Stuck Plymouth With Encrypted LVM

Every time the little Dell Inspiron 1000 boots, it gets stuck on the Plymouth window to type the LVM passphrase (the picture on the right) it sort of looks like a scaling problem.
Only solution is rebooting.
After that, you'll be in front of a GRUB menu, select the regular boot, and this time the passphrase prompt will be the "fallback" one, and of course, this time things will work.

Making Linux Mint Smaller

Continuing with the LM 18 install on the Dell Inspiron 1000 that I di yesterday, it was time to remove unwanted programs, bear in mind that the lappie will have a very specialized use, therefore I can remove a lot of stuff that I'm positive I won't be needing.

When I started the base install (with all updates installed) it was like this:

/dev/mapper/mint--vg-root   54G  5,8G   46G  12% /

Right now (and I plan to keep removing stuff) it is like this:

/dev/mapper/mint--vg-root   54G  4,3G   47G   9% /

To get back those GBs I removed:

• Libreoffice
• Gimp
• Foreing fonts
• Banshee
• Pix
• Hexchat
• Xfburn
• Thunderbird
• Pidgin

More Life For The Little Inspiron

So, it was time to upgrade the OS on the mighty Dell Inspiron 1000.
Yes, the little laptop is still alive and kicking like a mean MF, thank you.
Even after all these years of abuse and more abuse, it just won't give up, what can I say?
The battery, no doubt about it, is nothing more than dead weight, but what a hell, the thing must have something like 12 years or so.
It was running an ancient release of Linux Mint, with MATE mind you... Don't even remember when I made that install.
Of course, switched to Linux Mint XFCE (32 bits doh!).

Movies During The Weekend

Only one movie this time, we had quite a busy weekend.

Jack Reacher
A first time for the GF a re-watch for me.
She is is right in the middle of her "Lee Child phase" so she actually made a sublime effort, muster all the strength she could gather, and watched this movie with the ineffable Cruise.
IMHO the movie is actually good, and Deschanel's cinematography is amazing as always.

To Boldly Stream Where No Man Has Stream Before

Last night Binge watched the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery last night (here they are shown on Netflix, go figure...), I have a very mild flu, so went to bed early.
Really loved it, with a little homage to Daft Punk and a lot of Abe Sapiens.

Spotifyless Streaming on Chrome (Sometimes)

I've noticed this a couple of times already.
Sometimes when accessing Spotify's webfront, if you see a green line/ notification going the whole screen across the bottom of the page you simply can't listen to anything that you want to play from Spotify.
You need to reload the page in order to make it work once again.

155K and counting!

Yes, that's just about right.
Another thousand up... What can I say?

A Sunday Among Machines

The GF went for a little day trip with a girl friend, so, immersed myself with my boxes!
Children Of The Night!

(No) Movies During The Weekend

We have been pretty busy around here lately, so last weekend there was no movie at all.
We used that time with the GF to sleep like little pigs.
Perhaps we can use this weekend to catch up.

Dinnerrrrrrr!!!!!!

Taken last Saturday.
The now mighty milanesa (of course hand crafted with love by the GF) with side potatoes.
Gloria Excelsior.

The Viet Name War

At last!
Watching Ken Burns' The Vietnam War on Youtube (thanks a bunch to whoever uploaded those!!!) on the TV thru the Roku 3.
Guess I heard about this documentary for the first tine on 2012 or so, and after seeing his masterpiece The War, I wanted to see this one ever since.
Even tho I love Ken Burns docs, I think the flash forwards on the first episode were not really necessary... IMHO those were sort of a bait, something to assure audiences that the doc will be focusing more on the USA part soon.

Winter Dies (Unfortunately)

Winter, well, that thing that we had around here that should be winter it is about to end.
Of course, the MF leaves the room with an effing torrid day.
I'm afraid this summer is gonna suck big time.

154K and counting!

And, yes, you're right, another thousand up.
Listening to way too much music...
Right now I'm at an average of 72 tracks a day.

Standing On The Shoulder of Toothpaste

A little makeshift solution to improve refrigeration on the mighty hot Studio XPS.

A Little Help with The Power (Button)

So, once again I had to replace (after doing a field repair on the power button) the keyboard of my beloved Thinkpad T420 with an old one I had around that it used to be originally from the X220.
This whole thing of swapping and swapping keyboards is due to the damn flapping 9 key, that I got on a keyboard (doh!) as a nice trade with some spare parts a while back.
The power button was a bit flaky, so I added a piece of tape to act as a kind of shin in order for the power button to actually reach and push the toggle to turn on/ off the lappie.
So far the thing seems to be working A Ok.

153K and counting!

What can I say? I'm listening to music like a mean MF.
Another thousand up.

The current Linux Mint desktop

My Linux Mint setup these days...
This screenshot comes from the Opti, but I pretty much have the same thing on the other boxes as well.
The theme is the now mythic Adapta, while the icons are the famous Numix Circle, all flat and material like, long past are the days of the days of the fuzzy, out of focus, eco-friendly wallpapers.

Un-Google Now on The Moto G4 Plus

So finally [!!!!] I was able to fix the Google Now crap on my Moto G4 Plus.
I was getting really, really mad at the mighty cell phone, the new panel, that appeared out of nowhere and that I was unable to remove drove me crazy, as I hate having more than one desktop on my phone.

This is what I did to delete the effing unwanted panel:

1- Go to 'Settings' on your phone > Apps.
2- Select the Google App > tap on the top right corner > Uninstall updates.

Removed updates for the Google App, and voila, the damn panel vanished, also a couple of icons from the cell's desktop, but aside from that, everything A Ok, didn't loose any data nor installed program.
After that, updated that damn Google App once again, rebooted the cell, added the missing icons on the mighty Moto G4 Plus desktop again, and things, at least so far, are kosher and running fine.

Followed (in part) the instructions from this Google Products Forum post:
How do I *TURN OFF* Google Now?

Movies During The Weekend

Only one movie, strange days are we living...

• The Mummy

What a bummer, man!
Slept almost thru the whole movie... Tom Cruise should retire, he doesn't look convincing, anyway, at least IMHO.

• Narcos

Also, during part of the weekend, while the GF was sleeping a bit, binge watched most Narcos 3rd season, which turned out to be quite good.

Google Now Launcher Went Nuts

The mighty Moto G4 Plus got a bit crazy today and fucked it up with a damn new panel for Google Now that I can't get rid off...
Damn you technology!

Spotiless

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Stream Again...

VLC: Shuffle a Playlist

If you are listening to a shit load of music like I'm doing right now, randomizing whatever you are listening to becomes more than a crucial thing.
VLC's random sucks, so Googling around found this little script: Shuffle Playlist.

It exactly what it says, shuffles the contents of a playlist, yes, random does that, but this script does that before playing the next random file, that is, shuffles the playlist and plays it the way it got randomized.

Download the file (16 KB, small) and copy it to:

~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/

Since the directories "lua/extensions/" don't exist, create those:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/

Then start VLC and select View > Shuffle Playlist

Using Youtube DL

The options I'm currently using to download some movies from Youtube with youtube-dl (the amazingly versatile CLI program that downloads Youtube videos).

youtube-dl --list-formats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jWpN4n9hXE

Lists all the available video formats in which the movie can be downloaded, the output of that can be seen on the screenshot on top.
The other one I'm using a lot is:

youtube-dl --list-subs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jWpN4n9hXE

Yeah, to get the available subs of the video, but, on my case, and given the piece of crap old movies I'm d'loading, 99.9% of the time I get something like this:

7jWpN4n9hXE has no automatic captions
7jWpN4n9hXE has no subtitles

152K and counting!

What you know? Another thousand up...
Music all around all the time.

Spotty WiFi Connection with BCM43228

Switched drivers for the BCM43228 WiFi card on the Thinkpad X140E, it was working like a piece of shit, lots of drops and even total disconnects.
I was using the "firmware-b43legacy".

Frankuntu Ye Olde Sony Vaio PCG FRV37

A bit of a Frankenstein experiment with the really ancient Sony Vaio... Sort of a continuation of my stupid and time wasting experiments with slimmed down Linux installations on old boxes, just because it can be done.

Installed Ubuntu Server 16.04 from a Mini CD install, and then added a minimal GUI.
The base installation took about an hour choosing: Standard System utilities, OpenSSH server and Basic Ubuntu Server.

As usual, the installer detected the PCIA WiFi card, but after the was over it left me with a system without Wifi and using 1.3 GB of HDD (from a 60 HDD one).

Setting up the WiFi card manually took a minute, and on onto the GUI install we go!
Issued a:

sudo apt-get install xorg

That downloads 44.6 MB of files, and then expands those onto 256 MB.

Executing a startx (and not X you old fart!!!) starts X Window with no window (the thing actually looks like a full screen xterm), the mouse pad works, but I can't type dink on that huge xterm.

Switched to a virtual console, and killed X. or, you know, startx :p

Installed a window manager, and the program to configure it:

sudo apt-get install openbox obconf

That downloads 21 MB of files, and then expands those onto 104 MB.

Installed a little panel and a small Calendar program:

sudo apt-get install tint2 gsimplecal

It downloads 2 MB of files, and then expands those onto 8 MB.

sudo apt-get install thunar thunar-volman thunar-archive-plugin thunar-media-tags-plugin gvfs gvfs-backends

The thing downloads 22 MB of files, and then expands those onto 103 MB.

Logged out of X Window, restarted it, but still no Tint2 Panel nor a way to access Thunar yet.

So copied the file "/etc/xdg/openbox/autostart:  to "~/.config/openbox/autostart".

And then added to the bottom of the file:

tint2 &

thunar &

And then startx once again!

Out of the box, the whole thing looks as if a demon from hell has vomited scorpions on my eyes...

151K and counting!

And another thousand up.
Yes, the show never ends.

Movies During The Weekend

Well, we had kinda of bizarre last couple of weekends around here... Lots of work and stuff so not too much time for movies.

• Fright Night

No, not a re-watch, this was the remake they made a couple of years ago.
IIMHO, the original was better.

Accidental Shameless Plug

Last night I was lazily browsing for some stupid time wasting Linux thing or whatever stupid stuff and came across by pure accident with this...
What you say?
The screenshot from that article (as of today) is is actually a screenshot of one of my themes on XFCE Look, Mint-Y-Dark-Borderless.
Of course its a coincidence, merely a wget thing, my theme is not even mentioned on the article (nor the comments), but nevertheless it was a nice find.

Dinnerrrrr!!!!!

A mighty Suprema Maryland.
What's the occasion, you say?
Anniversary celebrating with the mighty GF.

Nano Xubuntu on The T60

Damn I'm impressed!
Last Friday made a "Xubuntu minimal installation" on the T60, just for kicks and shit.
Really snappy and also looks good, will keep using it, the only thing that sort of kills this thing is that the LTS release doesn't have a five year shelf life, but three.
I'm considering building a FrankenXFCE, using an Ubuntu Server as the base, and then install the minim desktop packages.

Worst Winter Ever

What a hell, man...
This has to be a joke, otherwise, in January we'll be swimming in molten concrete.

150K and counting!

And so it is.
150 fucking thousand plays! Now onto the 300 thousand, hopefully I'd be alive for that, let's say in something like five years from now?

Movies During The Weekend

Only one movie past weekend... A lot work and a busy life are mortal enemies if you wanna watch a a shitload of films...

• Rumble Fish

An amazing re-watch, on my case, and a first time for the GF.
Seeing this on FHD... We're Not Worthy! We're Not Worthy! We're Not Worthy! :P