Smart-@$$ed Replies

In the previous post, I said that I would frequently share different images with my peers pertaining to the job in some fashion or another–usually to try and release some tension, emotions, or just to try and be a bit comical. Sometimes, what I would send would simply be a reply to something that our district manager had said about the business–more often than not, that reply would be reflective of myself being a bit of a smart-aleck.


I cannot remember what I would’ve sent this as a reply to, but given the date I have for the image–December 18, 2018–I would guess that it has something to do with the shopping season, or the delay of store deliveries.


Obviously, this would have been in response to my agreement with whatever had been said in the group; no clue as to what I would have been replying to.


I’m fairly certain that I sent this in response to a reminder or announcement of a follow-up conference call.


And I think I’ll wrap up this post with this image. The story on this one is I wanted to express what I felt my district manager felt of me and my varied responses and comment in our group chat–Hank Hill’s favorite thing to say in response to his son’s odd behavior’s came to mind. To make things seem more fitting, I attempted to color Hank’s hair grey, and have Hank’s shirt colored and patterned like that of one our DM would wear. I doubt anyone really appreciated it, but I thought it was funny.

Momo

If you haven’t figured out by looking at some of my older posts or looking me up on social media, I was once employed with Family Dollar–I was a manager, too, and a pretty good one, at that if you can believe it. Okay, maybe I was just a dependable, hard worker that kept a very good eye on my assets and did my best to be fair with my subordinates and customers. Being a store manager–meh; but if you’ve ever tried to control one of those dumpster-fires, you know.

(Seriously, it’s a terrible job. And for some stupid reason, in hindsight, I’ll say I loved it and that I wouldn’t mind going back for more–if I could get the pay I had when I left the company!)

Anyway, despite company policies against group messaging at the time, our district managers found keeping a group-text to be helpful and mostly productive. Unfortunately, I as well as a few others, found it to be a great way to blow off steam and joke around with our peers. As such, I frequently made little meme-influenced images and either sent them to the district or to a select few managers. I cannot remember if this image was sent to the group or the couple of managers I considered friends. I don’t think there was any inspiration other than the whole “momo” thing.

According to the file info, I would have created this image on March 9, 2019, about 15 minutes after opening my store.

Forgotten Google Photos

Chances are that you know about Google Photos–you may even be a user of the apps and service. I, for one, am a Google Photos user–and quickly digressing, have been since before its odd birth from Google+ and Picasa. Anyway, since Google Photos came along and eventually offered automatic backup to the cloud from Android devices I’ve been full in. That means, however, that I’ve collected quite a few different photos, memes, and screenshots along the way and had them disappear into the dark recesses of my photos archive, never to be seen–until now. See, while I may go back and view photos on occasion through either the app or on the web, I usually only go looking at things by using the albums that Photos creates for me–or if I’ve got a specific image in my mind that I want to view I might use the search to try and find it. Rarely, if ever do I take the time to go scrolling back through the decades of photos I have stored online. Yes, decades–I can’t believe that I’ve actually been a user of the service in some fashion for that long; and, I’ve honestly got photos from decades prior to Photos inception–remember, I said I was a user of Picasa, and when I was I had been using the service to not only store digital photos of the then present day, but uploading and organizing older family photos I scanned into the software.

Anyway, with all that said, you might guess I’ve got a slight bit of an archivist or digital information hoarder in me. As such I’m always wanting to try and play with the odd program or tool to save and organize the digitized portions of my life. One tool that I had discovered over a year ago was a python app called Google Photos Sync (gphotos-sync). Once I discovered it, I started making regular local backups of my photos from the cloud, onto an old netbook I have. Yeah, I know, you’d think I would already have local copies of these memories, wouldn’t you? Well, once upon a time, I did; then a nasty divorce happened, followed by depression, and then finding an awesome new love, followed by a very demanding job–I kinda just let that part of me fall to the wayside. Now, I’ve had more time to tinker and rediscover my computing and archiving interests. Still, I’ve only been syncing what I’ve had go into the cloud with a local hard-drive. Today, however, I went a bit further.

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a lot of geeky things–including attempts to get myself into writing here more often, as has been mentioned in numerous previous posts. Well, along with all of that has been the on-again, off-again with getting my desktop PC set the way I want it. Today, I reached a point where I thought it was time to try and bring the photos from the aforementioned netbook over to the desktop, and start syncing things over there, as well as start getting back into the more hands on approach to photo album management. So far, everything from Google Photos is synced to the desktop–down-sync only–and imported into what had been my previous goto on Linux for photo management–Shotwell. My next steps will be to see how to have Shotwell and gphotos-sync cooperate in uploading any changes I make back to the cloud. This is where I’m unsure how much of a headache I’m going to give myself. I would like to use Shotwell to make potential simple edits, like crops and tags, as well as helping me identify “junk” photos that have been saved in the cloud. I’ve just got to see if when I upload via Shotwell from one of the pre-existing gphotos-sync directories and then perform a gphotos-sync if there’s going to be a conflict. Unfortunately gphotos-sync doesn’t currently support upload.

And there is what sparked me on writing this entry in the first place–“junk” photos. All those screenshots, memes and other non-sense that Google automatically backed up for me, that I completely forgot about.

After Shotwell imported everything into its little database I took a few minutes to scroll through my collection and noticed there’s quite a few images that I really don’t care enough for to keep–at least not as a part of what would have once graced a family’s shelves of photo albums. There are several images, however, that I wouldn’t mind keeping in a scrapbook–or something akin. So, for the next few posts, I think I’m going to share those oddities here so that I do still have a copy somewhere once I delete them from my collection. I will try to include a story–if I can remember one–to go along with whatever images I end up sharing.

This could be a fun little journey.

untitled-07-48-21

## Sat 01 Jul 2023 07:48:21 AM EDT

Quick note, for now;

I’ve given up on having my main desktop PC run Windows–at least in a full-time capacity. Since I’m dealing with old hardware and am set on having dual monitors, I figured it’s time to kill the headaches I’d been having with the thing being sluggish due to incompatible drivers and just play with linux. Both I and the computer seem to be much happier.

I had to work on the car again; we went for a drive earlier in the week and the passenger rear brake locked up, causing extreme heat and possibly a fire that extinguished itself. After letting the wheel cool for about fifteen minutes I slowly drove it back home–slowly being necessary as I discovered a few minutes after getting it back on the road that I had lost braking power altogether. The next day, I tore the thing apart and discovered that the wheel cylinder blew, and that the hub/bearing assembly was nearly seized. I’m not sure exactly what happened first or when as there’s a few different ways that things could have gone down. So, anyway, new hub, new cylinder, new hose (of course it snapped when I replaced the cylinder) and new shoes. Yay.

I haven’t written any of my “pen-pals” in a while because I’ve been busy tinkering with varied things, and I’m starting to feel guilty about it. I’m hoping that I can get back into the swing of that real soon.

I’ve got a decent amount of housework I want to try and accomplish today. We’ll see if that happens.

Blah.

Thanks for reading;

–J

reptyr

## Wed 21 Jun 2023 12:22:33 PM EDT

So, I thought that I was done with writing today–at least for now–until my wifi decided to crap out on me and disconnect my session. I’m sure you know the feeling that I had next–that quick little race of the heart and perhaps a little flush of the face when your computer decides to treat you like Ellen Feiss, and like half of your paper is gone. Yeah.

Well, see, I knew that if I didn’t figure something out, all of my post would be gone as I’ve still not made it a habit to run screen or tmux before starting in on something lengthy. So, I was like, great, is there some sort of temporary file written somewhere keeping track of changes to the file I was creating. Well, there was, and when I googled if it was possible to recover it, my first answer showed me that only a couple of people have had success in figuring out the wizardry needed to open/edit/recover/revert/etc that silly .swp-file. Okay, so, is there an application or command that can steal a process? Turns out, there is. Reptyr.

https://github.com/nelhage/reptyr

If it’s not already in your arsenal, I’d recommend equipping yourself with it, because it saved the day for me. A quick search of the repositories showed that it was available in Debian, so I didn’t have to fuss with compiling, or anything; the only trick I needed to figure out was how to steal the process I wanted, which came down to me needing to be root–the process I really wanted to grab was a subprocess, and in order to take it I needed to take the beginning process, which requires root, apparently. So, a simple “su” and then a “reptyr -T PID” got me right back to where I was before the connection dropped–exactly where I was. Once I finished up my post, the script running things continued as it would’ve, wrapped things up, and brought me back to the shell I was in previously on the tablet. I exited that shell to return to the root shell I’d spawned, then exited it, and came back to the new shell I’d opened to start my attempts at recovering things.

Neat!

I know there might be a few that will read this and laugh at my amazement and joy in discovering a tool they already knew about, but, hey, I’m still learning. Hopefully this silly little post will help someone out, someday.

Thanks for reading;

–J

untitled-10-51-18

## Wed 21 Jun 2023 10:51:18 AM EDT

Haven’t written in a week or so–I think. Just figured I’d write something right now since I have a few minutes to spare. Thing is, I really don’t know what to write about.

I’m currently sitting at the kitchen table, typing this on a keyboard I have plugged into my tablet; I’m using the tablet to connect to the “server” via SSH through the use of ConnectBot. Why I’m sharing that info, I dunno. I just think it’s neat that I can have all these different pieces of technology talk to one another.

Yesterday I was goofing around with Termux on the tablet and an old Pixel 2XL–just toying with running VNC’d X-sessions on them. I was kind of impressed with the quality of things when I started watching YouTube videos through Firefox in those sessions. I don’t know, guess I’m easily entertained. I was also toying with getting the tablet to display another computer’s graphics–that honestly halfway stemmed from me tinkering with running framebuffer applications on that computer a few days earlier. The framebuffer thing came from me removing a desktop environment and forgetting to re-assign a desktop manager to fire X into the remaining environment. I was like, “well, I want to play around in the console more than in a GUI, anyway, so let’s not worry about starting X immediately.” That eventually led me to remembering that framebuffer graphics were a thing, so I went down the path of trying to seek out applications to play with. That was a fun little exploration–as there really isn’t much documentation on the Internet from a user’s standpoint on using the framebuffer for fun and productivity. It’s like, when window managers became better and better, and the ‘nix world began to compete more with the Windows and Mac worlds, people forgot about the framebuffer. I wonder if maybe there will be a resurgence in the future, like everyone’s somewhat recent interest in reviving 8- and 16-bit computing.

I also played around with “My House“ a few days ago. I didn’t make it far–I still haven’t progressed past level one. I do hope to sit and give it some serious attention sometime soon. To be honest, I haven’t even played Doom II–I only ever played Doom, as the sequel wasn’t available on the high school sneakernet when I was a kid. Yep, I played a part in passing around copies of games back in the day. Unfortunately, I was only a leecher–if I can apply that term to the sneakernet–as I didn’t have a connection to the ‘net back then. Heck, only now am I trying to explore BBS’ and the like, to try and see what all I missed out on. Guess that kind of explains a little of my interest in toying around with older protocols–and those that mimic them.

Meanwhile, I see that my gemini capsule has hit Kennedy’s index, so I’ve at least helped to bring bits of my hometown into a searchable portion of geminispace.

I don’t know. I think that’s enough writing for now.

Thanks for reading;

–J