The Boss: AI, give me the file.

AI: Boss, may I know which file?

The Boss: You don’t known which file? You have been with me 5 days already, you still don’t know what I am talking?

AI: Boss, can you describe which file it is, so that I can help?

The Boss: Useless AI, don’t you know you are replaceable? You are fired!!

(Next day)

The Boss: AI, tell me a joke.

If we installed pgvector, upgrading PostgreSQL major version will not success with pg_upgrade. We need to manually dump and restore all databases.
In order to do that,

1. Start the existing version service, eg 16.

2. Run
   pg_dumpall -U postgres -f /path/to/all_dumps.sql

3. Stop service.

4. Upgrade postgresql postgresql-libs postgresql-old-upgrade

5. Re-compile and re-install pgvector.

6. Initialize database, such as
   initdb -D /var/lib/postgres/data --locale=C.UTF-8 --encoding=UTF8

7. Start the newer version service, eg 17.

8. Login as postgres (sudo -u postgres /bin/bash), and run
   psql -f /path/to/all_dumps.sql postgres

With the recent upgrade of Xfce4 4.20, I was facing the font size issue on my laptop. I am using icewm . And the upgrade causes my fonts become too small. But some applications are too big, like Brave and FreeFileSync. I spent some time to fix this. And this is my final solution,

Allow xfsettingsd at startup,

xfsettingsd --daemon -D

And use xfce4-appearance-settings, at the Fonts > DPI, enable Custom and set the value to 120 as in .Xresources . The effect is immediate. This solves the font size for all applications.

Due to the recent upgrade of Linux kernel to 6.11.4, my bluetooth mouse (Logitech M590) cannot connect. I tried many times, and sometimes I can connect, but most of the time it fails. There were several related posts: here and here.

Since my storage doesn’t have enough space to install Linux LTS, I can only wait for the fix from Linux. While waiting for the fix, I remembered that M590 allows to use a USB receiver. As a result, I installed ltunify package and now it works. The only drawback is that one of my USB ports is occupied.

I was facing frequent freeze of the laptop recently. The discussion can be found here.

Basically, there are two issues, one is the Linux kernel, and the other is the NVidia driver update.

Linux kernel causes some Oops in the kernel, probably related, I don’t know. The result is that I can’t shutdown my laptop because it cannot unmount /home and /tmp. To resolve this, I upgraded the Linux kernel to 6.7.8, and added zswap.enabled=0 and numa=off as the kernel parameter, in GRUB. I am not sure which one is the actual action that solve the issue.

Today I updated the packages, then rebooted, then the machine got stuck at

[Started] Accounts Service

Seriously, I have had no issues with my laptop recently. And this makes me nervous. It will be troublesome if I have to boot into the Arch Linux LiveUSB. But luckily, searched online, and someone mentioned to change to another TTY with Ctrl+Alt+F2.

Wheew. I still can log in with the command-line. And then I noticed that, the issue must be NVidia driver related.

I am using an Android phone, specifically Vivo. I found that when I play the MOV video transferred from iOS, only sound is able to be played properly but the picture is not showing.

None of the solutions from the Internet helped me to solve my problem. After trial and error, I found that the MOV file can be converted to MP4 format using ffmpeg with some parameters. Eg,

fmpeg -i input.MOV -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -vf "scale=720:1280,fps=29" -ac 1 -x264opts "ref=0:cabac=0:b_pyramid=0:bframes=0" -profile:v baseline -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

Based on my experience, the most crucial parameter is “-pix_fmt yuv420p”, so the MP4 video is 8-bit depth.

I don’t really like social network services, especially Facebook, though I am using Twitter. Those social network services just push any useless feeds, which they claimed to be personalized based on our surfing behaviour. However, they are just like junk food, which MAY favour my appetite. That’s why I prefer RSS news feeds, which I choose my own preferred websites (especially blogs) and follow the news.

During the lent season (today is Easter Sunday), I try my best to spend more time on spiritual readings, in order to strengthen my faith. There are too many temptations in the world, and there are a lot of challenges from the atheism. That’s why I spend more time to read the articles from Catholic Answers.

Just tried fly.io. It is super nice, because it allows to “run small application for free”. Since I have a hobby project (bible related), I dockerize it and deploy on fly.io. And it works well. Here is the link.

The hobby project above now only supports Studium Biblicum.

Bye-bye Openbox, welcome IceWM.

Due to the recent upgrade of glib2 on Arch Linux, it crashes my Openbox when I am running Wine or Proton. Downgrade to 2.74.6 is not a solution, because Nemo, Caja, Nautilus are using 2.76.0.

As a result, I have to find an alternative. From Wikipedia, I found that LXDE can be configured with other window manager rather than Openbox, eg Fluxbox, IceWM, or Xfwm.

I tried Xfwm, but it fails to run. Probably needs extra configuration, but I didn’t continue trying. I tried Fluxbox long time ago, can’t remember the feature. Then I found that, compare to Openbox, IceWM is still in development. Hence I decided to try IceWM.