn’t totally mind the notion of setting up a full VIC-20 rig, this sure is a great way of getting a blast from the past without 😎

Android vs Apple (The Great Internal Debate Continues)

Installation of Arch Linux (w/ luks encryption) and Cinnamon and/or KDE

Retro Nite

And then I decided to get more complicated…

Kids These Days

ChatGPT

Dragon Con 2023

Artemis I

TIL

VICEs