Point Element

I'm quite happy with the new laptop. I have been using it for creating videos, using as TV, also as current general purpose computer. Overall battery life is good. The dim display does not bother a lot as most of my work has been in-house these days. I have left the OS as it is. With SSD, the startup and shutdown is quite fast. The updates are rolling in and it looks quite stable. But it does conks off once in a while when updates kick off when browser is hogging the system and I have ended up force-powering it off a handful of times. Sucks, but that's windows for you. Anyway so far rest all has worked fine so I'm not tempted to install Linux. Also I don't know if the Radeon Linux drivers will work with whatever video-editing software I can find - maybe OpenShot. Anyway that's for future if Windows croaks on me. Last couple of months I was busy getting the scooter repaired. Ended spending almost about 10K INR. Lots of 25-30K km maintenance, new tyres, some new body ...

When debugging gstreamer applications, we have this great tool available. Basically, you can generate gstreamer logs & then view them in visual format using the gstreamer-debug-viewer. The debug-viewer is not available in any package as of now - at least as much as I searched. So you need to build it manually. The process is mentioned at https://developer.ridgerun.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Use_Gstreamer_Debug_Viewer . We will of course copy - paste the important part as links on internet vanish/break all the time. ################################################# How to Use Gstreamer Debug Viewer Contents 1 What is the GStreamer Debug Viewer 2 Installation 2.1 Dependencies 2.1.1 Mac OSX 2.1.2 Ubuntu / Debian Based 2.2 Install 3 Basic Usage 4 Functionality 4.1 Main View 4.2 Filters 4.3 Searching What is the GStreamer Debug Viewer GStreamer Debug Viewer, or gst-debug-viewer, is a GUI tool to ease the process of inspectin...

Recently I wanted to install bluestacks to check out some apps temporarily. I have windows 10 - fully updated and with hypervisor support and virtualization support in this new laptop on Ryzen 5. Checked out few options about installing virtual machine support etc windows components, since I have Windows Home and not Professional. But no success, so I gave up for lack of time. Just used my cellphone to check out the apps. Next time - few days later I needed to create a Ubuntu VM to test some VNC/RDP software, and VirtualBox also would not work. I checked few more links etc. Some of them asked to install the same windows components related to hypervisor support and virtual machine. These are already there. And they also asked to disable Memory Integrity settings in core isolation settings in Security portion of Windows Settings. Now after disabling Memory Integrity, Virtual Box started fine. I thought maybe this was the real culprit for Bluestacks not working. So installed it again. And...

On a whim, last week I purchased this laptop from Lenovo Store. It's retail price was 52000/- INR, and I used a coupon for 2500/- off, and there was an offer running for upto 5000/- INR cashback on payment from HDFC bank credit/debit card. It's a 14" laptop, and the detailed configuration is as below: Processor AMD Ryzen™ 5 5500U Processor (6 Cores / 12 Threads, 2.10 GHz, up to 4.00 GHz with Max Boost, 3 MB Cache L2 / 8 MB Cache L3) Operating System ...

I saw a warning popup on my windows laptop regarding "security issue with wifi network". I clicked on the popup and it took me to a page where it informed me that the home wifi is using TKIP cypher for security and it's obsolete. I should use AES. I opened my router's configuration page and checked in wireless settings. Found out that by default the router supports both WPA1 and WPA2. And as with WPA1 TKIP cypher is used. This is not good. So I set it to explicitly use AES with WPA2 support. Now the warning is gone. But my wifi router is dual band - so I have 2 SSID's with one for 2.4GHz and other for 5GHz. This change I have made is to 5GHz band. Now all other older devices connect to the 2.4GHz band. So I have a big exercise there to see if I can shift to AES/WPA2 on 2.4GHz band too. I don't think that will be possible with all these 3-4 year old other laptops and phones. But lets see. The more secure things are the better things are!! On other hand, I also ...

I like giving at least one try to fix broken things on my own and only when things are a bit too complex to simply fix it, I forward them to respective technicians. Sometimes there are simple things like a washer that's gone, or little bit of soldering that's needed. Sometimes there are wires that are broken. I like to fix these things are avoid a (possibly costly) visit to the tech people. Recently my wireless keyboard was acting up. It was quite random and I previously thought it was some noise from all the electronic stuff crammed on my desk, but it was a failing AAA cell. Used the multimeter to confirm that that cell's voltage was down to 1.1v instead of 1.4v and that was causing the issue. Replaced it and all's well. Usually we end up a non-working keyboard and the cell probably leaked it's guts all over the place. So catastrophe avoided! Cheers!!

hmm, I was not aware of this. Basically pigz ( parallel gzip ) is a fully compatible replacement for gzip. This uses parallel processing via multi-threading thus using SMP capabilities of a multi-core/+multi-threaded processor to improve zipping throughput. Cheers!

Recently I went out and had a really great ride. Got a lot of rain, some good amount of driving in hill twisties, and overall some really great time. As usual the dash cam had captured almost all the driving, and I thought of putting together a small timelapse video with friends as a memory. Copied all the clips onto a portable hard disk. From there went into Ubuntu and put together a decent clip using OpenShot. A surprize was waiting for me though. Went to export and found out on my updated system with Ubuntu 20.10, OpenShot export with hardware acceleration did not work anymore.  Puzzled I searched around via google, found a few solutions, tried them but to no avail. Then decided to shift to another video editor. On Linux the only decent choice is shotcut or kdenlive. Both did not support my midlife radeon integrated graphics. So what else to try. I have windows on other partition, so I could try some windows programs. As expected, I downloaded a bunch of video editors and tried out ...

Hmm, I was supposed to put in the process and commands in pt. 2 but somehow I seem to have forgotten that. Anyway lets start. 1. Create SSH Key for development PC. https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/creating-ssh-keys-776639788.html I did not have any old keys n ~/.ssh so went ahead with below command to create a new one. $ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C " your_email@example.com " Rest all is straight-forward. At the end you have a private key and a public key. 2. Add this key to gitlab. Open your gitlab server instance ( e.g. gitlab.xyz.com etc ). Then login with your credentials. After logging in, go to user settings by clicking on the user menu at top left corner and clicking on Edit profile option. This will open User Settings page. Here at left side is a list. Click SSH Keys in this list. This will open the SSH Keys setting page. Here you can paste the public key in the .pub file which you generated above. DO NOT PASTE PRIVATE KEY, as it is PRIVATE!!! 3. Add your ss...

I was trying my hands at Yocto and was having some success. Then one day I got stuck building the mali libs and it turned out there's a non-working URL behind this. The error was like below: ************************************** ERROR: libmali-xlnx-r7p0-00rel0-r0 do_fetch: Fetcher failure for URL: 'git:// gitenterprise.xilinx.com/Graphics/mali400-xlnx-userspace.git;protocol=https;branch=master '. Unable to fetch URL from any source. From a linux prompt, I try:  git clone https://gitenterprise.xilinx.com/Graphics/mali400-xlnx-userspace.git/ Cloning into 'mali400-xlnx-userspace'... fatal: unable to access ' https://gitenterprise.xilinx.com/Graphics/mali400-xlnx-userspace.git/ ': Could not resolve host: gitenterprise.xilinx.com ************************************** I googled some and found that there are some solutions. Further search led me to this solution at: https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Embedded-Linux/Petalinux-Yocto-rel-v2019-1-build-fails-du...

We have been using https authentication for a while in my current organization for accessing git. As the number of repositories I have been working on increased, I found it difficult to do this manually. So I decided to use ssh keys to access my forks of the actual repositories. So my access model is like below. 1. I add a SSH key for my office desktop in gitlab. 2. Then I modify settings in all my forks to add and enable the ssh key for access. 3. Then I create a folder where I'll keep all this code. Then I clone everything to this folder.  4. And lastly I use a small shell script to run git pull so that I can update these with one command and no pesky passwords. From security perspective though, I have to ensure my desktop is not stolen and my keys are secure. Lets see the steps in detail in next parts.

NPS stands for National Pension System. It's a new better-returns with more-investment system provided by the govt of India for primarily private / unorganized sector employees. You can simply search for "why should I invest in NPS" in google and get any results like https://www.etmoney.com/blog/6-benefits-for-investing-in-nps/ . Basically if you have extra money and think of future retirement planning, then better to invest a portion of it in NPS. One big advantage is upto 50000INR is tax-deductible. And if you are like me whose some income is eligible for 30% income tax, this 50000INR deduction can save about 15.5K which is not a small amount. From last couple of years the NPS enrollment procedure is fully digital and if you have a working Aadhar authentication with either OTP or virtual aadhar, this process becomes very easy. I tried to enroll last year, but there were some glitches in authentication and it did not work out. This year in March 21, when I was looking at...

Very useful command: find -name *.xml -exec cp -f {} /home \; {} is replaced by found file paths.

What worked for me: create /lib/systemd/system-sleep/touchpad : #!/bin/sh case $1 in post) /sbin/rmmod psmouse && /sbin/modprobe psmouse ;; esac make file executable chmod +x /lib/systemd/system-sleep/touchpad and test (suspend computer and wake-up again) Solution from: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/309247/linux-mouse-freezes-after-suspend

Frankly it was not a good experience. VLC kept hanging, lots of small issues kept popping up. After some tries, I had an epiphany one day and I decided to install ubuntu-desktop package and it got me gnome. VLC does not crash anymore, system is more responsive, sleep does not work yet but that is because I decided to select LightDM instead of GDM as display-manager. This laptop seems to have some issues in general like mal-working MTP, a mysterious device that keeps showing up in windows and eventually malfunctions. It's supposed to be something related to lenovo energy management. But I am not sure, and sadly being out of production and more than six year old, there's very little hope of getting better drivers etc for this one. So I'm going to get a new battery and put it in there, and at least that will make this thing run for a couple more years. Thankfully hardware-wise it's fairly complete. Only thing I am not sure about is - if it needs a cooling system overhaul. ...