Silicon Valley Redneck

New laser printer, Linux, complications....

I remember, Back In The Day, when getting printers to work with Linux was a pain.

Then, for a glorious while, 'twas easy, and a lot of mainstream printers Just Worked - generally better with Linux/CUPS than with Windows.

Well, the new color laser printer (Canon LBP-622cdw) arrived yesterday, so I figured I'd set it up this morning, while running noisy machinery outdoors seemed inappropriate.

Printer setup under the old version of Debian on the old workstation (connected via USB) doesn't find a driver for it.  No surprise there.  Well, let's see what the new laptop thinks of it.  Connect to the WiFi network... crap.  Looks like I need to dig out the smegging user manual to learn how to enter a mixed-case password.  Well, try WPS instead.  That works.   The laptop finds it, thinks there's no driver required, displays toner levels and everything... but when I try to print a test page, all I get is an uninformative, but rude, beep from the printer.  No error message I can see.

Fiddle around some more.  Meanwhile, the printer times out and dozes off, disappearing from the WiFi network - and, after that, I can't seem to get it to reconnect, nohows.  Eh?

Oh, and Canon does offer a Linux driver (I think I checked this before putting the thing on my shopping list earlier this year, but hadn't downloaded it, let along tried to install it).  Download, run the installer script.  Try to, anyway.  It wants yum installed (uh, guys?  Debian and derivatives use apt).  Install that, and it still doesn't work; it apparently wants to install a bunch of support stuff from repositories that I don't have configured.  Seems like it's trying to set up some kind of GUI utility, not just the printer driver.

Back to the workstation.  Maybe I should try running an Ethernet cable?  But let's try the USB again and see where the trouble is.  With the failed driver installation, the printer shows up by its correct handle, but is b0rked.  Hmmm.  Look at the stuff I'd unpacked from the driver download.  Install a .deb for the PPD (cnrcupslbp622czs_5.00-1_all.deb), and one for the rasterizer (cnrdrvcups-ufr2-us_5.10-1_amd64.deb).  Restart CUPS.  Delete the broken printer instance, and run through the new-printer process.  Hooray!  It can't report toner levels, but a test page comes out glorious.

It also shows up on the network now, via the workstation's CUPS server, but attempting to print a test page from the laptop gets, again, a rude beep and nothing more.  Oh, well.  Maybe I need to install the PPD, if not the rasterizer, on the other machines that may want to use the new printer.

Hmmm.

With "Anti"Fa, or whoever the Masked Instigators are, showing us once again the reason for laws against, in general, going masked in public - OK, some of those laws were originally aimed at the Klan, but they also apply to stagecoach robbers, the assumption being that anyone out and about and concealing his identity is likely up to no good....

Maybe masks worn for non-nefarious purposes need to be clearly marked: FOR PREVENTION OF DISEASE ONLY.

"Russia! Russia! Russia!"

So... the Official Truth now is that all the rioting is being done by white supremacists, Russian agents, and Trump supporters?

Riiiiight.

Well, in a sense it's kinda-sorta right.  If the white-boy provocateurs and terrorists are indeed "Anti"Fa, then they're Soviet agents a couple of generations removed.  Not much to do with the current Russian thugocracy, though.  Certainly not Trump supporters, except in an inadvertent, alienating-the-public sense.  And white supremacists?  Maybe, in their own special way.

As the world burns

The view from here is eminently peaceful.  It seems to be Tedding Day for the hay-mowing guy; I can see him down the street.

Earlier today, I got about halfway through assembling that little benchtop CNC router I bought earlier this year - a CNC3-3018 Pro.  Going mostly smoothly so far.  Then I got out and did some weed-whacking (rather hard on my gradually-healing arm), and mowed most of the back lawn-ish areas.

Then I came back in, sat at the computer, and watched two guys go on a rocket ride to low Earth orbit courtesy of SpaceX and NASA.  Yay!  Remember when this was supposed to be routine, Real Soon Now?  And the capsules and spacesuits were supposed to look just about like what we saw today?

Oop!  Hay-mowing guy just came up the driveway; must be time for our field to get its second tedding.  (I don't know much about hay, but apparently cows can digest the weird mixture of grasses, clover, and weeds that make up the field/lawn here.)

Anyway.  There no longer being anything excitingly routine on the live feed, I suppose I might as well go back out to the garage and work on putting that router together.

Correction and update:  The second pass wasn't tedding, it was raking into windrows - another operation involving a machine with rotating rakey-looking things.  Now he's back with the baler.

Meanwhile, I got the router put together (modulo cable management), powered it up, and confirmed that the stepper motors go brrrrrr and the spindle goes whzzzzz, on command.  This model didn't come with limit switches (though there are places on the controller to connect them), but it did come with a laser head (which I haven't tested yet).  The "safety" glasses that came with it don't seem to have any specifications marked on them, and they don't look at all like the right color for protection against a 450nm laser; good thing I have a proper pair of safety glasses around here somewhere (have to dig them out before playing with the laser).

Also, two boxes of garage shelving and a laser printer showed up in the driveway.  I don't think the third box of shelving is in the mailbox, but I suppose I should check the mailbox for mail.

They're rioting 'most everywhere....

Seeing this bit on rioting in NYC, I dropped a comment with two thoughts:

1. I’d expected Famine to show up before War, but apparently not; instead of waiting for food riots, we’re already having any-excuse-for-a-riots.
2. I wonder how many of those white punks are Usual Suspects.

Well!  Over at RedState, Jeff Charles has some info on that second point.

Looks like the ones instigating and escalating were, indeed, white "Anti"Fa-type thugs.  Which, yes, means they're any-excuse-for-a-riots.

(The non-rioty protests?  Well... the cops are being dealt with, though it sounds like at least one of them has been a problem for a long time and The Powers That Be have been covering up for him, because getting rid of a bad cop is terribly inconvenient.  From what I've heard so far, the cops did need to arrest Floyd, and maybe they needed to use force, but the force eventually applied was inappropriate in both degree and nature.  It's not clear what Floyd actually died of, though it does seem to be somehow related to the arrest.  A second autopsy will no doubt conclude that he hanged himself in his cell while no one was looking.  And, once the riots got started?  Sounds like various cops in multiple cities are seriously out of control.  Shooting non-lethal but injurious projectiles at obvious reporters and TV crews, forsooth!)

Geopolitics and small business

So here I am, contemplating starting up the consulting business again, and also looking at dusting off the potential product line that's been pretty much on hold (with one family crisis or another) since summer of 2017.

Gonna need PC boards fabricated at some point.  The original Gadget designs were 2-sided to save money, but in the meantime overseas fab costs came way down, and going to 4-layer designs would significantly improve noise immunity, allow for more efficient layouts, and open up some options when it comes to things like electrical isolation.

Well... most of those cheap prototype PCB fab services are in China.  One that I've used in the past is, I think, in Singapore, though I'm not sure that's where the actual factory is.  The one I was planning to try for the next non-urgent project is in Hong Kong... which is now being assimilated.  The ones in the U.S. and Europe tend to run pricey - as in, maybe I could use their service if it were somebody else's money, but for a speculative prototype or a small production run of a modest-price-point product, forget it.  Also, the ones that are even vaguely plausible on price tend not to handle small feature sizes.

So, back to looking around for options.  The one in Singapore should be OK for now.  I have a vague recollection of a fab service in Bulgaria from years back, but I don't recall who they were and don't know if they're still in business, let along what their current capabilities might be.

... Oh, and a year ago I was looking at setting up my own small-volume SMT assembly line, using equipment made, of course, in China.  Dunno what the availability of such things will be once I have a place to put them.  At one point, there were several Americans prototyping that sort of equipment in their basements, but I'm guessing that the flurry of ready-to-run Chinese products may have kept them from going from hobby project to business.  Then there's the prospect of populating the barn, once we have the opportunity to transform it into a workshop, with machine tools... which, the past many years, the ones in my price range have come from Guess Where.

There's a perfectly logical explanation for this

Making the rounds:  The Hill proclaimed that

Anti-Semitic crime in Germany at highest level recorded

Which... yeah.  More'n one person has raised the issue of that little episode back in the 1930s and 40s.

But!  The headline did say crime, dinnit?  Meaning, like, acts in violation of the law?

Change the laws, and little things like breaking windows and sending people off to extermination camps cease to be crimes.  Another change, and assembling a minyan becomes a crime.

... Unless, that is, you think there's some higher authority than the State.

Random midweekery

My Android phone updated itself last night.  The most visible change?  The time-and-weather app keeps popping up a big white dot in the notification bar to remind me that it's running.  Hello?  Why is it doing that, and why isn't there a way to make it stop?

I set forth during a random bit of time this morning to address an equipment issue.  The charcoal grill we have at this point was left behind by the previous owner, and is is decidedly used shape - also, the little side box (which I suppose is for using it is a smoker; looks like it's meant to have charcoal burned in the side box, with the smoke going into the main chamber) was not at all well attached.  I had the notion of drilling some holes and adding some sheet-metal screws.  Well, whattaya know?  There are places for two screws to be, where screws aren't.  Got nice permanently-installed nuts and everything.  So let's see if I can find a pair of machine screws to match the nuts... it's something bigger than a #10-32.  Bigger than Random Junkbox Screw A; smaller than Random Junkbox Screw B.  Huh.  Hey, why do I have a pair of stainless 6mm capscrews in my junkbox?  Randomly try one of those: sure enough, the nuts are M6.  The holes don't quite line up right (maybe it came that way, and the original owner got frustrated and didn't install those screws?), but a little Dremel treatment later I can bolt the thing together properly.

Scattered through the day, I've been fielding issues on the current ToasterCo project; this is a particularly challenging situation, since there's not really a proper setup for testing the last-minute FPGA changes, either here or there.

I managed to get a little bit of yard work in... but just a little.  After dinner there might have been time, except for ToasterCo being three hours behind and thus still at work, and anyway the long-promised rain finally arrived.

And, I ordered most of the bits for the new workstation (ATX mid tower format, X470 chipset, Ryzen 7 3700X).  All supposed to arrive before the middle of June (I think the motherboard went out of stock while I was pondering, but is supposed to be back in stock Real Soon Now).  Not ordered yet: the SSD; I need to ponder further on that, in particular since name-brand 2TB M.2 NVMe devices are pricey, so I want to be clear on what my requirements really are, as well as what's a good match for the motherboard.  With 32GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and a decently capable (but not exactly gamer-god-level) video card, well, it kinda adds up.  Still, it's basically a once-in-a-few-years thing.

Oh, well.  Back to pondering the FPGA, and whether there's any reasonable way of bringing out some internal signals to test points that'll be accessible on the unit at ToasterCo.

Addendum:  I omitted to mention that, this being 2020, of course there was another complication.  The workstation bits belong on my business credit card, so I tried to change my payment method... and Amazon wandered off to examine my available payment methods and never returned.  Return to cart, checkout, rinse, repeat... I ended up putting it on my default personal card.  Not a big deal, but it's just one more aggravation.

Still (next morning) pondering the SSD.  I've historically used Samsung, but $$$$$.  Might go for WD Black, or maybe - just maybe - one of the lesser brands for significantly less money.  It does appear, though, that (as ever) there are arcane compatibility issues between storage devices and motherboards.

Update:  The Thursday morning email from Newegg brought a discount on the WD Black 2TB NVMe module that brought it down to right around Amazon's price... but with delivery promised for early June rather than the Fourth of July.  Still expensive... but... for something I plan to rely on for work for the next few years, getting something with solidly 5 star/egg reviews and good brand reputation seems advisable, and it's significantly less pricey than its Samsung counterpart.  Hm.  I should probably also round up an M.2 heatsink, being as how longevity is a concern.

... And now I'm trying to remember how much I paid for my first 20 Mbyte hard drive... in 1985 dollars or whenever it was [edit: more likely 1984-ish].  Maybe I should dig out an old issue of BYTE and check the ads for historical pricing on 8" SSSD floppy drives.

Update 2:  Historical disk drive prices may be found here.  I think those are in original dollars, not inflation-adjusted.  Maybe I shouldn't be squawking about the price of a 2-freakin'-terabyte "drive" with insane transfer rates and an MTBF that 1980s IBM could only dream of?

Also, while I was at this sort of thing, I finally broke down and ordered a replacement for my aging laser printer.  Slightly bulkier, but it'll still fit on my printer table.  Has Ethernet and WiFi, in addition to the USB port.  Duplexer, of course - I've insisted on that feature on the primary office printer for a great many years now.  And, this one's in color!  Ends up costing a bit over (if memory serves, and not adjusting for inflation) a third as much as my first MX-80.  Consumables aren't that bad, and the black cartridge is sold separately from the colors.

Still holding off on a wide-format inkjet printer, though.  The one I have will do 11x17, and I can do cutting & pasting for the occasional mega-sheet.

Further afterthought:  I'm trying to remember how much I paid for my first PC - a fairly basic Made-In-Taiwan Turbo XT Clone.  Had, if memory serves, an 8088 CPU, a button on the front to switch the CPU clock between standard 4.77 MHz (for CPU-speed-dependent games) and a whopping 8 MHz, 640K of RAM, a floppy drive or two, and... was the hard drive 10 MB, or what?  Pretty sure the price tag was well north of $1K, in 1985 dollars or whatever year that was.

Supplemental rambling:  That MX-80 wasn't my first printer... before that, I had a converted wide-carriage Selectric, bought (extremely used) from Electro-Labs in Palo Alto (upstairs, at the time, from Peninsula Scientific, if anyone remembers that).  Didn't speak ASCII, nor even EBCDIC, and the computer had, IIRC, a certain amount of responsibility for timing the solenoids correctly.  Hadda write my own driver, first for my homebrew 6502 system and later for the SwTPC box running FLEX/09, handling (approximate) translation from ASCII to whatever flavor of Correspondence Code corresponded to the typeball in use.

Supply chains

So we didn't have a chance to buy a freezer the first couple of months after we got here, then there was the Pestilence, and now... well...

Lowe's has a bunch of freezers of suitable characteristics advertised - but, "In-store purchase only."  Yeah, that helps; we're trying not to go into stores at this point, and besides we can't even tell on line what's available in the local store.

Home Depot has some suitable-looking models orderable on line - for delivery sometime in August, maybe.  Ugh.  Well, we may end up going that route; we'd still have time to stock it for winter, and we wouldn't totally miss harvest season (though I think by that time most of the berries will have come and gone).

And, on the smaller-appliance front: it's about time to order the parts for the new workstation.  The mini-tower case I'd bookmarked is still available, and the price has even come down: good.  Most of the other bits, price and availability are pretty much unchanged since a week or so back.  But!

The motherboard I'd marked as preferred is now available only from a third-party bazaar seller, and marked up by about a factor of three.  The various second-choice-ish models seem to be backordered but available sometime before mid-June, which I guess isn't too bad.  And... main  reason the preferred one was preferred is that reviewers indicated that it predictably came with a recent BIOS installed and thus was ready to run with a 3000-series Ryzen CPU; the others seem to have been spotty about that.  But, if they're back-ordered... do I trust that a new batch is on the way from the factory, and they'll all have the current BIOS installed?

Oh, well.  Guess I'll get organized and start ordering computer pieces before other stuff goes out of stock.  And, looks like Amazon has better deals than Newegg these days, on the things I'm looking for (as well as accepting back-orders on those sometime-in-June motherboards).

The freezer?  We'll have to ponder that one.

Update:  I'm actually having second thoughts about the mATX form factor.  Seems that populating the PCIe X16 slot (in just about any of these) with a video card with fans on it (which is to say, anything but the most basic) covers up the next slot, meaning that there are really only two usable PCIe slots, which is just enough for my immediate needs - nothing left for surprises.  So, possibly back to full-ATX form factor, and a full-tower case.  I think availability of full-ATX motherboards may be better, too.

Rural life continues

Well, I did make some progress on the FPGA thing yesterday, though there's still some to do.  At least I'm now reasonably clear on what still needs doing.

Also, and in lower-tech areas of endeavor... I did some shovel work on the little drainage ditch that crosses the driveway; last time it was flowing, I'd noticed that it was backing up right at the fence line, and flowing across the grass and into the low-lying area of the driveway instead of proceeding to the little culvert.

And, out in the barn, I hoisted the mower deck up again and got it stable enough to go after it - cautiously! - with a pipe wrench, bending the offending flange back into something like its proper place, so the blade now clears it.  This involved around one and a half square feet of torque (a foot and a half of leverage times pushing on it with my foot on account of I couldn't apply enough force with my hand under the circumstances).  Fixing it properly will still, someday, involve strapping it to the pallet forks, taking it to someplace with electricity, grinding away at the (not very good) weld, re-welding, cleaning up, and applying a fresh coat or two of Kubota-orange spray paint, whereof I now have a can, but since I haven't done any welding in a couple-dozen years now, and the new flux-core welder needs to be tested on something less expensive first, I think that waits for a while.

This morning brings the hay-mowing guy; a few days hence, all the tall stuff should be cut and the hay baled and hauled off, and it'll be time to decide where walking paths are going to be and start maintaining them myself.  Also, it's coming up on time for a couple of minor earth-moving projects, so I'll be exploring the possibilities of the loader and the box blade.

Afterthought:  I omitted, while the mower deck was up, to measure the nuts so's I could buy the proper size of socket for maintenance.  Foo.

And yet, the more things change...

That predictable constant I mentioned in passing on Saturday?

Seems it's worse than I expected:

One in five English people believe that Jews created COVID-19 to collapse the economy for financial gain, a newly-released study by a team of researchers at the University of Oxford has revealed.

One in five?  In England?

You'd think they could come up with a better scapegoat occasionally.  Mormons, say, who are supposed to be prepared to hunker in place for a while.  Or Greens, who actually want to collapse the economy.  Maybe even the Chinese Communist Party, which... oh, wait, the Commies actually deserve a lot of blame for this one, as do certain idiot politicians who (e.g.) forbade nursing homes to discriminate against patients infected with a contagious, deadly disease.

Weeding required

The weeds in the victory garden come in zones.

Zone 1, planted early with corn and onions, is developing a robust population of weeds that look remarkably like the composition of the surrounding lawn.  This zone was tilled only once.

Zone 2, tilled a second time before I started planting in it, is sort of transitional, with less of the lawn-type grasses.

Zone 3, which had three tillings before planting, has some sort of broadleaf weeds that I haven't identified yet, plus two kinds of grass - one of which looks remarkably like corn, though I didn't scatter seed corn around those areas, and the other is... I think it's St. Augustine grass, and when I bought the Sunnyvale place the front and back lawns were composed entirely of this stuff, and it took a lot of killin'.  Like, multiple applications of glyphosate.

At least the soil here is fairly soft, so I guess if I go around uprooting the unwanted vegetation before it gets its roots too well established, that should more or less take care of it.  And maybe the fall treatment, for the entire area that's destined to become next year's vegetable patch, involves a spray of glyphosate, a tilling or two, and sowing with some sort of inoffensive winter cover crop (probably clover of some sort).

Meanwhile, I gotta keep the weeds in check, even in the corn patches.  And... I still figure on scalping the lawn surrounding the current garden area and covering it with weed barrier; perhaps if I extend that to next year's planting zone, I won't need the glyphosate come fall?

(The current victory garden is located in the zone originally designated as future goat pasture, but with goats having been reclassified as a Next Year Thing and life having gotten awfully busy, I think come fall we'll be reconsidering whether we'll be having time to take care of goats.  Maybe they just don't happen, and their pasture remains vegetable garden.)

I smell smoke

At 0412 on a Sunday?

Not sure if someone started burning a brush pile yesterday, or if this is opening weekend of BBQ season and someone's fired up the smokehouse.

(I know this is supposed to be opening weekend of grilling season, though with the unpredictable weather we're not likely to be doing any grilling - building a suitably fireproof cookout shelter is on my to-do list, but won't be happening for a while yet.)

Update:  As it turned out, the thunderstorms missed us... but by the time I figured out that was likely to happen, the time for getting any grillables out of the freezer and defrosted was long past.

For a while there, I was hearing occasional thunder to the south, and occasional musketry to the north; I assume the latter wasn't advancing Yankee troops.

My, how times change!

Kipling:

Yet when the sickness was sore in the land,
And neither planets nor herbs assuaged,
They took their lives in their lancet-hand
And, oh, what a wonderful war they waged!
Yes, when the crosses were chalked on the door-
(Yes, when the terrible dead-cart rolled!)
Excellent courage our fathers bore--
None too learned, but nobly bold
Into the fight went our fathers of old.

Now?  Despite all our modern learning, ignorance yet abounds... but courage seems sadly lacking, and our response, as a society, has been dominated by panic, at least among the ruling class.

(Also, I think the concept of "labor action" may have gotten inverted this year: instead of leaving their jobs in protest, workers return to their jobs in protest.  Some things, on the other hand, never change; you can always find someone blaming the Jews.)

Meanwhile in the wonderful world of Digital Stuff

Some years ago, I replaced the factory CD player in the Venerable Prius with one that can play MP3 files of a data CD.  I soon discovered that some of the MP3s in my collection would play fine, and some wouldn't play at all.  Apparently had something to do with which encoding program I'd used, though I never did sort out which was what.

Well... now we're in the modern age, and I got myself a set of Bluetooth earmuffs so's I can listen to some tunes while operating noisy machinery.  I loaded up my phone with a bunch of MP3s, and... yeah.  Some play, some don't.  And, this being a phone and a music player, there's no such thing as an error message when something goes wrong.

(I'm using Musicolet for an Android music player; it seems to work pretty well, apart from the smartphone UI and not playing some files.)

Maybe if I try transcoding to some other format?  That newfangled AAC, perchance?

After a little looking around, I tried:

ffmpeg -i foo.mp3 -ac 2 -ab 64000 foo.aac

Which, sure enough, produced a file that Musicolet would play... once I copied it to the memory card in the phone.  Which, on current Android?

Hello, Google?  How come I need to tap the build number seven times to enable the option to enable the option to have the USB port work for data transfers?  Hmmm?  On my last phone, that stuff was right up front, not hidden three layers deep in obscurity.  And whatever became of having the phone emulate a generic USB storage device?

Yeah, yeah.  We're supposed to move all our files via The Cloud, because that's so much more convenient and also because

Oh, and The Cloud doesn't seem friendly to shuffling my own music files onto the phone.  Photos, maybe.  Music, apparently I'm supposed to buy cloud licenses for. Riiiight.

Anyway.  Looks like I have a working incantation for transcoding the files to something at works on the phone.  I have yet to confirm that the metadata makes it across.  I need to check that, and write some sort of script for doing the conversion on a set of files contained in a directory hierarchy, possibly generating new names based in ID3 tags.  Oh, and possibly sanitizing names, because something, somewhere in the process, doesn't seem to like some of the file names, perhaps because of weird Unicode characters; I may need to apply an umlaut-remover.

And, for the actual file transfer?  I think I'll shut down the phone, remove the microSD card, and plug it into the computer.  Seems the quickest and most convenient way to transfer a bunch of music files onto an Android phone, which really says something about Android.  (I suppose I could use Dropbox or something, but good old Sneakernet looks best right now.)

Update:  Looks like MP3 metadata (ID3 tags) doesn't carry across to AAC... but, no reason I can't generate a batch of clean MP3s.  Bunch of stuff to fiddle with, but not now, what with there being another bunch of stuff that's kinda higher priority, like the ToasterCo project.

Is Despair the Fifth Horseman?

Report:

Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek say they have seen more deaths by suicide during this quarantine period than deaths from the COVID-19 virus.

Hm.  And we haven't (at least in the U.S.) seen Famine nor War, yet.  Rumors of Famine, yes, and stirrings of War, but not much in the way of casualties so far.

Sounds like Despair is doing a bang-up job, though.  And eventually we'll see the statistics for treatable, non-contagious* medical conditions that go untreated - cancer, strokes, heart attacks, and so forth.  Not sure if we chalk those up to Fear or to Central Planning.

* If they're contagious, they go in Pestilence's column, even if they're not the currently fashionable pestilence.

The 2020ness continues

So I did indeed try calling Home Depot again this morning... and, after a very long time on hold, eventually got a nice helpful-sounding Southern lady who heard my tale of confusion and said she'd better call FedEx and try to sort out what had happened with my shipment.

Whereupon the line went silent.  Oh, well.  Put the phone back on speakerphone, put it in my pocket, fetch lunch, put lunch and phone on my desk, eat lunch, ...

After another eternity, my phone emitted a series of tones - and up came the after-call survey.  Which says, I guess, that The Computer had decided that the call was at an end.

I still don't know what's up with my missing shelves and rails.  Oh, well: the question has at least been raised, and they have my phone number and e-mail address.

Didn't they used to have an on-line customer-service chat thingy?  Or was that just everybody else who used to have that, usually with annoying popups?  And has it disappeared from sites that used to have it?  Really, on-line chat would be the best way to handle this sort of thing.  Maybe with a "contact customer service" link associated with each recent order?

(A lot of e-commerce sites seem to be missing some basic functionality.  Last month, I attempted to order from one of the established electronics distributors for the first time.  There was some mixup with my bank, the order went into limbo, and there appears to be no way either to update the payment information and try again or to cancel the order.  And the local pharmacy lets me order, on line, a prescription refill to be delivered by mail, but then I have to call with payment info and tell them I want it mailed, because the order form has no place to enter payment info and the fact that I checked the "deliver by mail" box somehow gets lost in the process.)

Update:  Just to make my Thursday more and more wonderful, I spent much of the afternoon and on into the evening with stomach pain and cramps.  Later in the evening, the cramps moved to my legs.  Great.

And I still don't know what's become of my shelving.  Also, if you omit an apo'stophe and type "dont", Chrome's spelling checker thinks you could have meant "font" or "dint" or possibly "don", but not "don't".  Silly spelling checker.

Seems like we should have learned this earlier

Surely it shouldn't have taken this long to get useful information on how long the SARS-CoV-2 virus persists on various sorts of surfaces under various conditions; shouldn't that have been an early priority?

And getting a handle on how readily the Pestilence may be spread by various means: also a priority, no?

Well, comes the news that the CDC is now saying that transmission via surfaces is a low-probability thing.  Like, maybe it could happen, but we don't know that it does.

So, the whole sanitized-daily-for-your-protection business?  Pointless theater.  (Especially sanitizing the ground outdoors.)

And the don't-wear-a-mask-it'll-make-things-worse-just-wash-your-hands-for-20-seconds thing?  Abso-fraggin'-lutely bass-ackwards.  Of course.

Having a very 2020 time around here

Let's see, now...

A couple of checks I mailed, over the last several weeks, didn't arrive and get processed in anything like a timely fashion.  I still don't know what happened to the voided check I sent to the curbside garbage collection company so they could set up auto-pay, but I do know that the check I mailed for the second payment on the tractor wasn't processed until well over a month after I mailed it - good thing I checked my account status on line, and made an electronic payment (so now, the check eventually having arrived and been processed, I'm one payment ahead).

For a few weeks now, Joy has been going 'round and 'round with her, and my father's, former medical facilities, trying to get their medical records forwarded to UT Medical Center. It's not at all clear what's going on with that, except that somehow the medical records aren't making it there.

And, a while back I ordered three sets of wire shelving (each including shelves, rails, and brackets) for the garage/lab from Home Depot.  Estimated delivery time was yesterday.  Last Tuesday, a shipment arrived... consisting of one smallish box containing all the brackets.  Hm?  Strange that the brackets would ship separately; I'd assumed it would be three kits, each with a set of shelves, rails, and brackets.  But the  bracket count looked about right, so maybe for some reason the shelves and rails would be along eventually in one or more longer boxes.

Well, yesterday came and went, and a careful examination of the curtilage revealed no parcels large enough to contain even one shelf, so this afternoon I called Home Depot's 800 number.  The cheerful robot informed me that my order had shipped and would arrive by yesterday.  Then it offered me a tracking number, which got me off the phone until I fed it into FedEx's tracking thingy and discovered that it was for the box of brackets delivered last Tuesday.

(By the way, guys: maybe tracking data should include "number of boxes" along with the other info.  Just a thought.)

So I called the 800 number again, pushed buttons until it asked me for an order number, and said "live person" until I got put on hold.  For well over half an hour.  With no sign of anyone actually picking up.

I guess I'll try again tomorrow early, or maybe I'll try calling one of the local stores and see if someone there can help sort out an online order.

Oh, and Chrome's spelling checker seems to be getting increasingly limited in its vocabulary, as well as stupid about obvious typos.  Apparently if you habitually use more than the ten hundred most common words you're supposed to sign up for enhanced spell check, which I think means agreeing to share everything you type with Google.

As the computer grinds...

Back to working on FPGA stuff today, interspersed with working up a plan for the new workstation.

Given how obscenely long it takes to run an FPGA build (for this moderately complex design, but mostly with much iteration required to resolve timing constraints), I think I end up going for a top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 this time.  The gain in productivity should be well worth it.

Probably the B450 chipset, and a micro-ATX form factor - so, a mini-tower case.  Haven't decided yet whether I really need to have an optical drive poking through the front panel; a USB optical drive atop my desk (as needed) might make more sense.  Motherboard selection will be strongly influenced by availability, but I'm looking for something with a couple of PCIe slots beyond the one for the video card, at least one M.2 NVMe slot, and maybe built-in WiFi that plays nice with Linux (it'll be relying on the WiFi until I get the house wired for gigabit Ethernet, but I have the option of plugging in a PCIe WiFi card - not so much a USB dongle, as the dual-band ones aren't supported well under Linux at this point).

Based on current RAM usage and the likelihood of having multiple VMs running concurrently on the new system (mainly to support legacy tools, stable development platforms, and suchlike), I think I'd better go for 32 GB of RAM (DDR4 3200).

For an SSD, probably one-each 2TB M.2 NVMe module, so I can store not only the tools (/opt stuff) and VM images but also the development working copies locally, with working copies being backed up to the file server on a regular basis*.  I'll have to give data organization some careful thought.

In the video-card department, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 (from whatever card vendor) looks to be a decent compromise - not so expensive and power-hungry as the fancy gaming cards, but with plenty of capability for 3D CAD and suchlike.

Looks like a 500W power supply ought to keep it all running, and I'll probably go for a modular model this time, especially if I end up going with the mini-tower case; no point stowing a bunch of unused cables in such a cramped little box.

Still dithering over which distro to use; while I (mostly) like Linux Mint on my laptop, I'm thinking Kubuntu might be a better choice for the workstation, for various reasons of my own.  Vanilla Debian, alas, tend to be lacking in latest'n'greatest libraries and utilities, and software vendors that officially support Linux at all tend to support Ubuntu.

Ah, well.  Looks like the test build of the re-arranged FPGA code finished; time to start making actual changes.

* Clarification:  Working copies get checked in to the Subversion server (which currently lives in Dallas) when I'm good and ready.  Backing them up to the local file server (and its backups) guards against loss of work that I'm not yet ready to check in.