No software hackery this time around. All of my attention was spent in meatspace...

Home:

• Thanksgiving. Made my best turkey, pecan pie, and green bean casserole EVAR
• Blew leaves off the roof and the perimeter of the house, and swept up half a dozen or so loads. Tis the season, apparently

Vehicles:

• Adjusted the truck's headlights upwards a little bit
• Replaced the barely-used brake pads on the WRX with ones that actually work. After some bedding-in, it's night and day versus the older pads
• Oil change on the WRX
• Replaced the truck's master cylinder (again) with the correct model this time. It actually stops now, but still needs further bleeding or other adjustments, but I'll deal with that when I replace the rear pads

I got very little done during the first week of this period. Just as a FYI, don't get a flu shot and COVID-19 booster at the same time!

Home:

• Cleaned off the roof and swept up something like six loads of leaves and acorns
• Cleaned up my home office; everything is now up off the floor and properly stacked/stashed on shelves. Gave everything a much-needed vacuuming

Shaftnet:

• Fixed an unexpected mail delivery problem due to the ISP's modem masquerading all outbound connections from my public IP block...WTF? Corrected the SPF records to include the full IP range

Vehicles:

• Swapped out the truck's brake master cylinder and vacuum booster as the old one was leaking. Two quarts of fluid, three bench bleedings, and a malfunctioning (and subsequently deleted) RWAL solenoid later, I discovered that I'd purchased the wrong replacement master cylinder. The correct one is now on order and should be here Tuesday.
• Additionally, during one of several gravity bleeding sessions, I inspected and cleaned the rear brakes, discovering that the bottom third of one of the trailing shoes had broken off. A new set of shoes will be here by Wednesday (and will be a real PITA to install...) but everything else looked okay
• The WRX's brakes are fucked up, with the new pads glazed over due to my improperly bedding them in. It can still stop okay at low speeds but it's downright dangerous in traffic or on the highway. A new set of (different!) pads should be here Wednesday, and will be pretty quick to install. While I was inspecting everything I decided to do a four-corner bleed just in case; all seems to be well otherwise
• The WRX got a full set of inner and outer tie rods installed, followed by a long-overdue alignment. Unfortunately, the shop reported that driving with the broken camber bolt damaged the strut's string perch, but a quick inspection didn't show anything obvious. It seems most likely that the damage is to the upper spring perch and/or top hat (ie the steering pivot point) but either way it's going to require disassembling the strut(s) to find out. The shop also claimed the power steering pump I just installed is failing. I don't have the time and/or budget to deal with all of this nonsense just yet.

All in all, more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Moral of the story? Don't take apart your working vehicle when the other one is out of commission. And double-check that you have the correct parts first!

Rockbox:

• A bunch of patch review and helping out folks on IRC
• Minor cleanup on the jz47xx USB driver

Printing:

• Does vacuuming the cat hair off of the racks of printers count?

Home:

• Minor yard work; inclement weather scrapped the plans to do more

Shaftnet:

• Relocated shaftnet from the lab at my soon-to-be-former employer to my home office, along with the new IP address, and dealt with (most of) the fallout. There's still an issue with the ISP's modem that's causing some horrible latency swings
• Migrated shaftnet off of its 12-year-old special snowflake 4U case (which saw three motherboard swaps over the years) onto one of the unused nodes in the FatTwin chassis in my rack. The storage stayed much the same, other than converting it to UEFI booting, XFS on all partitions, and the FatTwin's MegaRAID card instead of the 3Ware controllers I've used for twenty-odd years

Tick Farm:

• Something's wrong with the well pump. And the toilet's guts are shot. These are probably related, but I don't have time to deal with this right now

Vehicles:

• Spliced the truck's new fan controller's temperature sensor into the upper radiator hose instead of wedged into the radiator itself
• New (not re-manufactured!) brake booster and master cylinder for the truck ordered and delivered, but were not installed due to crappy weather and the desire to wait until the WRX was back from the shop
• The WRX now has new inner and outer tie rod ends, but is still out of commission owing to a broken eccentric camber adjusting bolt discovered during the alignment. That broken bolt was probably the initial failure that could have gone much more badly.

Rockbox:

• On the xDuoo X3ii, ignore "remote" events when the headphone is not plugged in
• Some patch review

Printing:

• Allow the backend data files to be installed independently

Home:

• Mounted some improvised shoe racks into Sari's closet
• More yard cleanup
• Incremental garage cleanup

Shaftnet:

• Migrated the last of the non-photo-related data; just have to move the (already backed-up) photos off the big array

Vehicles:

• Truck almost boiled over again as the cooling fans refused to kick in. The root cause turned out to be a nearly-10-year-old vampire tap that was supposed to supply power to the fan controller, but I only found that after completely ripping out the old fan controller and its over-complicated wiring (along with a nearly-melted 40A fuse!) and replaced it with a completely different dual-fan controller that I hope proves to be more robust.
• Greased every serviceable fitting on the front end in an attempt to silence the worsening squeaking. I'm pretty sure every ball joint needs replacing due to leaking boots, but the ones that attach to the steering drag link appear to be the worst
• Discovered the truck's brake master cylinder is leaking out the rear seal, into the vacuum booster. Going to have to deal with that sooner rather than later, but I want to get the WRX drivable again first
• Got a new set of tires mounted on the WRX (Falken FK510 in 225/45R17) Discovered the outer tie rod on the passenger side was one pothole from complete disintegration

Printing:

• Fixed inverted "fast return" behavior, and allow it to be explicitly controlled via an environment variable
• Added support for querying the maintenance cartridge level on the Epson D700 / Fujifilm DX100

This is a big update, trying to deal with the backlog now that I'm feeling somewhat better.

In other news, Philips decided to shut down their Gainesville operations and completely flush everything in our R&D pipeline. My last day is New Year's eve.... So I'm now looking for work. This has been the other reason my updates have been relatively sparse lately

Home:

• Cleaned off the accumulated leaves all over the roof and gutters
• Leaf blower conked out again, and while trying to get it going the recoil starter broke. This was the last straw, and it's now in the trash can, replaced with a corded electric blower that packs far more oomph. Used it to cleaned up the driveway and other areas near the house
• Swept up six loads of leaves, and can barely tell the difference
• Cut up a large hunk of fallen tree that somehow didn't take out anything other than a banana spider's web
• Burned up about two thirds of the accumulated pile of kindling
• Carefully pulled up most of the poison ivy around the woodpile and burn barrel. Unfortunately, the area cleared by the goats is almost a lost cause
• Made more progress on the garage; it's almost to the point of being tidy
• Vacuumed up enough hair out of my office to make another cat

Shaftnet:

• OS upgrade (to Fedora 34)
• Got rid of unnecessary "home network" stuff like resolving DNS and masquerading
• Continued emptying out the "big" RAID5 array
• Got remote stats monitoring working again for taster & ixodidae
• Moved Shaftnet's UPS back home and racked it up

Vehicles:

• Replaced the windshield on the WRX with one of those come-to-you services. When the old one was out, we found the source of the leaks -- a couple rust spots underneath the paint. Ground it all out before they put the new windshield in, huzzah
• Cleaned out some of the gunk from the steering rack gears. Ultimately unsuccessful, unfortunately. And the tire that's badly worn is not the one that's leaking

Rockbox:

• Migrated to a wildcard TLS certificate

This update spans two weeks, for reasons that started with leather pants and culminated with a visit to the ER, punctuated by an increasingly miserable camping trip

Home:

• Partially disassembled the washer to remove a chain that fell under the spinner. Discovered a truly vile hive of scum and villainy
• Old Sony ZX1C smartphone inconveniently died due to battery failure during aforementioned camping trip. Slummed it with an old flip phone for nearly week until a ZX2C arrived, only to find out it (unlike the ZX1C) doesn't actually work with VoLTE on T-Mobile's network.
• Finally reversed the garage's descent into chaos

Vehicles:

• Changed the oil on the truck
• On top of everything else, a couple of days ago I found a 6" crack on the WRX's windshield, from an impact on the left edge. The car hadn't been driven for over two weeks. To add insult to injury, one of the tires was completely flat this morning. WTbloodyF..
• Truck cooling fans didn't kick on, leading to an overheating condition on my way to the ER. Jiggling the relay seems to have resolved the problem. I'll have to keep an eye on this..

Rockbox:

• Significant amount of Patch Review
• Adjusted the wiki configuration to hopefully prevent it from DoSing the entire website. About a week later the entire server crashed hard. Sigh..

Printing:

• Fix 'offline-report' logging
• Synchronize all backend changes with upstream Gutenprint
• DNP: Handle mediaoffset calculations that could result in negative values
• Makefile support for GCC's static analyzer

After reporting for Jury Duty, I spent all day in a cold, ass-numbing courtroom pew. I was assigned to a courtroom where a four-day first degree murder case was to be tried, but I ultimately didn't get a chance to get properly rejected during voir dire as the counsels selected a jury using the first two batches of eighteen prospects.

Home:

• Pulled the big litter box out of the hall closet and moved it into the hall bathroom, stacking it using a perfectly-sized shelf. Still need to build a small ramp to encourage the cats to use the upper level

Vehicles:

• The vampire splice on the truck's A/C clutch was failing, so I re-did it using proper heat-shrink spade connectors, and re-routed it along the top of the radiator for added neatness. While I was at it I re-did the connections for the cooling fans, also using proper heat-shrinking
• Adjusted the truck's headlights upwards a bit. Definitely better but still not quite right
• Confirmed the WRX's steering rack needs a rebuild; A torn boot allowed a quantity of gunk to get all up into the gearing. It's possible that this can be resolved by a partial disassembly and cleaning (along with new boots and possibly new tie rods) but the rack will need to come off the car no matter what

Rockbox:

• Fixed a few straggling issues from the www service migration
• Enhanced numeric read-back to handle languages that swap the tens and ones columns; eg "233" == "Two hundred three and thirty"
• Enhanced date read-back to be configurable per-locale, for example "12 January 2013" vs "January 12 2013"
• Improved automatic language/voice file fix-ups for incomplete or inconsistent translations
• Enabled Serbian & Norwegian nightly voicefile generation
• Improved the translation web site to flag languages that have a high proportion of "translated" strings that are the same as English
• Migrated the themesite from native SQLite bindings to PDO
• First cut at upgrading the wiki from foswiki 1.x to 2.x

Printing:

• A handful of fatal errors were holding the print job instead of properly stopping the printer queue. This affected the DNP/Citizen, Canon SELPHY, and Mitsubishi 9xxx backends
• Log the USB bus/port numbers when connecting
• Rework connecting-to-printer STATE usage, and add offline-report
• Report the USB information up as PPD updates
• Don't sleep when issuing PPD updates
• Submitted a fix to CUPS so that it respects offline-reports from the Gutenprint backend
• Centralize fast_return logic, and make the decision only apply for the final page of a given job
• Move common backend job structures into their own structure, and make proper use of it. This fixed some logging glitches but was done primarily to enable future refactoring

Home:

• Got reverse DNS entries created for my new IP range at home
• Set up a temporary DNS server on Shaftnet's new IP, to help minimize service disruption when the migration occurs
• Got a new Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel set up on Shaftnet's new IP
• Everything is now ready for the move!

Vehicles:

• Swapped the power steering pump in the WRX, and flushed over two quarts of fresh ATF (and a bit of seafoam) through the system to try and get out all of the gunk. Unfortunately, while the new pump is quiet and the steering feel is much improved, it's still inconsistent, which unfortunately implies something binding up in the steering rack itself
• Replaced the aftermarket center high stop light on the truck; its lens was clouded up and disintegrating and had cracked open on one side. As an added bonus, this one was actually wired properly!

Rockbox:

• Wrote a script to re-generate the relative build scores used to schedule the distributed build system, resulting in about a 10% bump in "efficiency" and slightly more fair handouts
• Fixed an issue compiling the UI simulator under Windows
• Migrated the remaining services over to the new VPS, including both the front end and backend of the build farm, bug tracker, and wiki
• Some patch review and bug triage

Printing:

• Rework how Gutenprint advertises CUPS command support, and properly advertise the capabilities of the existing Epson escp2 family driver
• Hook up CUPS command Level Reporting to most dye-sublimation printers supported by Gutenprint. This functionality has been in the backend for some time, but it's now finally usable

Home:

• More tweaks to the bird feeder arrangement; tightened everything up, changed how the existing feeders hang, and then added a suet block as an experiment
• Registered another domain for a secret project.. :D
• Finally got Windstream to properly assign me a new IP block, which only took four days of daily calling. Called back today about Reverse DNS entries, and ... suffice it to say my opinion is decreasing further
• Upgraded one of the unused nodes on the FatTwin in preparation for ShaftNet's eventual migration back home (Faster CPUs, 10GbE, USB3)

Vehicles:

• Replaced the valve cover on the RTV900, again. This one has a working breather valve, ending the excess pressure building up in the crankcase. Also confirmed there is no sign of coolant in the oil, huzzah
• Replaced the clutch hydraulics on the WRX, again. It's nice to have that thing driving again. Unfortunately the power steering pump is on its last legs, making a horrible racket that is most likely from a failing bearing.. Replacement ordered..

Rockbox:

• Migrated the theme, translation, and forum sites to the new VPS
• Merged some updated translations
• Fixed some bad character encoding configuration on the www site
• Tweaks to the www theme to pull more stuff into CSS
• Make the --no-ccache configure option work for HOSTCC and sim builds
• Patch review & discussions

Printing:

• A few more fixes for the Fujifilm DX100

Home:

• Got the leaf blower running.. for about 15 minutes before the carb gunked itself up again. Fortunately that was enough to get most of what needed doing sorted out
• Got Windstream to upgrade my internet connection to the highest the lines will support, which is now ~45Mbps down and ~8mbps up. Also put in an order to go from 1 static IP to a block of 5, so I can put shaftnet on its own IP, isolated from the other household stuff
• Misc server equipment swaps and upgrades in preparation for bringing shaftnet home. My plan is to transfer the disk image to one of the unused nodes in this SuperMicro FatTwin box, and then to move the guts of what is currently shaftnet into a smaller, 2U case. There's no date set for this yet, though I'd like to make it happen by the end of September.

Vehicles:

• Clutch hydraulics failed four days after their warranty expired. Geez, it's always something with that car... back to driving the truck again!

Rockbox:

• Outbound @rockbox.org email is now working
• Set up a few @rockbox.org email accounts for trusted developers
• Finished basic bringup of the VPS and initial data transfer
• Manually migrated the VPS from one data center to another, giving us both IPv4 & IPv6 addresses, plus more disk space
• Migrated download.rockbox.org to the new VPS
• Migrated git & gerrit to the new VPS
• Fixed mail relaying for the new VPS
• Some patch review

Printing:

• Sony UP-971AD (and probably UP-991AD) now work!