Point Element

It's end of year 2022, and our Hero Duet has completed 6 years couple of months ago. It's crossed 34000km and recently few months back a big service which cost me about 4500/-. The scooter as of now runs like new, the engine has same vibes. We have not lost any original hardware. And beside some consumable replacements, the scooter body is holding well. Lets talk about the repairs: 1. Fix front fork out 2. Replace suspension bush, engine mounts 3. Resurface VVT pully 4. Get kicker mechanism parts repaired 5. Get clutch scrubbed 6. Fork seal/bearings replaced 7. Replace air filter I had couple of 100+ km rides on it and things are improved. Though not to any extent that I want to do even 50+km rides on this thing. But it's good enough for local runabouts. I'm thinking of getting a bike for longer rides, but for now mind is in splits as it's much comfy and safer to take out the car for longer travel. But then riding on a bike/scooter has a different charm. Anyway the ...

windirstat is an amazing tool to get an idea of which folder is taking how much of the disk.

I have so far never messed up with GPIO's. I have a raspberry Pi. But I almost always used it as a desktop computer and never as an embedded device. Anyway so this development ended up in my lap as we re-implemented the general purpose IO functionality in one of the new products at the current employer. And then it was proposed to use libgpiod. Turns out the library was quite easy to use. But then came time to test it. And first thing I got stuck was trying to find out which gpio devices or chipnames I have available. Few google searches confused me even more. Anyway after fiddling a bit here and there, I ended up with an option to try and access the actual prototypes. The device I had used a slightly different yocto SDK and the newer device just had a different libc version. After struggling for a while to sort out the errors, I thought of compiling the libgpiod library using the old device SDK. Turns out it needs autotools, which we don't have in the SDK. That put a hard-stop...

User can create a script-file in  /etc/X11/Xsession.d as 91_custom_xrandr and add the mode there. xrandr --newmode "1680x1050_60.00"  146.25  1680 1784 1960 2240  1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync xrandr --addmode DP-2 "1680x1050_60.00"

Recently I came across a use case where on a product-line, we needed to use systemd-networkd as networking back-end. The product in question was using a very old networking back-end and the newer version of Linux was going along with systemd. So along came some thoughts on netplan which is a tool developed by canonical which abstracts both NetworkManager and systemd-networkd. Basically user provides network configuration via yaml configuration files and netplan creates back-end configuration automatically depending on whichever back-end is in use. Now, the version of Ubuntu I was using (22.04) had NetworkManager enabled and it also had systemd-networkd available but disabled. So my first step was to stop and disable NetworkManager. #systemctl stop NetworkManager #systemctl disable NetworkManager Next enable systemd-networkd and observe it's status if there is a successful startup: #systemctl enable systemd-networkd #systemctl start systemd-networkd #systemctl status systemd-netwo...

I bought this in dec'19 and it has been overall a great phone. It came with Android 9, received one OS update to Android 10 and few more security patches. It's price was about 10000 INR and I was eligible for a bank offer that knocked off 900 INR off the price. It has 2 versions - one with 3GB RAM/32GB flash and another with 4GB RAM/64GB flash. I went with the latter. Now after so many days Accubattery reports the battery health at 86% which is excellent. I recall so many phones where battery replacement was needed after 2 years of usage. This phone has plastic construction and is not really a looker. It's originally supplied case is still holding even though it has yellowed a lot. I don't seem to find vinegar anywhere which might help clear out the yellowness and make it look new. Anyway the phone is smooth because I don't really have a lot of apps on it. Couple of games, few messengers, and some food ordering, cab booking apps. And I ensure to keep 10-15GBs of fla...

I followed below linked article to upgrade Debian 10 to 11, and it worked well. https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-upgrade-debian-10-to-debian-11/ I'll add the text below for quick reference or in case the original link goes down. Prerequisites The upgrade operation must be run with superuser privileges. You need to be logged in as a root or a user with sudo privileges . Backup Your Data First and foremost, make sure you backup your data before starting the major upgrade of your operating system. If you are running Debian on a virtual machine, it is best to take a complete system snapshot so you can quickly restore your machine in case the update goes south. Update Currently Installed Packages Before starting the release upgrade, it is recommended to update all your currently installed packages to their latest versions. Packages marked as held back cannot be automatically installed, upgraded or removed. This may cause issues during the upgrade process. To check whet...

It's about a year and 10 months and the car has crossed 20000 km. It was overall smooth sailing. There were no issues, a few parts were scuffed up and there were few underbody hits. But nothing critical, and the car seems to have survived. We will be doing 2-3 road trips in the coming year and the car seems like it can take it. I can imagine hitting 30000km next year. One good thing is the car is not driven much in neck-to-neck traffic so the AGS transmission has had it easy. Hopefully, with this work-from-home situation, things will continue to be easy. Also with limited parking space in office premises(my company being a small one), I prefer to take 2-wheeler to office. I'm getting consistent 15-16kmpl with air-conditioning on. I would try for more, but with the crazy weather and so much dust on the road, we prefer to keep the windows closed and use air-conditioning on the lowest setting. I tried to travel with windows open a few times but around any city, it's impossible...

1. When you are importing video from action camera, shotcut will prompt you to convert it into fixed bitrate format. That helps. 2. To reduce fish-eye effect from action camera footage, use lens correction filter and use near-center correction value of 45 and near-edge correction value of 40. 3. Use stabilize filter to reduce shakiness. It won't be as good as a gopro's video due to not having corresponding gyro data. But it will be much better than no-stabilization.

Recently my Benq display died. It had already taken a fall and the screen was cracked in a few places. But it continued to work. Then about a year of work from home, it decided to die with picture moving up/down. I got it repaired and it worked for another year or so. And now it's croaked for life. It's not completely dead. But 80% of screen shows alternate black lines and it's not usable anymore. I bought it for about 7.5K INR. And it served for a few years as display for my lightly used Raspberry Pi. Then it was fully used for WFH since last 2.25 years. Now similar displays cost upwards of 10000 INR. That's inflation for you. Anyway luckily I had a 22" Samsung TV lying around unused. And since the company desktop I have with me, does not have HDMI and the TV does not have VGA, I had ordered a VGA to HDMI convertor box for about 500 INR. That purchase saved the day and I was able to use the Samsung TV as monitor. There were few complications though. One was crappy...

Not as such really, but something was having some issues. So what happened was I went for an outing with few relatives. As usual when you go away from city, the roads get worse. And we got onto this patch of road where patch was very uneven and full of potholes. The weather being pleasant, we had windows open. Then a metallic sound was heard once in a while. I could tell that it was coming from exhaust-pipe/muffler area. It was coming from rear-right corner of the car. It seemed that when the rear-right wheel went into a dip, muffler or some portion of exhaust would rub somewhere causing the metallic sound. I surmised it as a sum of 3 factors causing this problem. 1 fully loaded car with 4 adults, 2 maybe a slightly low tire pressure, 3 hilly terrain with potholed road causing more suspension movement and thus something getting scraped somewhere. I did stop the car and took a look underside but did not find anything obvious like a stuck branch or loose stones. And afterwards I drove a ...

This nightmare started with my wife's Asus Vivobook 14. We should have gone for the SSD model, but I thought the usage being light, the HDD model would suffice. Little did I know the amount of trouble will this decision give me!! So when we received the hardware the 2 major complaints were the screen even though having FHD resolution, had abysmal viewing angles and weird color reproduction. This was overcome with a custom color profile. Its still not good for long time usage, but for her for about 1 hr a day video calls, it was enough. The second issue was slow HDD performance. I tried a few dozen things. Optimized windows 10. Optimized partitions. But it was junk slow. The R/W speeds never crossed 5-6MBps. And when windows update kicked off the whole thing would grind to a hault.  With optimized settings it worked decently for about a year.  But now with many windows updates in and also so many files in, it just could not take it. Even sad is the drive won't fail. It would chu...

I have come across some really low quality wires in use in some places, and after just a few years the rubber has stiffened and is now giving problems. First instance was with the ceiling fans. See the house wiring is of good quality, sufficient gauge. But the installers used a very cheap quality wiring that became hard and cracked. A couple of fans out of the 4 I have in this house stopped working. When I looked at the wiring, I found out that these low quality patches have become rock hard and useless. I had just about enough good quality wiring to replace these patches in the 2 ceiling fans. I wanted to do the rest also, but did not have enough wire. I got some good quality wire of 5 mtr to be exact, but then did not have time and it just went on the side. I'm waiting on the low quality wiring to go hard and go bad. Lets see. The next instance was with some accessory wiring in my scooter. It's 5 years old, and I found out that the headlight and indicator wires are gone rock ...