If you don't have the luxury of having a dedicated machine to run SpinRite to scan hardrives, perhaps this recipe will help you. It only scans drives through the USB interface, which is (at least) one layer removed from the ATA layer, but its better than nothing, and anecdotely it seems to work.

Since the virtual machine requires access to the raw usb decices, you'll probably need to run the following recipe as a privilaged user, i.e. root.

Today I added caching to my gitlab CI since i keep on running low on minutes. This was annoyly challening for a few reasons.

• Gitlab only caches data in the build directory, so if you want to cache $HOME/.cargo you can't. So you must redefine $CARGO_HOME.
• There's a bug in cargo where it uses the wrong linker that seemd to pop-up when redefining $CARGO_HOME and cross compiling.

The error I was recieving was the following for each compiled object.

Relocations in generic ELF (EM: 40)
Relocations in generic ELF (EM: 40)
Relocations in generic ELF (EM: 40)
Relocations in generic ELF (EM: 40)
Relocations in generic ELF (EM: 40)
...
error adding symbols: File in wrong format

Recently I had this pesky problem where my office could not print to our HP printers. The printer would give an error "Unable to print file. File is corrupt". If you run a google-search on this problem, you'll find many others complaining about this problem over the last several years. On HP's forums, HP techs do their best to help people, but as far as i can tell, the problem is with HP's PDF (or PS) interpreter on their printers, so any amount of troubleshooting will not help, the problem is with HP's printers.

HP's Techs advise customers to use Adobe's PDF viewer

The Solution🔗

This is a lame solution. Well, more of a 'workaround' since HP doesn't want to fix the actual problem. However this is a good workaround because it's seamless and easy to use.

Time to sing the praises of Netris.

tl;dr🔗

ssh netris.rocketnine.space

Back in college, the other Computer Science lab rats and I played a lot of xtris while "studying". It was a wonderful multi-player tetris game where completing 2 or more lines would send a bunch of junk to another player, similar to the classic gameboy version of tetirs. Back in the early 2000's it was a pretty fun game. The number of players was only limited to the horizontal resolution on your screen. In the recent quarantine environment, we wanted to revisit our glory years of hanging out in the computer of Lab of the basement sub-basement of the Computer Science building, but sadly, xtris has been defunct for many years.

I want to share a small utility for PostgreSQL that I use regularly for debugging. It is not a unique utility, there are many others like it, but this one is mine, ... and it's written in Rust!