iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 30/05/2026

Went to an El Salvadoran restaurant a few days ago, and a thing that the menu didn't advertise was that every dish came with salad: tastesbetterfromscratch.com/curtido/ , mostly made of cabbage, totally delicious. The pupusas and empanadas were also great. I'd eat there all the time if I could.

tastesbetterfromscratch.com

Easy Curtido Recipe (Salvadoran) - Tastes Better from Scratch

Curtido is an authentic Salvadoran cabbage slaw or relish made with finely shredded cabbage, red onion, carrot, spices, and vinegar.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 26/05/2026

I made beans and rice for dinner, but the rice hadn't absorbed all the boiling water after 5 minutes. "Oh well, we're having beans and rice in a bowl," I said, and did that. The rice in the pot had absorbed a lot more water after I'd finished eating. I guess it can take longer sometimes.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 24/05/2026

Random: In 1991, my father took a sabbatical year in Urbana, IL. He taught at UIUC, and the Math building was named something confusing. The faculty put up a large black flag with an integral sign and the word "Mathematics" on the most visible to students wall. The administration said they were

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 21/05/2026

everything2.com/node/e2node/... is probably the most depressing thing you'll read today. tl;dr: Being in love with someone who's mentally ill is extremely hard, and several people shared their experiences with that on that page.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 21/05/2026

everything2.com/node/2118436 tl;dr: Having a bad childhood can really mess people up, and lead to all sorts of problems in adult life. This is from 2005, yet I don't know how or whether the info's being used to help people. The cdc.gov page has suffered link rot or deliberate removal though.

everything2.com

Adverse Childhood Experiences

"Adverse Childhood Experiences" - A curated collection of 27 items on Everything2. Browse related writings, discussions, and creative works organized by topic.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 21/05/2026

OK, I mistakenly bought paté canned food for Mystic. I thought she'd hate it as she's always never eaten much of it when I served it, but she ate 100% of both servings. If she keeps eating it, her options for food are about double what they used to be.

Black cat Mystic sitting on a sofa, just a head shot. There's a small notch in her right ear which is very visible.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 19/05/2026

I wonder whether Google's decision to go all in on their AI slop will affect traffic to their search engine. I've already removed Google as an option in the menu for this firefox installation, and recommend that you do the same. (Edit->Settings, search tab.)

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 18/05/2026

A Ramen Slinger, heated up in the microwave for leftovers. The recipe ( crow202.com/recipes.txt , search for "Ramen Slinger") is adaptable/easy in most cases. I need to go find the hot sauce though.

Ramen, chili, cheese, and eggs in a bowl. This is a "Ramen Slinger" and a good/cheap thing to eat for those on a budget.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12/05/2026

Food prices have gotten so high that I can afford to make enchiladas roughly once a year. In 1996, I could do that once a month. WTF? I guess I'll just enjoy them while I still have a few left to eat, and regroup next year.

Enchiladas on a green plate, with a metal and white plastic fork on the top. The enchiladas are cold.

Enchiladas on a green plate that have been chopped into small sections and microwaved until hot. These were delicious, but expensive.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12/05/2026

This was from 2002: crow202.com/2026/qtutori... . It, of course, would not compile any more as it was written when KDE 2 was a thing. I updated the C++ file with a comment saying how to compile/link the silly thing. crow202.com/2026/qtutori... for a pretty-printed version.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 11/05/2026

Patagonian cavys are the masters of disapproval.

A light brown Patagonian cavy, looking directly at the camera and being very disapproving. Caption: I will decide your level of FAIL.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 10/05/2026

Enchiladas, on Friday. I will post the next 2 pictures in about an hour. They were pretty tasty, but the price of ground beef means these will be a very infrequent meal. 20 years ago, I could eat these every month; now, it's a once-a-year treat.

Ground beef and chopped onions in a frying pan with a spatula prominently visible. Enchiladas Friday 1/4.

Ground beef and chopped onions in a frying pan, after being cooked for about 12 minutes. Taco seasoning and 1/2 cup water have been added, so the whole thing is red and somewhat cooked down from the previous image. Enchiladas Friday 2/4.

A baking pan with 10 tortillas rolled up into cylinders, each one containing about 1/10 of the frying pan's contents. Enchiladas Friday 3/4.

A baking pan with 10 enchiladas covered in red enchilada sauce and shredded cheese, before going into the oven. Enchiladas Friday 4/4.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 04/05/2026

sddm, by default, starts X on tty0. That's the current virtual console. It then starts user sessions on the next available tty. So to get kmscon running on tty1 through tty5, I had to patch sddm to start X on vt7, and change /etc/inittab to start "/usr/local/bin/kmscon --vt tty1" through tty5.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 03/05/2026

Lunch. There's something satisfying in a ham and cheese sandwich. Also it was a good thing I opened the jar of kimchi yesterday, as it was under active fermentation pressure and spilled cabbage juice when I opened it over the sink. It was impossible to close the jar either; had to eat some.

A green plate with a diagonal-cut ham and cheese sandwich on wheat bread. In the background are salt and pepper shakers and a jar of kimchi.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 26/04/2026

It requires building libtms-4.5.0 and dev-libs/check , but github.com/kmscon/kmscon can get you at least one virtual console back if you're annoyed that the Linux kernel made those and X/Wayland mutually exclusive a few months ago. Probably more than 1, I need to reboot to check that out though.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 23/04/2026

Apparently San Tan Brewing is discontinuing this beer. So a 6-pack is available for $2. What's not to like?

San Tan Brewing Boondocks Honey Blonde ale, with a picture of a boar on the cans. This beer is being discontinued, which had the store selling it for $2 per six-pack.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 22/04/2026

OK, this is kind of a weird thing. I took my old PS1 game "The Raiden Project" and ripped it to a .bin file in the early 2000s. No PS1 emulator that I have tried has been able to run it. Except epsxe_x64, and AFAICT it works perfectly. I wonder what the secret was?

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 22/04/2026

Chicken and rice! crow202.com/recipes.txt , search for "chicken/rice" or line 652. First time I've made this in a year or so.

A dark green plate with some chicken and rice in the bottom portion. A metal and plastic fork is to the upper right. This was the first time I cooked chicken and rice in my new apartment.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 22/04/2026

I think the /etc/mke2fs.conf default settings in Linux really don't fit with modern disk sizes. A 600G /home gets 39 million inodes created, while I'm actually using 411624, 2% of that. Reducing the number of inodes to 3 million would save 8G of disk space for files. Note that YMMV and EPID.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 15/04/2026

Software archaeology? It's more likely than you think, as the state of PS1 emulation on modern Linux is a bit wonky. crow202.com/2026/epsxe_h... details how to get the epsxe_x64 binary working, since it's linked against a (very) old openssl. crow202.com/2026/libssl-... for the library.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 11/04/2026

Wayland users: HowTF do you deal with logging out and having every window position randomly shuffled around like a drunken monkey was driving the mouse? KDE's default is Wayland now, and it's super-irritating. If I logged out more often, this'd be really annoying, but this is basic shit and

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 08/04/2026

In a plain vanilla tarball from kernel.org , the default .config has neither Unix sockets nor TCP/IP set to enabled. I guess no one noticed because really, who configures a kernel by hand these days? Also most people who have already compiled a kernel saved their old .config file and it's mostly

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 16/03/2026

These aren't that difficult to make, just time-consuming. Also they were very popular at work potluck parties. 1 can medium olives, 1 can large olives, a carrot or 2, 1 package cream cheese. some toothpicks, and you're set. Peel carrot, make thin slices. Chop out triangle from carrot, put that

A set of 15 penguins, constructed out of black olives, carrots, cream cheese, and toothpicks. Every time I brought these to a work potluck, they were very popular.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12/03/2026

A thing I remembered recently: When people in the USA suffer the death penalty, they usually order something from McDonald's as their last meal. And they usually don't eat it. What would you choose as your last meal? I'd go for Zzeek's Pizza, Azusa Ramen, or Culver's, but YMMV on that.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12/03/2026

Neverness by David Zindell (sci-fi, published 1988, read 1999) made me realize that no matter how much our technology advances or how long our history is, we will still do dumb things, behave stupidly, and make bad choices. And we will continue to do so.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 26/02/2026

The differing numbers you see after the partition identifiers in /proc/mdstat confused me. So I did a little digging: dev_number in the superblock for RAID version 1.2 is always in the 4256th through 4259th bytes in 32-bit little endian. All components of 1 md device are supposed to have

"grep md /proc/mdstat" reveals 3 partitions on sda and sdb that are the building blocks of 3 software RAID-1 devices.

The 4256th byte of the partitions in question, which seems to match up with the mdp_superblock_1 data structure in include/uapi/linux/raid/md_p.h . dev_number starts at byte 169 in the superblock, which for a softRAID 1.2 is always 4096 bytes from the partition start.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 24/02/2026

This is not as good as the alternative ramen sources.

Cup Noodles (rich and savory beef broth) 16g protein. This is a ramen noodle thing designed for people who don't have time. There is a lot of pea fiber/taste in this. but this is fine. This ramen is actually less good than the Tapatio ramen (more expensive as of 2026/02/24.)

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 23/02/2026

Good grief. Last time I bought instant coffee, it was $1.25 for 6 packets. Same thing today is $1.59. Guess it's a good thing I've cut way back on coffee; the policies of that fat orange idiot have materially hurt people in many ways. Bread that was $4 is now $5, ramen that was $1 is now $1.19.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 19/02/2026

Apparently, there's no way to minimize a window progammatically in anything X11 or Wayland. And the X people, at least, made that design decision on purpose. A weird thing to me is that the window manager, the only thing that is supposed to minimize windows, doesn't have some sort of interface to

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 18/02/2026

Yesterday, on my VPS: I should renew my openssl cert with certbot. Do that, copy files over, restart apache. Error: the privkey does not match the certificate. Repeat, same results. Today: run certbot locally, copy files to VPS, and it works first try. I'm very confused because both machines

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 15/02/2026

Kernel 6.19.0 has changed stuff with md devices. There's a new setting for logical_block_size (LBS) in /sys/devices/virtual/block/md*/ , and 6.19.0 will only mount md read-only where it's not configured. Also if you echo anything other than 4096 (the default) to that, you will destroy any PV you

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 12/02/2026

Apparently someone's been trying to make a TV series about the Chronicles of Amber since 2016. Not sure how well showing Shadow, Amber, or the Black Road would work on a TV budget. The plot is relatively straightforward, at least for the first 5 books—a bunch of half-siblings try to seize the

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 11/02/2026

Argh. Finally figured out what was going on with lightdm. sessions-directory= in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf was set to "/etc/X11/Sessions" when it should've been set to "/usr/share/xsessions:/usr/share/wayland-sessions". lightdm wants to see a : separated list of dirs containing .desktop files,

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 10/02/2026

I got an initramfs build with ugrd working. It only required getting the right UUID (the one of the encrypted LV) set up in the [cryptsetup.root] section. It's smaller than the one built with dracut (7.5M vs 12M) and does the same things. However, I have had no luck with getting lightdm to work.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 10/02/2026

TIL: GRUB2 will have a hissy fit if one of the lines in its grub.cfg starts with }menuentry. (The braces were all matched up and correct in the file.) The "menuentry" keyword apparently has to start at column 0 or be preceded entirely with whitespace. crow202.com/misc/second-... ? Also I broke

crow202.com

Second-System Effect

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 07/02/2026

GLib.get_user_special_dir(GLib.UserDirectory.DIRECTORY_PICTURES) works, but it is not at all obvious how, because the python code calls a C function and and UserDirectory is not defined anywhere in the python code. tl;dr: it ends up reading ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs and spitting out the data in

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 05/02/2026

I went out and got pizza and a salad. They gave me 2 little plastic containers of ranch dressing. This is about double the amount of dressing I need for a salad, so the 2nd went home with me. Wheat toast dipped into ranch dressing is a great breakfast idea, right?

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 04/02/2026

Back in the 1990s, Word 4.0 on MacOS had an interesting feature that I have not seen duplicated very often: You could drag a little bar from the top right corner down, and the view would split so that you could see 2 different parts of the document. You could then view part of page 1 at the top,

Screenshot of LibreOffice, showing some lorem ipsum text and a widget being dragged down from the top bar to about halfway down the window. This is to show a feature in Word 4.0 from the 1990s.

LibreOffice screenshot, showing what happened after the widget drag: The window is now horizontally split, there are 2 scrollbars on the right side. Top half shows sample text for page 1, bottom half shows sample text for page 27. This feature doesn't exist in LibreOffice, but it did in Word 4.0.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 04/02/2026

In order to get the panel to stick to the bottom of the screen in Xfce, I had to edit the panel's XML file in ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/ and change a value= from "x=0;y=0" to "x=0;y=1054". There's no way to do this AFAICT from a GUI. So yeah, it's much faster to build Xfce than it

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 01/02/2026

At some point while playing with my "/ on an encrypted LV" install, I broke X. And this is a problem because this system refuses to start any virtual consoles; it's X or nothing. radeon is automatically loaded, and that calls vga_remove_vgacon(), so no ttys for you. This is actually a PITA,

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 31/01/2026

xterm has some problems. Completely counterintuitive configuration, menu nonexistent, Athena widgets. But www.futurile.net/2016/06/14/x... and crow202.com/2026/xresour... can help. The problem is you have to remember to "xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources" after editing that file. If it had tabs, I

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 30/01/2026

It took too long, but I finally got root on an encrypted LV working. dracut is very particular about the config files you set up for it, and if grub.cfg is not set up in a particular way, it will fail miserably and be cryptic. The keys were: Set the video mode in GRUB to the dumbest 640x480,

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 28/01/2026

In the course of trying to get full-disk encryption with cryptsetup working, I have found 2 things: Apparently, before X loads, my USB keyboard is not sending any key events out. And if I take out the ancient PS/2 keyboard with some missing keys, that *does* send key events. Then when I try

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 27/01/2026

When I got her, Mystic was not very much of a lap cat. But when it got cold in December, she decided that sitting in someone's lap was totally fine. My water glass is almost empty and I can't reach my phone. Halp.

Large black cat Mystic sitting on my lap, though the picture is from a while ago.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 26/01/2026

TIL: restic, when restoring from backup, does not change the mtime or ownership or permissions of files until the very end. When a restore takes 96 minutes and everything is still owned by root and was last modified recently, 99% of the way through, it's a bit nerve-wracking. Also it backs up in

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 26/01/2026

TIL: My backup disk is USB3, not USB2, and I had it plugged into a 2 port. Looks like 120M/second read, so it should only take an hour or so to reformat /home as LUKS, then restore the most recent backup to the newly encrypted LV. Also backups now take about 1:35 where they took 2:30 before.

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 25/01/2026

Poll: Chicken and dumplings, or Swedish Meatballs? I was leaning towards chicken and dumplings, but you can Change My Mind! (Marie Callendar frozen meals were 4/$10 last week, I stocked up, the Swedish Meatballs are kind of a comfort food for me.)

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danceswithcrows @crow202.com · 24/01/2026

Ramen for breakfast. You are not my supervisor, and I will not be taking questions at this time. At some point last year, I ate Flaming Hot Cheetos for breakfast, thanks to the grocery store having its power cut, but that condition is not true right now.

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