Category: Ramble

When I first got my own computer, it was a refurbished Windows laptop built to last all of 4 years. It wasn’t particularity fast or well built, but it was mine. I wasn’t so well versed with technology back then, and kept most everything at stock settings. This led to some unusual issues – sometimes the laptop would simply decide to heat up, melt everything around it, and die. At the time, the best I could do was keep a charger with me.

I had heard of a new thing called Linux, but my understanding was that it was for people who knew what they were doing – and I still needed to turn in my assignments as Word documents. But as time passed and I entered college, with the looming threat of needing use a CLI and understand g++ finally gave me the push to attempt to install Ubuntu.

Ubuntu (even now) has a strange problem – sometimes it will decide to freeze, play the same half second of audio in a loop, and then die. There are no obvious errors, and all input devices become unresponsive. The laptop uses an AMD CPU, and any attempt to sleep crashes the device. As you might have guessed, these two errors are the same type of error – mishandling sleep states.

Aside: This is easily fixed by going into GRUB adding this to the boot options (but it will prevent your laptop from sleeping):

intel_idle.max_cstate=1

My Pico W also has some of the same issues as attempts tell the chip to sleep without first disabling WIFI will leave it in a pseudo-sleep – drawing significantly higher power without the ability to control it. As far as my own understanding goes, the RP2040 make use of external module for WIFI – and the power to that module and the built-in LED is not controlled by the sleep state.

Now, as I run into power management issues with my own micro controllers and the need to keep them online for a month+ at a time for remote sensor monitoring, low power sleep states are becoming an increasingly important aspect of computing that I’ve never thought about – mishandling them is disastrous, and using them safely is difficult, but if I do this correctly, I will no longer have gaps in my data.

Now to get my own sleep states under control.

If you are reading this, check your backups right now. Is it a pain? Will it be a bigger pain if you lose all your data? Check your backups!

(In a twist of delicious irony, Hello World #2 is also going to be about backups…)

If you’re looking for a Hello World #1, it doesn’t exist any more – I was lamenting the downfall of social media and the need to have a personal website for self-expression, and started this website with the hope that I would no longer need to introduce myself as often. Perhaps in a twist of delicious irony, I am introducing myself again less than 24 hours after I first wrote about it.

The Problem: When I started Ghost and initialized the MySQL database, I did not disable automatic updates from Watchtower, a container monitor, nor did I check to see that the volume that I mounted in Docker was the correct path. As the container was ran, data was saved and a directory was created and aliased to the container, but the data was not persisted across versions of MySQL. Consequently, this blog’s data was lost upon updating.

The Fix: MySQL has been pinned to a stable version rather than the latest version, and the typo in the volume mount has been fixed. I modified the DB and then restarted it several times to make sure changes persisted.

Moving Forward: Test the data – writing test data and then checking if the backup is updated to reflect the change would have been a quick and dirty way to see that I did not save any relevant data and would have alerted me to the fact.