Posts
Linux Mint 19 on HP Notebook 17z-ca000
I was asked to install Linux on four newish HP notebooks with 17 inch screens. These machines came with Windows 10, so it was necessary to do a dual-boot installation. The three major problems with these HP machines were: getting the machine to boot from a Linux Mint bootable USB thumb drive a Realtek wi-fi device whose driver was not built into the Linux kernel Secure Boot preventing the Realtek driver from loading
May 27, 2020
Disabling the send cart button in Koha
Our library has enabled the cart feature in the Koha OPAC, which allows patrons to create a list of books they’re interested in. Some patrons have used the “Send” feature of the cart, which allows them to send the cart to an arbitrary email address. But there have been several problems with this, such as bad email addresses causing the emails to be redirected to the sysadmin (me). I decided to suppress the ability to send the cart by hiding the “Send” button. In Administration / Global system preferences, edit the OPACUserJS preference to look like this:
May 23, 2020
ThinkPad T450s ethernet and suspend
There seems to be a problem in Linux with the Intel E1000 ethernet device on a ThinkPad T450s, and possibly other machines that use the e1000e device driver. The symptom is that Network Manager (NM) hangs trying to initialize the ethernet link after a suspend/resume cycle. After a resume, NM shows a spinning icon for about 10 seconds trying to get an IP address, and it eventually gives up. Telling NM to try again results in the same failure, forcing you to unplug and replug the network cable.
May 12, 2020
Determine your external IP address
It’s sometimes useful to know your computer’s external IP address: that is, the IP address of your NAT router as seen from the outside world. It would be most convenient to be able to do this from a shell, without having to resort to a web site like this one . A quick DuckDuckGo search found this older discussion , but nearly all of the methods described there no longer work. The only ones that worked for me were this:
March 29, 2020
Calculating patron savings in Koha
At least one library is giving patrons a checkout receipt showing how much they saved by using the library. ByWater Solutions has provided a tutorial that shows how to do this in Koha, by adding some template code and Javascript to the HTML for the issue slip. The code works by adding up the replacement costs for each item in the checkout list. For an item that has no replacement cost in its item record, the code uses the default replacement cost associated with that item’s type.
October 22, 2019
Thoughts and Prayers
Here’s a little program to generate a very sincere, heartfelt public response to a tragedy.
March 15, 2019
Using LastPass in Pale Moon browser
Firefox 57 introduced a new extension API that broke most of the extensions I had been using, including It’s All Text, Dorando Keyconfig, and Tab Mix Plus. So I installed Pale Moon , a fork of an older Firefox that works with those extensions. But the current LastPass extension only works with the new (57+) Firefox.
February 20, 2019
Adding Redo to MicroEMACS
Last year I added undo support to my ancient fork of Dave Conroy’s MicroEMACS . The undo function has been useful on those occasions where I do something stupid, like justifying a paragraph in, say, a piece of C code. But sometimes it’s possible to go a bit too far with repeated undos and lose some valuable work. The solution was to implement a redo command that undoes an undo.
February 9, 2019
Ispell unable to open default.hash
For some reason, one of my Linux Mint 18.1 machines was not able to run ispell, which gave this error message:
November 23, 2018