Paul Cobbaut's blog

2026-06-23

Vleesetende plantjes

Bekers van mijn vijf oudste Nepenthes.

Trompetten van enkele Sarracenia.

2026-03-19

So there is this post which says:
"Yes, the people who are likely to care are admins with cobwebby
homebrew cronjobs that regularly generate painstakingly formatted
security reports and send them to the fax machine, or whatever."

...I feel extremely personally attacked by this :)
(Replace fax with mail, or whatever.)

I want my freshly upgraded to Debian Trixie Raspberry Pi to keep sending this cobwebby report... even if it is only for a couple of years to come... thus:

How to get lastb back on Debian

install dependencies:
apt install build-essential gettext autoconf flex bison libtool autopoint

get the source:
git clone https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux.git

rtfm:
cd util-linux
more Documentation/howto-compilation.txt

compile:
./autogen.sh && ./configure --disable-all-programs --enable-last
make last

install:
cp ./last /usr/bin/last
ln -s /usr/bin/last /usr/bin/lastb

happiness:
# lastb

btmp begins Thu Dec 4 15:50:47 2025

2026-02-19

more?

How can 'more' take 100 percent CPU?

The command was grep -i start */* | more

2026-01-03

middle-of-screen subtitles

I stop watching and downvote the moment your video has middle-of-screen subtitles. Idem ditto for huge forced subtitles.

2025-09-30

stty: /dev/ttyACM0: Inappropriate ioctl for device

This command on a Raspberry Pi 3:

stty -F /dev/ttyACM0 ispeed 9600 ospeed 9600 raw

Resulted in this error:

stty: /dev/ttyACM0: Inappropriate ioctl for device

This happened after the sd-card (with the OS) of the Pi entered failsafe mode so it is read only. I used dd to copy the 16GB sd-card to a new 128GB one:

dd if=/dev/sdd of=/srv/iso/pi_20250928.iso
dd if=/srv/iso/pi_20250928.iso of=/dev/sdd

The solution was to stop the module, remove the device, and start it again:

# modprobe -r cdc_acm
# rm -rf /dev/ttyACM0
# modprobe cdc_acm

... as it was probably copied with dd from the read-only sd-card.

epilogue: The 16GB SD was ten to fifteen years old. The Pi expanded the new card to 118GB not 128GB as advertised: relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/394/