Things I've learned, documented quickly
This keeps coming up in various contexts over and over, so I might as well document it. What do you do when Windows decides to misbehave and a reboot isn’t enough? Nothing overly specific, but maybe an occasional error, Windows Update acting wonky, or there’s some other odd behavior that only happens on one computer. Here’s my checklist of things to verify/run, which will get the vast majority of problems resolved, or at least identified.
TIL of the specific differences between two of the most common “modes” of EXE applications. The PE (Portable Executable) format has a Windows Subsystem field, which is most often set to either IMAGE_SUBSYSTEM_WINDOWS_GUI or IMAGE_SUBSYSTEM_WINDOWS_CUI. When set to the GUI subsystem:
Today I needed to create a blank .img (raw disk) file, format it with a filesystem, mount that filesystem, and put a file on it. The reason for this was absolute laziness: I didn’t want to put a file on a flash drive and then go to my basement to plug it in to a server. Instead, I wanted to use the Dell iDRAC Virtual Media option to mount a disk with the necessary file. So, how does one create such a disk file?
I finally learned how to commit a shell script in Git on Windows that will have its executable bit set in Linux when the same repo is used there:
I’ve been playing around with Google TV boxes, as well as actual TVs, and I’ve learned a few things about customizing them. NB: Naturally, as operating systems and services get updated, this information will become outdated.
Today, I made a terrible mistake. I attempted to do a live upgrade of a Windows mirrored disk pair to use larger SSDs. The procedure started normally, but in the middle of one of the resync operations, I realized that I would need to break the mirror (again) in order to resize the partition because mirrored partitions are not resizable, so I naively stopped the resync. Bad idea. The source drive ended up in an “invalid” state, which Windows refuses to work with in any way, it would seem.
I didn’t learn this recently. In fact, I realized that it’s been buried in my head for a while, until a coworker happened to mention that his screen looks a bit… off.
Some interesting links related to OpenStreetMap and raster/vector tiles:
Certain electric car charger models (which shall remain nameless) have a penchant for breaking. One specific type of issue I’ve encountered multiple times is when the handle is plugged into a car, but charging does not initiate, and the car displays a message along the lines of, “verify everything is plugged in securely”.
After a significant amount of trial and error, I figured out how to use SatPy to create a GeoColor image from GOES satellites. I tried doing the same with Himawari L1 data, but the process kept running out of memory and crashing. Not sure why.