This post is largely a log so I remember how to do it next time, but if anyone else has a bunch of scans to convert, read on…

Background

Frequently in academia—and probably in much of the modern world—one has to handle things which began life as books, hit the glass of a scanner, and became pdfs. Scanning is hard, and unless one has a lot of patience, the resulting pdfs are generally pretty all over the place: sometimes pages are upside down, frequently the book (which was not made to lie flat) does not want to flatten on the glass, and often the scanner has simply picked a nearby standard page size.

Somebody has bent the toaster. It shouldn’t be looking like this:

It should be looking rather like this:

Oh well. It’s only mild steel and it bends easily. Some springs got out of place too, but it’s easy enough to ping them all back, particularly with the unbent side for comparison. The hard thing is normally taking toasters apart—cheapy ones are frequently held together with bent metal tabs, which sheer if you try to unbend them—and of course it’s always messy. But this is a quality toaster. I got it half price, but if a tree fell on it tomorrow I would go out and buy the same model. It has the deepest slots of any toaster in the local Tescos (and the local Tescos had many toasters). I know. I measured them all. (Back then nobody bothered you in shops. Now of course they’d probably arrest me for touching the merchandise and spreading the coronavirus.) And I was going to award Russel Hobbs full marks for making something with no hidden screws and only standard heads, until lo and behold! there was one hidden screw with a star head. Well I have screwdrivers a lot more exotic than star heads, but that’s one black mark against Russel Hobbs. So the toaster only scores 19/20.

Our thermostat has an annoying feature. If you press any button—but particularly the ‘OK’ button you have to press a lot to change anything—it reboots. Worse, it loses everything you’ve just entered. Last night it started doing this without my pressing anything. I first thought a dead battery might be to blame, but even with a steady 3V from my bench power supply it refused to work. I put it aside, and when it came back on ten minutes later, very carefully increased the temperature till it turned on. Here is a dud thermostat:

My microwave went on the blink, a few days before I got married. It started turning itself on, randomly, as soon as it was plugged in. You could use it—I did in fact use it—by putting something inside, waiting for it to turn on, and then opening the door after the required time had elapsed. Hardly ideal. I unplugged it and left it for later—there were other things to think about after all…

There are lots of anti-rsi packages out there for windows. I even found a few for Linux. None did what I wanted them to do: to enforce short and long breaks at configurable intervals, allowing me to push them back when I was in the middle of something, but getting increasingly insistent that I actually took them.

Enter anti-rsi, a python script which does everything an anti-rsi package needs to do and nothing more. It can be paused, resumed, postponed, and forced to run early. It uses some idleprinter (xprintidle) to keep track of when the computer isn’t in use and pause itself. It logs the total time it considers that the system has been in use. Communication is by unix signals, which is a bit naughty, but I found enough. It will output usage when sigpolled to /dev/shm/usage, which I then pickup with a wrapper script for i3status. It also logs, and I run a few services to conglomerate all these logs onto the main workstation and generate a nice pretty graph of them with the wonderful mlpd3 which ‘brings matplotlib to the browser’.

Currently we are all stuck in front of webcams, at least half the time. I do have a laptop—a gift from a kind friend—and it does get used, but the rest of the time I am sitting before two old monitors (one of which recently had to be repaired) and a lovely cherry keyboard: and no webcam. No matter: I’ve a cheapo usb-thing and it works fine. I’ve also an old phone handset from an 80s landline wired into two 3.5mm jacks—it had an electret microphone and works fine. It gets laughs on zoom, but it’s easier to pick up and put down than a headset, and I can hear if anyone’s creeping up behind me.

Background

This workbench is built almost exactly to a published design and following the videos. One has to buy the videos. This is the first time I have ever done anything like this, and it was a very good idea. Buy them; watch them; copy them. Unless one is very lucky one simply doesn’t get to watch a good craftsman up close very often, but the ability to pause, zoom, replay, and see exactly how to position your hands and body when paring with a chisel, for example, is worth any amount of textbooks.

What does one do with temporary files? For things one really doesn’t need, there’s /tmp, which is wiped on boot—though sometimes it’s a ramdisk, and one should be wary of dropping large files into ramdisks. But what about e.g. downloaded isos, pdfs prepared for printing, and the like? Things one needs now, might need tomorrow, but definitely won’t need in a year’s time?

Like most people I used to use ~/Downloads and go through it (with ncdu) every time it got too large. But this isn’t really satisfying: one can accumulate thousands of files each only a megabyte in size. I considered using cron to wipe downloads ever so often, but sometimes one wants to keep things.

I wrote this a while ago, and it’s been in use ever since: a very simple script which counts down (or up) while printing the remaining time. Controlled with standard job control, it’s one up on sleep as you can see how long is left. This is occasionally handy; if I only have ten seconds on the clock before lunch I’ll not start something new, but if I’ve got fifteen it might make sense.

Wordpress is a glorious conglomeration of PHP which works very well, PHP which works poorly and PHP which doesn’t work at all. The former is generally written by the Wordpress developers, the next by me, and the latter by me after around 11pm.

This website existed for a while on wordpress.com. It was the natural choice: everyone uses wordpress to manage blogs, and this is little more than a blog. On the other hand, writing in a web browser is irritating (writing is what text editors are for) and does one really need the whole wordpress architecture to serve a lot of static pages and images? Wordpress.com won’t even let you install plugins on the free tier, so it’s not like I was doing anything with all that dynamic ability anyhow.