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Linux Archives

fwupd trouble on XPS 9370

Posted at age 30.

I didn’t realize my fwupd installation was not working till I noticed my BIOS is still running 1.5.1 instead of the latest 1.6.3. Upon investigation, I realized I did not have the Linux Firmware Update boot entry above the Linux Boot Manager entry. When I fixed that, or tried to manually select after F12, it still was not working. It took some time to notice there was an extremely tiny message flashing for less than .1 seconds. I had to use my DSLR to zoom in and record a video of the corner of the screen to figure out what it says:

Found update fwupd-7ceaf7a8-0611-4480-9e30-64d8de420c7c-0 WARNING: No updates to process. Called in error?

I realized I could boot to the laptop’s native BIOS update utility with F12 and then navigate to the .pac file in \EFI\arch\fw\, so I did not need to solve this problem.

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Raspberry Pi and Smokeping network monitoring

Posted at age 27.

We’ve had some network issues lately, so I dug out one of the Raspberry Pi Model Bs I got for free from Adafruit with my first couple of orders in September 2013. I then set it up to do network monitoring using Smokeping. Since it takes 10 or 20 seconds to generate the graphs, I switched to a master-slave setup where the graphs could be generated on my web server, but the measurements taken from the Raspberry Pi on my home network.

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Moving MySQL data with Vagrant and Ubuntu 14.04

Posted at age 26.

I recently started doing my local development on virtual machines using Vagrant, and PuPHPet. I really should have started this long ago given all the hoops I’ve had to jump through setting up Perl and friends with every new version of OSX. And even though the new OSXes lately barely qualify as a new version and come out more and more frequently, they still break nearly everything about my development environments. So, virtual machines are super convenient.

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Simple PHP file caching

Posted at age 23.

Note to self that might be useful for others doing really basic stuff:

Often I use Random Web Service’s API to get a JSON file of data repeatedly, but that file doesn’t need to be refreshed 600 times a second. I can then use a simple PHP script to store the file and retrieve it from disk until it gets to be a certain age.

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