Electronic gadgets, hobbies, developing
I’ve noticed that process SpokesUpdateService promoted to the top of my Memory usage list with 2.8 GB RAM used! It turned out to be part of PlantronicsHub software. I will disable to for a while an see how it will behave.
|
1 2 |
bash-4.4$ sudo launchctl remove com.PlantronicsUpdateService bash-4.4$ |
Note: this step needs to be repeated after every PlantronicsHub upgrade.
It’s been a while since I’ve built my current home lab. It’s based on Lenovo M910t. In general, I’m quite happy but it’s lacking expansion flexibility.
So I’m looking for a replacement. Below my notes from research and calculations of total cost.
Cost estimation.
| Component | Description | Price [PLN] |
|---|---|---|
| Total [PLN] / [USD] | 7307 [PLN] 1964 [USD] |
|
| Case | - Fractal Design Define R5 👍 - be quiet! Silent Base 800 - Phanteks Enthoo Pro | 439 |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X | 3365 |
| Motherboard | MSI X399 SLI PLUS | 1290 |
| RAM | - 48GB from old PC - 16GB - Crucial 2400 Total: 64 GB (with option for expansion up to 128 GB) | 630 |
| PSU | SeaSonic Focus Plus Platinum 650W (SSR-650PX) | 478 |
| HDD | PC - 2x 2TB from the old (ZFS root, RAID1) - 1x 4TB from the old + 2x 4TB new (ZFS storage1, RAID5) Total: 2+8 = 10 GB HDD On-demand backups - 1x 2TB from the old (backup, via old USB dock) | 880 |
| SSD | - 256GB from the old (zfs storage2-ssd) | 0 |
| M.2 | - 256GB from the old (ZFS cache) | 0 |
| CPU Cooler | - Noctua NH-U12S TR4-SP3 - Arcetic Freezer 33 TR 👍 | 170 |
| Video card | Used one from ebay or Allegro | 35 |
| Delivery | 20 |
Tech It Out was kind enough to provide this response and the photo on the MoBo I’m interested (MSI X399):
And how does it look on the picture:
After deeper deliberations (it’s hell lot of money! And I’m completely self-funded… Also Threadripper 2 is about to be released on August) I decided:
Regardless of all, this was quite interesting exercise!
My current home server which I use many for virtualisation, serving also some net services is reaching memory and disk-space limits. I named this server Wieloryb which in Polish means The Whale.
So far I have:
For greater flexibility and separation between different tasks I decided to use Proxmox as virtualisation manager. No issues with that: it does what it should, small issues can be justified by a very attractive price (0 USD…).
Another embarrassing problem with my MBP: when scrolling in e.g. Chrome, Safari or actually – any other window, there is annoying lag. When you scroll continuously, it’s more or less fine, but when you pause to read and then want to scroll, it stutters.
After a bit checking here and there, it turned out that if I increased keyboard backlight timeout from 5 seconds to 1 minute, the problem has been worked around!
Well done Apple, well done‼
This Quick Look plugin allows you to decompile Java class and look at the content.
When trying to add a custom resource, no matter what, I always got a wrong constant name error, for example:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 |
resolving cookbooks for run list: ["01_test-cookbook"] Synchronizing Cookbooks: - test-cookbook (0.1.0) Installing Cookbook Gems: Compiling Cookbooks... ================================================================================ Recipe Compile Error in /home/jhartman/.chef/local-mode-cache/cache/cookbooks/test-cookbook/resources/append_line.rb ================================================================================ NameError --------- wrong constant name 01TestCookbookAppendLine Platform: --------- x86_64-linux-gnu |
It turned out to be an issue with my cookbook name: it’s not allowed to have a cookbook name starting with a number (as later, it’s converted into a class name).
So my cookbooks as below are causing the problems:
|
1 2 3 4 |
drwxrwxr-x 8 jhartman jhartman 15 Apr 22 21:45 1_PreRequisites drwxrwxr-x 7 jhartman jhartman 14 Apr 22 23:38 2_OracleDB drwxrwxr-x 9 jhartman jhartman 16 May 3 18:12 3_NCC drwxrwxr-x 6 jhartman jhartman 13 Apr 22 22:22 4_PostInstallation |
They should be renamed into something else, for example:
|
1 2 3 4 |
drwxrwxr-x 8 jhartman jhartman 15 Apr 22 21:45 A_PreRequisites drwxrwxr-x 7 jhartman jhartman 14 Apr 22 23:38 B_OracleDB drwxrwxr-x 9 jhartman jhartman 16 May 3 18:12 C_NCC drwxrwxr-x 6 jhartman jhartman 13 Apr 22 22:22 D_PostInstallation |
Note, inside the files, there are references to the names, so you may need to update them accordingly, for example using:
|
1 |
$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/2_OracleDB/B_OracleDB/g' |
After this, no more strange errors after adding resources.
PS: When you work on MacOS, you may face another problem with your resources: MacOS trash files (._* or .DS_Store) are causing another (similarly looking) error. Take a look at this web page.
Just to inform (in case when Google stop working one day 😃) that my public projects are stored on GitHub https://github.com/jaroslawhartman
When you add some timezones to your Apple Calendar, it’s somehow difficult to remove them and you end up with a list which you perhaps don’t need anymore:
How to remove them? Rather easy, but we need a plist editor (easiest way to get it is to install XCode). Once we have it, just type in your terminal
|
1 |
$ open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist |
Find attribute RecentlyUsedTimeZones, unfold it and delete unwanted items:
A MacOS Alfred workflow to open a predefined Webex session.
Pre-requisites:
It’s pretty basic, but helps me to speed up a very common activity (which I always tend to do on very last second when a my conference call is about to start)…
So when I urgently need to open Webex conference, instead of searching through my browser bookmarks, just press Option-Space and type webex:
Then press Enter to get the list of your web conferences, for example:
Hit cursor down or up to select bridge you want to open and just press enter.
After downloading the workflow, just doubleclick the file and it will get imported to your Alfred.
Ok, how you could add your most frequently used Webex URLs to the list? Navigate to Alfred workflows, find Webex workflow and select Open in Finder:
Then open configuration.txt in your text editor:
In the file, set your URLs in format <Name>|<URL>, for example Jarek|https://webex.com/joint/jarek.hartman:
Save and done!
A script to pull Kindle Vocabulary Builder DB and convert into Memrise course.
The latest Kindle Paperwhite (second generation) offers the Vocabulary Builder feature. With Vocabulary Builder, you can look up words with the dictionary and memorize their definitions.
For my self-education I use http://memrise.com/ (both on my phone and desktop PC). I thought it would be great to pull words which I’ve checkded when reading English books on my Kindle and push them into my Memrise course.
memrise.db (the mp3 is written to the disk only, folder audio)vocab.db file (retrieved from your Kindle, from /Volumes/Kindle/system/vocabulary/)I heavily sourced from two GitHub projects:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 |
MBP:kindle-to-memrise jhartman$ ./kindle2memrise.py -h usage: kindle2memrise.py [-h] [-kindleDB KINDLEDB] [-dictionaryDB DICTIONARYDB] [-output OUTPUT] [-revision REVISION] [-debug] optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -kindleDB KINDLEDB Kindle vocabulary db filename (default: vocab.db) -dictionaryDB DICTIONARYDB Memrise dictionary db filename (default: memrise.db) -output OUTPUT Output file to import to memrise.com (default: memrise.txt) -revision REVISION Revision to output. Not specfied (default): last, 0 - all -debug Enable debug |
At minimum, the tool does not require any parameters, it will search for vocab.db in the current folder and will write output files into the same, current folder.
Pay your special attention to memrise.txt which has been generated:
|
1 2 3 4 5 |
MBP:kindle-to-memrise jhartman$ tail memrise.txt mere Sam. Used to emphasize that something is not large or important. Example: It costs a mere twenty dollars. mɪər thinning Rozcieńczać, rozrzedzać. To make a substance less thick, often by adding a liquid to it. Example: N/A θɪn carnivore Zwierzę mięsożerne. An animal that eats meat. Example: N/A ˈkɑːnɪvɔːr embrace Obejmować (się). If you embrace someone, you put your arms around them, and if two people embrace, they put their arms around each other.. Example: We are always eager to embrace the latest technology. ɪmˈbreɪs |
This is the file, which will be used for bulk word add into your Course.
Go to your Course, press Edit and in the Advanced options, look for Bulk add words:
Open memrise.txt in an editor (e.g. Notepad), select all, copy it and paste into Memrise Bulk Add form then press Add:
That’s it!
Download the script from GitHub: https://github.com/jaroslawhartman/kindle-to-memrise