Popped in to see my mum this afternoon, and one of her friends has knitted her a splendid chicken.

#Chicken #Knitting #KnittedChicken

I've got an old SSD that reached its TBW a few weeks ago. It's been shouting in my logs every half an hour since then that it's reached old age.

... only it stopped doing that recently.

I looked at the SMART output. It's now at 101%, so I suspect that the monitoring is merely checking for usage=100, not usage>=100. :blobcatamused:

I did not need this. *goes to find out how expensive SSDs are these days*

Aug 23 10:02:26 s_src@amelia kernel: BTRFS error (device sdd1): bdev /dev/sda1
errs: wr 44086, rd 2282, flush 1796, corrupt 0, gen 0

Well, here's a couple of my pics from the recent eclipse.

Lots of people in the park. Many with disturbing equipment (guy with two pairs of dark glasses, I'm looking at you... hope you didn't damage anything).

My setup: a pair of 10x50 binoculars with wobbly focusing, a plastic box to lean them on, and a sheet of paper.

#Eclipse2026 #Eclipse

There's a pigeon living around here. It sits somewhere near my window and starts a conversation:

ker-koo-koo-ker-kew.
ker-koo-koo-ker-kew.

At this point, I'm nodding along with it.

ker-koo-koo-ker-kew.
ker-koo-koo-ker-kew.

Couldn't agree more.

ker-koo-koo-ker-kew.
ker...

Eh? What were you going to say? WHY DON'T YOU FINISH THAT SENTENCE?

Gets me every single time.

#Pigeon

"Where did you get your talent?"

"From the devil, at a crossroads."

"At midnight, In Mississippi?"

"No, West Street and Broad Street in Reading. Midnight's too busy, so it was four in the morning, and the stupid bastard still nearly got run over by the number 17 bus."

#MicroFiction #RdgUK

Sometimes you have to rotate a password. So it's vital that you don't use ambigrams for security purposes.

[edit: removed spurious "a"]

#Security #LowQualityAdvice

The existence of the festival of Beltane implies festivals of Beltene, Beltanol, Beltone, Beltanal (Beltehyde) and possibly also Cyclobeltanes.

#Alchemy

I have a beer mug. I made it from a couple of broken ceramic jars, stapled together and epoxied, and a pewter handle.

I call it my Franken Stein.

#DadJokes

Oh, yes... if I put an illegal instruction (CSRR t0, mstatus) into the `stvec` routine, it doesn't trigger. So either the STI interrupt is firing very fast and interrupting the interrupt routine (how?), or something else is happening, but I have no idea what.

3/2 (I mean it this time)

In my `stvec` routine, I'm saving a couple of t registers on the stack, clearing the STI bit of `sip`, restoring the t registers, and returning with `SRET`. Nothing else.

But the thing just seems to lock up hard as soon as the first timer interrupts lands.

What am I doing wrong?

2/2

#RiscV #qemu #OSDev

OK. I'm not completely at the end of my tether here, but I'm close.

I'm trying to write an OS kernel for #RiscV (using #qemu's "virt" machine with an S-mode kernel and OpenSBI), and every time I try to enable interrupts -- specifically the timer interrupt -- it just locks up hard.

I can see in the registers that `scause` is STI. Most of the time, `stvec` is the correct value (occasionally, it's not, which I don't get either).

1/2

all these new generation copy-on-write filesystems, and yet no one has been brave enough to name theirs simply "cowfs". then they could call the package containing its mkfs, fsck, etc. "cowtools"

My VPS is currently running an out of support version of #Debian . Is it better to try to upgrade one release at a time, or upgrade straight to Trixie, or just spend the time to blow it all away and reinstall from scratch?

Is there a good word or phrase that one could use in place of "the user"?

I'm writing a git commit, and the phrase "report the error back to the user" is making me a little uneasy for some reason.

It's probably the past 50+ years of snotty developers(*) and sysadmins looking down on the people that they're running the computing systems for. Or am I just being too sensitive?

(*) Includes me. Sorry.

#Software #Inclusion #InclusionInTech

She's very much non-technical, so a command-line shell interface is going to be a non-starter.

We're not looking for medical solutions (she's in conversation with the medics, and has drugs that aren't helping a lot).

#Ataxia #Accessibility #Ubuntu #Linux

Question for anyone out there on fedi with experience:

My mum has increasingly bad ataxia: very wobbly hands and feet. She's got to the point of barely being able to write legibly. Using a mouse is also getting difficult, but she can still use a keyboard at this point.

Are there assistive technologies or techniques that she might be able to use on her Ubuntu machine that would reduce or eliminate the need to use a mouse?

#Ataxia #Accessibility #Ubuntu #Linux

I've just been looking at RISC-V assembly language, and...

lw a0, 4(a1) # Load word from address in a1 + 4, result into a0.

4(a1) ... seriously? Are you all right? Have you been at the mushrooms again?

#riscv #assembly_language

In her retirement, my mum has been learning to play the cello, having played it when she was at school.

She went to the Oxfam music shop at the weekend to get a book of studies, to practice with.

She found one, opened it up, and... saw her name written inside the cover, in her own handwriting from 60-odd years ago.

#music #cello #coincidence

as we all know, innovation in programming language design is being held back by a shortage of bracket characters. as we wait for Unicode to rectify this problem, designers are pushed into more and more desparate compromises