Posts

WordRefAnkiNoteCreate - a python command line utility to automate Anki Note creation

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GitHub Repo for WordRefAnkiNoteCreate: https://github.com/jglotzer/WordRefAnkiNoteCreate As a committed user of both Anki  as well as wordreference.com  I've always wanted to have an easy way to create new Anki Cards. Creating Anki Cards (or more accurately, Anki Notes, as a Note consists of two sides while a Card is only one side.) can be a laborious, manual process, depending on how complicated or aesthetic you want the card to be. Most of the information one might want can be found at  wordreference.com , it's just not organized and/or formatted in a way that makes sense for the way I happen to use Anki. This is because, quite commonly, words have multiple meanings and I want each meaning to be listed once on each side of the created Note. Also, having appealing fonts and colors is a plus. Anything you can do to make the information "stick" in your brain is going to be helpful with this sort of memorization. Here's an example of what the  wordreference.com  sit

Wake on LAN settings Screws up Wifi - Disable your "Wake on" Features

Long story short - have a windoze PC for Zwift (gaming) and the WiFi got progressively worse - went from intermittently working to never working. Sometimes the windoze dialogs would show the wifi adapter as disabled, other times not disabled but the network center would say "no internet" access.  Really no reason at all to suspect the wifi signal (all other devices in house work) or really the PC hardware.  Solution is to disable the  Wake on LAN feature in the wireless adapter but especially Wake on Magic Packet Wake on Pattern   (Can look here to see what these settings look like).  When I clicked disable on the last two I could see the internet spring to life in real time.  Interestingly, many, many years ago I wrote a blog post on Wake on LAN (this was for wired not wireless) that was also a problem. My take is if you see "Wake on ..." when it comes to Networking - be afraid, be very afraid. It's maybe useful in some specific use cases but for "normal

Linux/Airpods Pro Headset mode not working of Fedora38 - Don't forget about Bluetooth adapter firmware! Also fix helvum breakage.

After getting a pair of Airpods Pro and connecting them to Fedora 38 computer I found that I could use them as "headphones" but not as a "handset". Pairing was easy using the utility bluetoothctl - put the airpods in pairing mode, run bluetoothctl and then issue the "pair" command giving the proper hex string e.g. as in  https://meroupatate.github.io/posts/airpods/ . Once this is done, the "headphone" device as well as the "handsfree" device shows up in the Sound section of "Settings" and can be selected but the this doesn't result in the airpods being able to do anything useful in handsfree mode. In theory, the problem could be in the Linux Software Sound stack (some combination of  Pipewire, Pulse Audio, Alsa),  or with the various codecs installed on the system.  Most of the resources on the internet focus here. Since I'm on Fedora 38 Pipewire is well established. One other wrinkle about this is that somewhere in

Zwift - Power Stuck in Workout Mode

I've been using Zwift for years now. The one problem that I've been plagued with and have up until now failed to find a soution for is this - When in Erg Mode aka Workout Mode, very often the power setting gets "stuck". This means that despite the Zwift platform raising the power setting as the workout progresses the trainer remains stuck on some particular power setting. When this happens the whole point of Erg Mode is completely defeated. I've faced this situation literally dozens of times and like all "first world problems" it can be very annoying! Online forums suggest that you toggle Erg Mode when this happens either by stopping/resuming pedaling or by using the companion app on your phone. Other more extreme measures include disconnecting the trainer from power and plugging it back in or worst case just starting the workout completely over. Recently I've hit upon a theory and a fix that seem to be holding up. Time will tell if this is indeed th

Android (Pixel II) - Can no longer swipe right to get to news feed.

Settings Apps & Notifications See All Apps Pixel Launcher Advanced Additional Settings in the App Display Google app (To the left of the main Home Screen)

Infinality breaks Fedora 25 to 26 upgrade

Very much like a previous blog post . In that case the bootchart package borked the F21 to F22 upgrade. Here to make a long story short in going from F25 to F26 this time it was infinality. How did I figure it out? Most of the init sequence would execute but couldn't get to gdm so startup only got so far. Booted into single user mode and then did     init 4 Did a dnf distro-sync but that didn't help. But when I looked in /var/log/messages I saw the error message regarding libharfbuzz mentioned here . /usr/lib/libharfbuzz.so.0: undefined reference to 'FT_Get_Var_Blend_Coordinates' That link mentioned infinality.  dnf remove infinality-repo dnf remove freetype-infinality  did the trick. Then I could do     init 5 So infinality seemed to break F25 to F26 upgrade.

USB drive in dmesg, lsusb, but not in lsblk

This was puzzling me for awhile. Found the answer on the arch linux wiki which is to do a reboot. Apparently if there is skew between the latest kernel and the running kernel, things won't work. After a reboot it moutned find using MTD stuff.