silveradept | Some People Seem To Think I Can Do Computers

These things are not actually related to Home Automation, but they are the kinds of things where someone has looked at me and said explicitly, "I think you are one of those computer touchers," the implication being that even if I still don't think of myself as someone who has an extraordinary amount of technological knowledge (because there's still a mental block in there that using a recipe is not cooking, despite the point of libraries and scripts being there so you don't have to construct everything from scratch,) there are still things that I am doing that other people would possibly gesture and flail about.

Like thanking my past self for having set up the routing on a desktop machine so that when I needed to upgrade the Pi-Hole to the newest version of Raspberry Pi OS, and tanking all wireless access in the process, the wired desktop machine was able to keep finding the Internet so it could download the image and flash it to the card. Once the Pi-Hole was reinstalled and imported again, wireless came back for the machine that actually had a built-in reader. I don't know why the one worked and the other didn't, and I should probably figure out the why on it because I do want the wireless to work if the Pi-Hole should fail. Or keep up a set of instructions that will reverse the Pi-Hole router settings so that DNS still works when the Pi-Hole is temporarily offline for version upgrades, and then re-do the instructions to make the Pi-Hole the primary DNS for everything. This will probably change, because the current router is likely going to be replaced, since it has entered the manufacturer's end of life era, and the people maintaining the current aftermarket firmware for it have said they will stop releasing updates for this router at the end of the year. So I'll get to learn how to make this work with an entirely new router. This does not fill me with terror, which is probably one of those signs that I may have more skill than I think I do with technological things. Or, at the very least, more confidence that I can do things and recover from weird situations when they arise.

The other thing I ended up doing, by accident, was destroying important things while other important things were running on my primary laptop, the converted Chromebook, and that caused GRUB to be unable to find the kernel and boot it. Ooops. The good thing was that the partitions themselves were intact, and the kernel images were there, but the GRUB configuration did not find or load them. So I booted up a rescue unit that provided a chroot for me to work with, tried reinstalling the packages, which didn't fix the problem, and eventually did enough research (reading web pages) to figure out the grub command prompt lines to use to get GRUB to specifically boot the kernel and get back into my own install, which was good, although I knew it would be temporary. But once I was in there, I was also able to consult the Arch Wiki and use the correct commands present there to reinstall GRUB and have it find what was already there. Once I did that, everything booted again, as if I hadn't done anything at all, and the system has remained stable. And now I know not to mess with the cache when there are updates going on. But also, finding out what had gone wrong, rustling up the commands needed to first boot and then reinstall GRUB to find everything again, and having tried to fix things from the chroot are probably all things that other people look at me and wonder what kind of arcane magic I performed to make this work, or even to conceive of how to find out what the problem was and then to further be able to fix it by following other people's recipes. Being comfortable with command line operations probably helps a lot, since a lot of those tools and fixes required the command line to achieve effectively.

There's a certain amount of command line evangelism that happens when you start using a Linux, and some people suggest that people should start by using command-line tools and then eventually progress to a GUI with a desktop environment or a window manager. For people whose first experiences are with command lines (like me), it seems a logical choice to have other people learn the system in the same manner, especially with the amount of power and speed that command line tools can provide. And that an awful lot of utilities are still built only with the command line, and their GUI counterparts are really mostly visual dressing on those command lines. For people who have not had the experience of memorizing and repeating commands on the line, and whose primary way of interacting with a computer has been visual and GUI-driven, making them learn the command line first is silly. Furthermore, a well-designed GUI makes a lot of tasks easy and closer to intuitive, which lowers the entry cost of using a Linux. (Which is an admirable and correct goal. Gatekeeping people who don't have a certain amount of technical ept is silly and it keeps them in places that they may not want to be.)

So, yeah. Apparently, I'm still doing things with my machines that are foolish and require repairing, but I'm also managing to diagnose the problems and find solutions to them. And also, I successfully shepherded all of the tiny machines that were on RPi OS up to the next major version, so hopefully that will hold fast for a year or two until we need to jump again. Setting things up again after these version jumps is an annoyance, but it all moved relatively quickly, so not a major annoyance. And the tools and scripts that other people have provided mean being able to get back to the previous state fairly quickly. It's cooking, it really is, and those scripts are literally there to help make the process work and get people with a functioning device. Using them is the intended way of installing things, just like recipes are there to help you made food in an intended way, and knowing what they're supposed to do, and what you can do to save a dish that might not be going according to plan, is part of having cooking skills. If I keep telling myself that being able to use things, and being able to fix problems when they appear, is valid computer skills, and being able to follow recipes to make delicious food, and occasionally experiment or save things that might be going weird is part of cooking things, at some point I might believe it.

(Postscript: Primary laptop/repurposed Chromebook's battery gave out. I managed to diagnose that within a few minutes, since the thing was still plugged in but not turning on and none of the lights indicating battery charge or a charging battery were on. Popped off the bottom, disconnected the battery, re-applied plug-in power, and things booted up just fine. So I ordered a new battery. We'll see if it comes with all the necessary connection components, of course, but that was probably a lot of worry saved by just knowing what the most likely outcome was and testing that. Computer toucher I may yet be. And that's before I do things like boot people's Macs into recovery mode so that I can change the password to log in with and then from there change the necessary passwords for their associated accounts. Yes, I probably do things that other librarians don't know how to, but using one's power for good and not evil, right?)

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Jasper Byrne - Decade Dance (Game Mix)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thewayne

That's interesting that your Chromebook won't boot with a dead battery unless you disconnect that. I've never experienced that with any other laptop. That's also entirely possible what's wrong with mine, but mine is nigh unto a decade old and I just don't have the interest in trying to resurrect it.

From:

silveradept

Yep, very interesting. But also useful that the bypassing the battery essentially allowed the whole system to power on again, so yay for that.

From:

thewayne

...as long as you don't have a power blip while using it! crosses crossable appendages

From:

silveradept

Save early, save often, don't leave anything you can't recover from.

From:

thewayne

Yep!

From:

tuzemi

Heehee. I grew up on the command line too, and refused to give it up. A long time ago I was working on an "embedded" type Linux and had a similar nightmare scenario of the boot manager (LILO -- grub is way nicer!) not picking up the kernel, and having to figure out Just The Right Sequence to get things back on track. Fun times, glad to see you having some too! ;-)

(Speaking of computers, I am setting up my new laptop to replace my last one from 2016. Hoo boo this thing can fly, once you get a proper operating system on it...Windows 11 is sooo terrible!)

From:

silveradept

They are absolutely Fun Times when you mess things up in the loaders.

I'm okay with GUIs and comfortable using command lines as well, but I'm less sanguine about the purists who think that GUIs make a system unacceptably accessible to the laity.

Yeah, Windows is an OS often kept around for gaming. As strides keep getting made toward making gaming work wonderfully away from Windows, there's less need to keep it around. Which I very much appeciate.

From:

biteshelter

I relate to feeling like using tools and scripts "don't count" as having computer skills. I've gotten to the point where I can say I work with computers often, but I still shy away from saying I'm any good at it. The self-doubt is hard to shake even though it gets sillier the more experienced I become.

Nowadays, I usually test things with a virtual machine or live USB if I get the feeling I might break something. I don't know if that's more or less caution than I should have.

I wanted to set up a Pi-Hole a while back, but it never ended up happening. I should see if the rest of the household is on board with it... Thanks for the reminder! :)

From:

silveradept

I have an engineer in my immediate family, and was occasionally regaled with the formula sheets that were allowed for engineering exams, because the knowledge being tested was not what the formula was, but whether you knew the right context to use it in. I feel that's the knowledge I have, rather than the kind of thing that would let me code a utility from scratch.

A live system or USB wouldn't have helped me on the mess-up I did that necessitated reinstallation of GRUB. I didn't realize that there would be bad interactions with running specific tasks next to each other. I know better now.

Pi-hole is excellent for knocking out a lot of ads and junk off the network. It's not perfect, so I use it in conjunction with an adblock in a browser. It works on low resource computers as well, not just single-board machines, so it's perfect for that computer that isn't doing anything taxing right now, but still has a lot of life left in the components. The thing to watch out for when you install it is that some websites may need to be put explicitly on the allowlist, but that's been a small handful for me in all the years I've been running it.

From:

biteshelter

I think my experience might be the opposite, in a way: I was exposed to formulas without knowing what they're useful for. I make a lot of utility scripts for myself, but I struggle with wrapping my head around larger projects and more general applications.

That makes sense. I tend to avoid running anything else while something significant is going on, so my cases are usually simpler. That just stems from my general nervousness. Accidents always happen, though. Knowing how to search for information on fixing things is a great skill to have.

That's good to know! I wasn't sure how possible it is to run Pi-Hole alongside other processes, but I do have a Raspberry Pi that can probably handle it. I'll make sure to pass on the message that some websites may break. I've gotten used to adblocker-related troubleshooting, but I don't think everyone here is familiar with using an adblocker. Thanks for the tips.

From:

silveradept

Yeah, I'm lucky that I have some search skills to use, and I admit that I run what I do because there's good documentation for it, so that when I screw things up, there are commands to run available.

Pi-hole runs on all flavors of Pi, to my knowledge. Mine is running on a Pi 1 Model B+, so it's really tuned for that one piece of computing gathering dust but still able to do things. And it's reasonably well documented on how to get your home router to use Pi-Hole for specific clients and things. Just be sure there's a fallback way of getting out to the Internet for when you have to do version upgrades of the underlying OS.

From:

azurelunatic

My engineering teacher told us that his limitation of size for our note cards for his exams was to make us choose the most important formulae, so we wouldn't be tempted to copy the whole damn book.

We were allowed to split the 3x5 card in as many layers as we could without them becoming separate sheets.