Picking up sticks.
https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2025-09-05/picking-up-sticks/
It’s been a bit since I’ve checked in with everyone.
About a week after my last post I found out that I’d been moved back to day shift at work. Through a miscommunication I found this out the hard way, which is to say right after logging in one evening my boss wanted to know where I’d been all day. Long story short, I used the entire week to slowly wind my sleep schedule back to normal, getting up an hour earlier and going to bed an hour earlier every day until I was back on day shift. It didn’t take long for my mental health to start improving once that happened. Even introverts need some kind of interpersonal contact, if only to remind oneself that there are other people out there. So, it’s back to 0800-1600, which now gives me the option to go out and do stuff if I want, and have to worry significantly less about noise because everyone’s awake anyway.
My office is pretty well cleaned up. As cleaned up as it’s ever going to be, I suppose. The last shipping crate was moved into storage about a week ago and I now have more floor space than I can recall having since the Before Times. It’s kind of odd - there is so much I can do with that floor space (and space on the shelves) but I have to stop myself from doing so, because I need that space to not feel so claustrophobic. Space on my bookshelves is great, but that doesn’t mean that I should run out and get more books. Space over my desk is great but that’s for displaying things that I didn’t have anywhere for before. Maybe once I’ve got everything set up I’ll post a few pics.
Some time ago a colleague of mine put me on to a new piece of equipment, the GL-AXT1800 from GL.inet. It’s a travel router, which is to say that when you go somewhere you plug it in, connect your laptop to the travel router, and then use it to connect to the local guest network. Once that’s done multiple other devices can connect to the travel router. It doesn’t seem like much but there are still places where you have to pay for wireless access per unit, plus there are security concerns; for example, there are circumstances in which it’s useful to have everybody all going through teh same VPN connection. It even has a built in mechanism for clearing captive portals called Travelmate. So I ordered one off of Amazon (I don’t know if this is an affiliate link or not, Amazon’s changed it up so much) and when it arrived I put it through its paces. For one thing, it has easily the best documentation for a piece of equipment that I’ve seen in a very long time, 172 pages of goodness. Second, it runs OpenWRT right from the manufacturer, which saved me a lot of work figuring out if it’ll work in the first place. I was able to both configure it and get it hooked into my exocortex with very little trouble. I’m on retreat right now and using the GL-AXT1800 in my hotel room, and it’s required zero messing around to get working. I even have a VPN connection running from the router keyed to the physical switch on the side. All in all, quite a nice piece of kit.
Somewhat along those lines, when I go traveling I normally bring a Raspberry Pi running RasPi OS (I wish they hadn’t renamed it from Raspbian - it looks much more interesting when someone pronounces it) and Kodi with a couple of flash drives full of stuff to watch and listen to. 1 Just about everywhere one goes these days has a flatpanel display with at least one HDMI jack, so there is little sense in not putting them to use once in a while. I also, incidentally, used Long Haul for testing that GL-AXT1800 at home. Specifically, I ran a regular system update (sudo apt-get upgrade and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade) to see how the travel router would hold up (perfectly, as it happens) but in the process something got messed up. Namely, when I cleaned everything up (sudo apt autoremove, per the output of apt) it broke Kodi. When I plugged Long Haul in at my hotel I didn’t get the Kodi splash screen, just a blinking text mode login screen, and occasionally a black screen with a single cursor at the top left. My travel router makes it possible to SSH in to take a look around, and I noticed thlis in the system logs:pi@long-haul $ journalctl -u kodi.service -xf … Aug 30 15:10:27 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: did not find extension DRI_Mesa version 1 Aug 30 15:10:27 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: failed to bind extensions Aug 30 15:10:27 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: did not find extension DRI_Mesa version 1 Aug 30 15:10:27 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: failed to bind extensions Aug 30 15:10:27 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: did not find extension DRI_Mesa version 1 Aug 30 15:10:27 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: failed to bind extensions Aug 30 15:10:27 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: did not find extension DRI_Mesa version 1 Aug 30 15:10:27 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: failed to bind extensions Aug 30 15:10:28 long-haul kodi-standalone[1239]: ERROR: Unable to create GUI. Exiting
Long story short, the DRI_Mesa libraries went missing, probably when I ran sudo apt autoremove a few weeks back. The fix was simple: Reinstall it with the command sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri and answer yes to any questions you are asked. Kodi started working again immediately.
That’s about all I’ve got right now. I have one or two other things in mind, but those can wait for another post (which really should be dedicated and not a “things I’m doiing right now” entry).
- I named him Long Haul, because when I go on travel I’m in it for the long haul. I spent way too long traveling for work to do it any other way. ↩