A productive week-end update

Published on 2025-06-01

Got a 4 days week-end just after my 3 weeks of vacations, can you get any more French than that? But it's not like I was idle, as you'll read. Since I've been doing a lot of small things and didn't post for some time, here's an exceptional potpourri style post.

Went to the beach for a few hours, was real nice; at least until the great unwashed started pouring. One of the main reasons for favouring mornings in this situation (that and colder water).
My laurel, albeit sparse, is giving nice, vibrant pink flowers. Good for the mood.

Discovered that Emacs had directional window focus all along! Can you imagine the relief of someone who had been bumbling around with C-x o for so many years? Out of this world. A few lines is all it took:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-x <up>")    'windmove-up)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x <down>")  'windmove-down)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x <left>")  'windmove-left)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-x <right>") 'windmove-right)

Fixed my redshift_toggle mpv script that was broken because Lua is crap and changed the return type of os.execute between 5.1 and 5.2; even if I'm using LuaJIT instead of PUC Lua, since the lua52compat USE flag was needed by Aegisub…
Ate at the small Japanese restaurant in town. Really incredible taste and quality considering the tiny (5~8k people) town I live in. Got my usual karaage, giozas, miso soup and rice; will get ramen the next time.
Debugged my broken VapourSynth install and found the fix.
Uploaded my stagit fork whose purpose is to produce prettier output (add a "View raw" button and display pictures); only missing an universal filter thing to apply pygmentize to code and convert CSV/TSV to HTML tables.

Did a cool trick to the text file I use to record my running times: using my trusty gnuplot wrapper, I gave it the ability to plot itself:

$ head -n5 run.txt
awk -F'[: ]' 'NR > 1 {print $1, $2 + $3 / 60}' "$0" | plot -l "$@" 'set xdata time; set timefmt "%d/%m/%y"'; exit
28/08/21 7:56
09/10/21 8:04
17/10/21 7:59
27/03/22 8:21
$ sh run.txt -o run.svg

Finally completed my RAID/NAS, currently in the process of cleaning up my files and awaiting some cables to make the innards prettier. Will post a massive report once I'm done. Here's the storage topology as a small teaser:

$ ssh user@server lsblk
NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
sda                         8:0    0   9.1T  0 disk
└─sda1                      8:1    0   9.1T  0 part
  └─dm-integrity-WP027C1N 253:0    0   9.1T  0 crypt
    └─md0                   9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid6 /home/user/data
sdb                         8:16   0   9.1T  0 disk
└─sdb1                      8:17   0   9.1T  0 part
  └─dm-integrity-WP027C9L 253:3    0   9.1T  0 crypt
    └─md0                   9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid6 /home/user/data
sdc                         8:32   0   9.1T  0 disk
└─sdc1                      8:33   0   9.1T  0 part
  └─dm-integrity-WP027C98 253:2    0   9.1T  0 crypt
    └─md0                   9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid6 /home/user/data
sdd                         8:48   0   9.1T  0 disk
└─sdd1                      8:49   0   9.1T  0 part
  └─dm-integrity-WP027C38 253:1    0   9.1T  0 crypt
    └─md0                   9:0    0  18.2T  0 raid6 /home/user/data
sde                         8:64   0 111.8G  0 disk
├─sde1                      8:65   0     2M  0 part
├─sde2                      8:66   0   128M  0 part  /boot
├─sde3                      8:67   0     8G  0 part  [SWAP]
└─sde4                      8:68   0 103.7G  0 part  /

Contributed a small something to my favourite Linux sandbox, bubblewrap.
Tended to my small Portage overlay with a few bumps/fixes.
After reading the woes of a fellow Agora Road user in need of a way to automatically include HTML fragments in pages with a static web server (not even SSI) and without any complex generator, I made a small but feature-complete HTML preprocessor using GNU CPP and Make. Cool, right?

Had to patch the kernel on my NAS to finally get proper motherboard hwmon support. And because I don't half-ass things, I made a script to easily update the patch for new kernel versions:

#!/bin/sh
# Update the Portage user patch for the it87 hwmon driver
set -eu

curl() { command ${CURL:-curl} --fail --location --compressed "$@"; }

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/frankcrawford/it87/refs/heads/master/it87.c |
    grep -vFx '#include "compat.h"'!OA |
    diff -u /usr/src/linux/drivers/hwmon/it87.c - |
    awk 'NR < 3 {$2 = (NR == 1 ? "a" : "b") "/drivers/hwmon/it87.c"} 1' |
    sudo sh -c 'mkdir -p "$(dirname -- "$1")"; cat >"$1"' argv0 \
        /etc/portage/patches/sys-kernel/gentoo-sources/it87.patch

And I added some music to my collection:
- Discovered (I knew their name, at least) Smashing Pumpkins: Gish is quite good, Siamese Dream even better but the following acclaimed double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, is way too self-indulgent and bloated for me (someone who listens to full albums).
- Got into Boredoms, the Japanoise band. More specifically everything before the cult but meh Vision Creation Newsun, incredible stuff when they take themselves seriously enough (e.g. most of Soul Discharge).
- Found this mesmerizing IDM single by Clark somewhere on the web. Too bad the rest of the album isn't like that.
- Decided to re-explore post-SoFaD Depeche Mode, to see if there's anything to salvage. Not much except Playing the Angel, a breath of fresh air compared to the two previous LPs and largely more than "good enough to go into my collection". Still not the same as their Some Great Reward/Black Celebration/Music for the Masses era, but that's how it is.
- And finally, got me Gorillaz's three first albums. Everybody knows their singles, but I didn't remember just how good and consistent they were at their peak (i.e. Demon Days).

That should be all. I think. All of this while locking horns with OpenRC and NFSv4.