The Ultimate Cat Toy

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by Lisa

Neko’s favorite toy was two feathers mounted to a string so they made a V shape and spun like a maple seed as the string was pulled through the air. With a bunch of birds around the farm, though, I didn’t think it would be a good idea to train the kittens to chase after fluttering feathers. Anya has played with the kittens with string, she’s wiggled her fingers along the glass and they bat at them, she’s made a ball for them from her old socks. But today we encountered the ultimate cat toy — the seed pods from a sycamore tree — Scott picked a few up whilst he was mowing the lawn. Wow do the kittens enjoy batting these things all over the place. But you have to be careful walking around the back patio — never know where a ball might be lurking!

KDE Dolphin — Unable to Move Files and Folders

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by Lisa

Scott was trying to move some backup files from /a/path/to/backup to /a/path/to-a-different/backup — he’s using Dolphin & has a tab open to each of the folders in question. He chown’d /a/path to his account, chmod’d /a/path so user can read and write. But using the copy/paste option … nothing happens.

I came across a few old (and closed) bugs that seemed to produce errors in this same situation — but the reporters were able to perform their copy/move operations when they used the same tab instead of having one folder open in each tab. It worked … inexplicable, but we have success!

Samba Server Not Appearing In Network Locations (Fedora)

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by Lisa

One of our Samba servers — unfortunately the file server — did not show up when browsing the network locations in Dolphin. I map drives from Windows, so it’s not something I’ve really noticed … but Scott is trying to avoid using network mounts and wanted to access everything through “Network”. Several other servers — ones that Scott built — show up, but not the one where we actually store our files.

There’s no salient difference in the samba configurations. But … it turns out that the “newer” way Samba advertises its presence is through mDNS. And I routinely disable the avahi-daemon because, well, I “don’t use” mDNS for anything. Turns out I do use mDNS … so I had to enable and start the avahi-daemon (and restart Samba). Voila, the file server is visible in the list of network places.

Running a Docker Container without *RUNNING* The Container

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by Lisa

I needed to get files from a container image that I couldn’t actually start (not enough memory, and finding a box with more memory wasn’t a reasonable option) — fortunately, you can override the container entrypoint to start the container without actually running whatever the container would normally run.

docker run -ti --entrypoint=bash imageName

Yum Does Not Work On CentOS

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by Lisa

Since this is the fifth time this month that I’ve spun up some CentOS image and been stymied by the inability to install new packages … I’m going to write down the sed commands that magic the default yum repository configuration to something that’s still functional. 

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sed -i 's/mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*
sed -i 's|#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org|baseurl=http://vault.centos.org|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*

Using PG_CRON In PostgreSQL

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by Lisa

The pg_cron extension allows you to schedule tasks from within your database (or, to those who didn’t know it was a thing, it allows you to hide {really well} jobs that mutate or remove data leading to absolutely inexplicable database content). While the project documents how to create or remove a scheduled job, I had quite the time figuring out how to see what was scheduled.

To see jobs scheduled in pg_cron:

To see the result of scheduled jobs:

Cornbread Waffles

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by Lisa

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup yellow cornmeal
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 tsp ground chipotle pepper
1 3/4 cups buttermilk
2 duck eggs
4 tablespoons melted butter

Mix all of the dry ingredients together. Mix the buttermilk and eggs together and add to dry ingredients. Blend well, then drizzle in melted butter and mix to combine. Cook in a waffle iron.

The Kittens Returned

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by Lisa

All of the stray kitties disappeared last Thursday — no Patches, no Cali-Kitty (although there may only be one grown up calico cat … still don’t know!), no Cali-Kitten, no Fritter, no Black Currant, and no Pebble.

We saw a calico girl yesterday — she ran by while we were getting the chickens and turkeys into the coop and ate — and saw Patches earlier today (she was really hungry!).

But, tonight, Anya was playing a video game and saw some movement outside. She thought there might be a raccoon or opossum … but looked again and saw the kittens.