Category Archives: Sys Admin

Material related to systems administration.

Old Book Teardown #10: Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design (1973) | In The Lab

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This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video over here.

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Silly Job Title: Component Wrangler

In this video I take a look at Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design by Fredrick J. Hill and Gerald R. Peterson published in 1973:

Here is the laundry list of links to things which came up during this video, including a few duplicates:

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe! :)

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Rigol PLA2216 Compatible Logic ProbeThis is an image of the product.notes

Let’s go shopping!

JMP001 Symbol Keyboard now on Debian Linux

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Thanks to my mate @edk from IRC I learned of the compose key. I configured my KDE Plasma desktop to use Right Alt as my compose key in System Settings -> Input Devices -> Keyboard -> Advanced. Then I updated the firmware and deployed a .XCompose file that I generated, and now I have a symbol keyboard on my Debian Linux workstation!

Subversion @ GitHub

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I wanted to use Subversion to checkout one of my GitHub repo branches, because an svn checkout only downloads the files it needs, not a full copy of every file ever added. But I discovered that GitHub sunset Subversion integration earlier this year. Sad face. Still, I suppose the economics justify that decision. As a consequence of my research, which was a bit sketchy because there is still heaps of documentation out there referring to the GitHub features which no longer exist, I did happen to learn about:

Kubuntu 24.04

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I want to install some software to check it out (MySQL and MySQL Workbench) but I’m having trouble making it work on Debian. So I decided to spin up an Ubuntu instance for this job. I picked Kubuntu 24.04 (Ubuntu with KDE Plasma desktop) and this is my first go at using Ubuntu 24.04. Figured I should document the installation experience, which I have done here.

Getting info about recent core dump (on Debian)

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This is a note for Future John about how to report a recent coredump (with debugging symbols) on Debian:

DEBUGINFOD_URLS="https://debuginfod.debian.net" coredumpctl gdb

Then bt is a magical gdb command to run to give you the call stack of the thread which… failed?

Disable HTTP gzip compression in W3 Total Cache

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This is a note for Future John.

I recently installed W3 Total Cache for WordPress for my blog.

Then I started having this weird problem where sometimes when I loaded the blog home page I would see binary garbage rendered as text in my browser. I think the problem was either that the Content-Type header was being set incorrectly or that the data was being double gzipped.

On the second assumption I found this setting:

W3 Total Cache > General Settings > Browser Cache > Enable HTTP (gzip) compression.

I disabled HTTP (gzip) compression and now my page seems to be working correctly again. But I will need to keep an eye on it. If you have a problem accessing my blog, please let me know!