And the wheel turns
Taken at Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, just south of Gainesville, Florida.
What I did over the past week XXV
Home:
- Upgraded a few more straggler home systems to Fedora 33. Pro tip: During upgrades, make sure your systems are plugged into a UPS than can handle a sustained power outage. Yay for backups.
- Continued tweaking of the garage storage & organization, which proved its worth over the past week.
- Swept up another seven loads of leaves, and hauled off all of the branches downed by inclement weather.
Vehicular:
- Finally replaced the WRX's timing belt and water pump. The old belt and all but one of the idlers turned out to be in decent shape, but the hydraulic tensioner was showing signs of leaking. Additionally, the water pump was clearly past its prime, with quite a bit of corrosion on its impeller and fittings, plus a lot of scale
- While I had the front-end of the WRX in pieces, I pulled and rebuilt the power steering pump. It's now nice and quiet.
- Managed to introduce a massive leak into the A/C system; apparently the depressurization cycle (I had to pull the condenser coils to gain sufficient clearance to remove the crank pulley) caused something to fail; evidence is leaning towards the expansion valve or evaporator coils buried inside the air handler. Joy!
- USB events now reset the power-off timer; no longer will an unplug trigger an immediate shutdown.
- Add support for the Mitsubishi CP-M1/M15's new 'Vivid' color profile.
What I did over the past week XXIV
I'm officially on vacation, huzzah. Not so much time spent in front of the computer. Been knocking out the smaller things on the honey-do list while doing prep work for the really big stuff.
Home:
- Moved the old metal shelf to the back porch, and consolidated all gardening-related stuff from the porch and garage onto it.
- Took down the webs of the various spiders killed off by recent freezes.
- Installed insulating gaskets on most outlets that back up against exterior walls.
- Replaced the 18-year-old dishwasher that blew its internal fuse again. Given the multitude of smaller issues the old one had, it just wasn't worth firing the (secondhand) parts cannon at it any more. Plus I wouldn't be able to get any parts until after the new year. Thanks to the requisite blood sacrifice, the new one went in with no fuss.
- The vacuum cleaner sucks once again! The home office hasn't been this free of cat hair since the lock down began.
- Set up a new secondary DNS for ShaftNet, cleaned out some old entries, and regenerated all DNSSEC keys. Should resolve the intermittent resolving issues that have cropped up lately.
- Reworked EROS Q/K scroll wheel handling.
- Fixed the 'make clean' target in selphy_print.
- Fixed some CI build stability issues.
What I did over the past week XXIII
Very long $dayjob hours for the end-of-year push, but it's all done, and I'm on vacation through the rest of the year. The Honey-Do list is pretty long, and travelling anywhere is pretty much out.
Home:
- Installed 18' of simple wire shelving over the freezers in the garage.
- Replaced a rickety commercial metal shelf with a much larger and more solid unit.
- Started reorganizing things in the garage to be more orderly and consistent.
- Another round of gutter cleaning, and swept up seven loads of leaves. The to-bag pile keeps growing; I hope to tackle most of it this week.
- Made a very small dent in the patch and bug backlog.
- The fallback invalid voice file wasn't being installed properly.
- Fixed a couple of minor bugs affecting language translation stats.
- Added Dutch voices to the nightly build after a user supplied an updated translation.
- Added Russian voices to the nightly builds.
- Fixed fallback "invalid voice" prompt to be installed in the correct place.
- Fixed all URLs in the manual to use https.
- Fixed a four-month-old CFLAGS typo in the selphy_print Makefile.
What I did over the past week XXII
Another round of oral surgery. Between that and some long $dayjob hours, didn't have a lot of time or energy for anything else.
Home:
- Cleaned off the roof and gutters, 8 26-cu-ft loads of leaves swept up, 10 more 30-gal bags hauled off (50 total, lots to go).
- Installed a hanging shop light over the garage workbench.
- Sony UP-DR200 media remaining count & more bug fixes.
- Mitsubishi CP30DW support.
Mitsubishi CP30DW
The Mitsubishi CP30DW is a specialized printer, intended for medical applications that require color imaging, primarily endoscopy.
As it is an older design, it uses a protocol quite similar to the old CP9xxx family, but with some headache-inducing deviations that required some substantial surgery in the cp9xxx backend.
After a couple of evenings of effort, everything is now committed into Gutenprint; snapshots dated 2020-12-06 or later incorporate all of the bug fixes and other improvements. Use of the 3D LUT functionality will require using the lib70x image processing library.
Note that not all features are implemented. Notably missing:
- Sharpening -- this will require reverse-engineering Mitsubishi's drivers. At first glance it appears to be similar to sharpening algorithm used by the CP9800-series, which is also unimplemented.
- Remaining prints/copies before job is complete. So far there appears to be no way to query this.
- Lifetime or any other sort of print or maintenance counter.
- Error conditions are detected but only a handful of specific errors are decoded.
As an aside, the reason I worked on this specific printer was because I found a "not working or for parts" example (with some media) on eBay for very cheap. Most of the printers on my list, especially the newer models, are pretty expensive, and not something I can fund out of pocket. Donations, contract driver work, and/or loaner printers make a big difference.
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What I did over the past week XXI
A very-scaled-back Thanksgiving happened. And I got some needed rest.
Home:
- Cleaned out the gutters twice, swept up eight more 26-cu-ft loads of leaves, and hauled away just 10 bags (for a total of 40). The very next morning the yard looks like I'd done nothing whatsoever. Meanwhile, the to-bag pile grows ever larger...
- Cooked up a (very) scaled-down Thanksgiving dinner.
- Pulled enough hair out of the kids' bathtub drain to make a Japanese horror film.
Vehicular Stuff:
- Replaced the (very) worn-out wipers on the truck and the WRX.
- Changed the oil on the Kubota (quite nasty!) and the WRX.
- Topped off the transmission in the Kubota.
- Pulled the dents out of the WRX's fender. It's still a little lumpy, but much improved from the tree incident nearly four (!) years ago. Meanwhile, for nearly as long, I've had a replacement fender sitting in my garage, albeit the wrong color. One of these days I'll get to it.
- More bug fixes to the WWW site.
- Further rbutil metadata generation work.
- A couple more minor bugs closed.
- Significantly better status reporting on the Sony UP-DR200.
- Started implementing backend support for the Mitsubishi CP-D30DW.
What I did over the past week XX
Home:
- Upgraded ShaftNet to Fedora 32. Fixed most of the fallout.
- Improved home networking:
- Traced and labeled all of the RG6 coax drops in the house
- Installed a new splitter and cleaned up the wires where they all terminate.
- MoCA adapters installed in the media center and master bedroom.
- Attached nearly all 2.4GHz-only devices to the MoCA bridges.
- Cleaned the gutters again, and swept up nearly 100 cubic feet of leaves.
- Dishwasher died mid-cycle; turned out to be an internal fuse. Replaced it, the loose handle, and re-leveled the whole thing.
Vehicular Stuff:
- Installed the replacement dome light on the Kubota. I really need to pick up an inline fuse.
- Added the necessary libraries to enable interfacing with the Bluetooth subsystem on HibyOS-based targets.
- Update configure script to prompt for USB serial support when in advanced mode.
- Cleaned out some long-deprecated language strings.
- Bug fixes for USB action prompt on some targets.
- Improved ALSA PCM driver to reduce (and better mitigate) buffer under runs.
- Minor xDuoo X3 manual fixes.
- Fixed HTML manual generation with modern Tex Live packages.
- Infrastructure improvements:
- Build server now uses 10-character commit IDs internally.
- Improved metadata generation for the upcoming Rockbox Utility release.
- Rearranged where daily builds, voices, and manual files are placed.
- Nightly build scripts now generate a font package.
- Minor changes for better PHP 7.4 compatibility; Now requires at least PHP 5.4!
- Bug fixes affecting the Sony UP-DR200 (and probably other older UP-series models).
What I did over the past week XIX
Home:
- Cleaned out the gutters (again), and swept up three more loads of leaves.
- Hauled off another 10 bags of leaves (total of 30 so far)
Vehicular Stuff:
- Wired up a waterproof LED dome light on the Kubota, and had to remove it the next day as it turned out to be defective.
- Discovered the Subaru was low on both oil and coolant. Sigh...
- Picked up and installed a new wheel splash shield for the Prius; the old one was shredded by a hidden stump.
Rockbox-specific:
- Further cleanup of the PCM API.
- Explicitly clear all pending button events when entering Yes/No popup.
- Configurable action upon on USB insertion, including prompting the user.
- Some platform-level fixes for the iBasso DX50/DX90.
- Fixed a pile of minor bugs with the WWW site scripts.
- Upgraded gerrit instance to v2.16.23, fixing a longstanding site configuration problem along the way.
- Wrote up a privacy policy, and added a link to the site templates.
- Made some quality-of-life improvements in the admin mode on the theme site.
- Cleaned out obsoleted/superseded themes, shrinking the DB size by nearly 2/3rds and about 100MB of disk space.
- Reviewed some patches.