Posts
Fixing UEFI boot order on HP Stream 14
I’m in the process of installing Linux Mint 19 on our little library’s several Windows computers. The latest candidate was an HP Stream 14, a small, lightweight laptop that is crippled in various ways, so I wouldn’t recommended it except as a cheap toy. I was finally able to get Mint and Windows 10 to dual-boot successfully, but it took a day’s worth of internet searching combined with lots of trial and error.
December 11, 2020
ThinkPad T450s boots slowly after RAM upgrade
After I installed an 8 GB RAM stick in the single DIMM slot in a ThinkPad T450s, the system didn’t seem to be powering on successfully. The usual ThinkPad logo didn’t appear within a few seconds. Instead, the screen remained black for quite a long time. I powered off the system and tried reseating the DIMM, but the problem remained. It turns out that I wasn’t patient enough. According to a Lenovo forum post , it may take a couple of minutes for the system to boot the first time after a RAM upgrade, as it “checks timings and configures the slots.” Subsequent boots go quickly, as expected.
November 27, 2020
Call forwarding on Tracfone / AT&T
Recent (at least the last five years) Android phones have a call forwarding option in the settings of the built-in phone app. But it’s very inconvenient: once you enable “always forward” and enter a phone number, the phone loses the additional settings for “when busy”, “when unanswered”, and “when unreachable”. These settings normally point to the regional voicemail access number. So when you later turn off “always forward”, you have to re-enter those three addtional settings, by typing the voicemail number three times.
October 30, 2020
Koha, Mint 19, and silent printing
The Koha manual describes how to tell Firefox to not display a print dialog box when printing a slip on a receipt printer. But those instructions are specific to Firefox on Windows. I’m in the process of replacing our library’s Windows 7 installations with Linux Mint 19.3, and I found that I I had to do things slightly differently on Linux.
October 24, 2020
Butterfly gathering
Butterflies often congregate at dried-up puddles to gather salt and minerals. This is one of several groups seen at Texas Falls.
June 6, 2020
Koha and Debian 9 and /tmp
I recently upgraded our library’s Koha installation to 19.11 (from 19.05), and at the same time upgraded the operating system from Debian 8 to Debian 9. This created a problem with the “Stage MARC records for import” feature in Koha. I could upload the file, and using ssh I could see the file in /tmp. But then Koha would complain that the file did not exist when it tried to import it.
June 5, 2020
Backwoods backhoe
The cab of an abandoned backhoe. You can tell from the depth of the leaf litter next to the wheel that it’s been there a long time.
June 4, 2020