Nepenthes

Carnivorous Pitcher Plant

Of the many things we care for in our garden, having some Carnivorous plants was also one to have. Plants are tricky. A lot of information they pass. And depending on where you are and what plants you are with, the results can vary. The Nepenthes family isn’t native to where I live but I still wanted to have them. While not impossible, though a difficult task to bring up such species. [Read More]

Systemd Service Hang

Why and when do systemd services hang indefinitely

Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl-daemon-reexec for this scenario. The scene would be something along the lines of: rrs 6467 0.0 0.0 23088 15852 pts/1 Ss 12:53 0:00 | | \_ /bin/bash rrs 11512 0.0 0.0 14876 4608 pts/1 S+ 13:18 0:00 | | | \_ systemctl restart snapper-timeline. [Read More]

Btrfs Subvol Fix

BTRFS Subvolume Received UUID fix

There surely is need for better tooling on the BTRFS File System side. While migrating my setup from one machine to another, this is one issue I came to be aware of, only today, when my backup tool (btrbk) complained about it. Following the pointers, I see the below snippet in btrfs-subvolume manual page. A snapshot that was created by send/receive will be read-only, with different last change generation, read-only and with set received_uuid which identifies the subvolume on the filesystem that produced the stream. [Read More]

apt-offline 1.8.4

Offline Package Manager for APT

apt-offline 1.8.4 apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released. This release includes many bug fixes but the important ones are: Better GPG signature handling Support for verifying InRelease files Changelog apt-offline (1.8.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium [ Debian Janitor ] * Update standards version to 4.5.0, no changes needed. [ Paul Wise ] * Clarify file type in unknown file message * Fix typos * Remove trailing whitespace * Update LICENSE file to match official GNU version * Complain when there are no valid keyrings instead of missing keyrings * Make all syncrhronised files world readable * Fix usage of indefinite articles * Only show the APT Offline GUI once in the menu * Update out of date URLs * Fix date and whitespace issues in the manual page * Replace stereotyping with an appropriate word * Switch more Python shebangs to Python 3 * Correct usage of the /tmp/ directory * Fix YAML files * Fix usage of the log API * Make the copying of changelog lines less brittle * Do not split keyring paths on whitespace [ Ritesh Raj Sarraf ] * Drop the redundant import of the apt module. [Read More]

ThinkPad AMD Debian

Running Debian GNU/Linux on ThinkPad T14 Gen 2 AMD Variant

After a hiatus of 6 years, it was nice to be back with the ThinkPad. This blog post briefly touches upon my impressions with the current generation ThinkPad T14 Gen2 AMD variant. ThinkPad T14 Gen2 AMD Lenovo It took 8 weeks to get my hands on the machine. Given the pandemic, restrictions and uncertainities, not sure if I should call it an ontime delivery. This was a CTO - Customise-to-order; so was nice to get rid of things I really didn’t care/use much. [Read More]

Lotus to Lily

The joys of nature

The Lotus story so far My very first experience with water flowering plants was pretty good. I learnt a good deal of things; from setting up the pond, germinating the lotus seeds, setting up the right soil, witnessing the growth of the lotus plant, fish eco-system to take care of the pond. Overall, a lot of things learnt. But I couldn’t succeed in getting the Lotus flower. A lot many reasons. [Read More]

Human Society

My experiences with people

In my past, I’ve had experiences that have had me thinking. My experiences have been mostly in the South Asian Indian Sub-Continent, so may not be fair to generalize it. Help with finding a job: I’ve learnt many times, that when people reach out asking for help, say, for helping them with finding a job; it isn’t about you making a recommendation/referral for them. It, instead, implies that you are indirectly being asked to find and arrange them a job. [Read More]

Insect Camouflage Plant

I was quite impressed by the ability of this insect; yet to be. The way it has camouflaged itself is mesmerizing. I’ll let the video do the talking as this one is going to be difficult to express in words.

Plant Territorial Behavior

Observations of the subtle behavior of plants all around

This blog post is about my observations of some of the plants in my home garden. While still a n00b on the subject, these notes are my observations and experiences over days, weeks and months. Thankfully, with the capability to take frequent pictures, it has been easy to do an assessment and generate a report of some of these amazing behaviors of plants, in an easy timeline order; all thanks to the EXIF data embedded. [Read More]

Kget Goodness

Dear Google - KISS

Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today’s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud. At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external download manager work proper. [Read More]