After I finished King’s latest book ‘Later’, I was tempted to start reading something longer by King, and so started reading Mr. Mercedes. The book is very unlike the typical SK fare, with absolutely no paranormal overtones, but is instead a crime-fiction, and a decent one at that, for the most part. The protagonist(s) are recurring characters in a three book series which is supposed to culminate into a crime-fiction meets typical Stephen King supernatural horror.

git submodule and git subtree are two very different beasts, but they are designed to solve similar problems; the internet however is filled with many pages urging people to stay away from git submodule, but I think it’s just a question of understanding the purpose and limitations of the tool, and using the right tool for the job.

In August of 2007, my then boss Dr. Sandeep Joshi introduced me to the lightweight fully scriptable desktop window manager, FVWM, which is extremely minimalist, and I’ve been hooked to it ever since. On my laptop, I use XFCE, but have continued to run FVWM on my workstation. Dr. Joshi also introduced me to fvwm-script-setup95, a script that sets up a Windows-95 inspired minimalist theme. This script used to be part of the fvwm package available on most linux distros, but over the years, package managers must have felt it was unnecessary, so it’s now a bit hard to find. I use Debian Testing and Arch Linux, and don’t see the script bundled with either distro. After some digging around, I found the original perl setup script, and retrieved a backup of the fvwm-rc and other style files required to get the theme running. I’ve now uploaded these files here.

I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi 2, for a while now, using it as a NAS box. I recently read about Jasper, an open-source project aimed at developing voice-controlled applications, like Siri and Alexa. Since I’ve been using Arch Linux for Arm on my RPi2 for a while, and quite happily at that, I simply did a disk dump of the / and /boot partitions on my older pi and cloned them on the new SD card. What I forgot to do after partitioning the new card though, was to set the LBA flag on, on the /boot partition. If the file system on the /boot partition is not either fat32 or fat16, and if the LBA flag is not turned on, the pi will neither boot, nor display any diagnostics. The only indication will be the non lighting up of the green LED, indicating SD card activity.

Many bulletjournal entries are of meetings, many of which are recurring entities, so some context to previous meetings can be quite helpful. Minutes from the meeting can be added into the bulletjournal, using the standard bulletjournal signifiers; the dot for personal action points, and the dash, for notes. These minutes/notes may come in handy, during the subsequent meeting, particularly if it’s a few days or weeks apart.