Click image to enlarge. Source: Synergy Project on Github.com

As I upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04, I wanted to reinstall Synergy and that did not work out of the box as it was setup.

Looking around, it seemed that I'd have to get Synergy 3.x and I did.

The experience was fabulous. I installed it on my Ubuntu and then replaced the old version on my Windows box with version 3.x (I had some version 1.x which worked, but had all sorts of bugs).

The new installer does not require you to specify anything other than location of your screens. For the rest, it works 100% automatically. It's ...

I like to play Shisen Sho and even wrote a tool to search for a solution (because at times, the randomized games have no solution even if you ask the game to not create such boards).

However, under Ubuntu 24.04, the icon was missing and I could not pin the game to my favorites. So I search fora  solution and it was actually rather simple. You have to edit the .desktop file and add the startup class info. I find it strange that just a missing field like that would prevent a lot of the functionality for an app. but well...

I found the solution on Ask Ubuntu (a stackoverflow website).

...

I just installed Ubuntu 24.04 (yeah... it's already 2025...) and started to setup my new system. Tons of software to re-install, etc.

I use Firefox as my default browser, but I also have Chrome and Opera for all sorts of reasons (Chrome plays more videos and Opera allows me to be logged in as a different user in a few systems).

Today I clicked on a link in Thunderbird, which I've been doing a lot. Only, it opened the Chrome browser instead of Firefox. I was really surprised since that usually works as expected.

I went to my System Preferences, Apps, Default Apps... and sure ...

I've always had to recreate my filters whenever I reinstalled Thunderbird on a new system. After a while, that's rather annoying to have to do that over and over again.

This time, my lost filters included hunders of rules (around 5 or 6 years of work). The only good thing about it: I can now decide to not reinstate some of the filters. After all, most of these good old filters were rather useless after so many years. Many of those emails, I really do not care about anymore. So it's going to be a big clean up.

That being said, it would be a lot easier to clean up by deleting ...

Today I was thinking I should restore my bookmarks in Firefox. It has been a few days since I was preparing to lose my boot drive and I did not lose it while running... but I still replaced it. It took me a whole weekend to get back to a somewhat normal system (unfortunate that it takes so long...)

So... I have Firefox running and I have an HTML file with all my links. I right click around the location where you enter URLs. That shows a small menu where I can choose to show my toolbar: Bookmarks Toolbar » Always Show.

Now I see a button to the left side which says Import bookmarks. I ...

Whenever a disk starts failing you get errors telling you that your ATA is timing out or returning some other kind of errors.

Here is an example of errors I was getting in /var/log/syslog with Ubuntu 22.04:

Feb 22 07:47:13 monster kernel: [87309.624764] ata6.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x2000 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
Feb 22 07:47:13 monster kernel: [87309.624780] ata6.00: irq_stat 0x40000008
Feb 22 07:47:13 monster kernel: [87309.624789] ata6.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
Feb 22 07:47:13 monster kernel: [87309.624794] ata6.00: cmd 60/08:68:30:ea:08/00:00:56:00:00/40 tag 13 ncq dma ...

Lately I've been using a USB drive to boot on various versions of Ubuntu to install Ubuntu on a computer. I used the following command to save the ISO on said USB drive:

sudo dd bs=8M \
    if=ubuntu-24.04-desktop-amd64.iso \
    of=/dev/sdh \
    conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress

• The bs=8M option tells dd to read 8 megabytes at a time (pretend that the block size is thatlarge) — in most cases this makes for a much faster transfer speed
• The if=... indicates the source file, an ISO in my case
• The of=... indicates the destination, here we use the USB ...

Introduction

Last night we had a pretty large scale power issue. It went down for over 1h.

I restarted the computer in the middle of the night, but when I came in the office in the morning, the LAN computers and phones were not connecting to the Internet.

I fairly quickly ruled out the firewall as an issue, it was in place as expected.

Looking further, I noticed that my PC's would find some DHCP info, but the DNS IP addresses were the local IP address (such as 10.0.10.1 instead of my Internet provider DNS IPs). So the culprit had to be the DHCP server.

Sure enough, the server ...

Issue with pulseaudio

It looks like pulseaudio is about to become history¹. I've read that you should be using a new system in replacement to pulseaudio.

In the meantime, I have pulse audio installed and so was thinking it makes more sense to use that at the moment rather than trying to get a new thing going and that was preventing Shotcut from working².

Is it running?

To see whether it is running, use:

$ pactl info

If it works, you see a list of details about your audio device.

Server String: 127.0.0.1
Library Protocol Version: 35
Server Protocol Version: ...

Anacron Time Changed

After upgrading, I noticed that I was getting some results from my Anacron at 07:38 instead of the usual "around midnight" time (which was often off by 1h in winter and/or summer... but that was fine with me).

Anacron Settings on 22.04

So I looked around and found out that the setup to start the Anacron scripts, a calendar setup in systemd, is used on newer systems. The other scripts starting CRON will test whether anacron is installed then do nothing if so. The old anacron script will test whether systemd is installed and if so, again, do nothing.

...