Category: Rant/Op Ed

In making the labels for my NFC music tags, I ran into a fun bug when printing from InkScape. Sometimes it doesn’t print your entire image. In my case, it printed all the outline boxes for the labels but NONE of the actual images for the labels. I found out from a forum post that this is a common problem for more complex images.

The way to get around this is to”Save a Copy” of your document as a PDF format, open that PDF in your favorite PDF viewer and print that out. Ensure in the print dialog that the PDF isn’t being scaled as well, as the application might try to be “helpful” in that way (which is entirely unhelpful when you need it to be a specific size). Don’t print the InkScape drawing as a PDF since that runs into the same print bug, it needs to be save as to the format for everything to work.

I use Edge to open and print PDF documents, so I make sure “actual size” is selected rather than “fit to printable area” which will shrink the document that already fits just fine on a sheet of paper.

So recently my unraid webui has been running slowly, sometimes not showing the list of drives for a minute or two, or not at all. This finally culminated in an http 500 internal server error when I tried to load the main page. This isn’t good, and I was still able to access the server over ssh and via smb/nfs, so it wasn’t completely dead.

Time to debug over ssh. I first went to top and saw that shfs was at 100%+ CPU usage. This felt like an odd program to be using more than one CPU core of performance. I then went to the syslogs and saw lots of failed login attempts from a specific IP address. This wasn’t one I recognized, but I thought it might be a container I’m running (unraid api specifically).

I then went and ran docker ps to get the list of containers, and more importantly, the name for my unraid API container. I then ran docker inspect on that container and found it had the IP in question. Finally I went and ran docker kill on the container and the unraid webui started responding again. I guess I had misconfigured the container so it was falling to login, and retrying aggressively enough to stall out the webui.

Note to self, apps that scrape the webui should be configured correctly or else they may have some unintended consequences.

I wouldn’t normally go into this, but boy does this product tell me that I’m the product being sold here, not the tablet. Starting with purchasing the tablet, Amazon asked if I wanted my account preloaded and I am glad I said no, or else they would’ve probably subscribed me to every fee possible.

When going through the initial setup, there were multiple pages of “do you want to sign up for this monthly service for $xx/month”, each of which moved the accept and deny buttons, often swapping them from the previous page, so don’t just click quickly through or you’ll have a new monthly bill.

On top of that there was the same situation with permissions, do you want maps to be able to use your permission (oh and allow Amazon to track your permission too, can’t do one and not the other). This really liked like they saw the windows 10 and Google privacy settings and said “we can do worse, much worse”.

One final insult Amazon gave us through this tablet is how it handles its lock screen ads, when the tablet is asleep. It will wake up the screen to play ads, this is just…. one great big slap to the face. Pros: cheap, Cons: Software, now to work on rooting and installing lineage OS, if its possible.

I have been fighting failing parity checks for a few months now on my unraid server. I looked into each disk, checked smart stats and even thought I had found the culprit hard drive that was causing the issues. I still had it in my array but with no data on it just in case. This all happened just before another set of problems arose. The VMs on my server started acting up, crashing, and eventually when logging into one VM, everything crashed due to memory problems. I ran memtest and discovered that one of my RAM sticks was at issue, and from there determined that it simply wasn’t seated properly. After reseating the RAM, everything started working properly again. Parity checks come back clean, no more kernel panics, and the VMs are running stably. One partially unseated RAM stick caused all those issues.