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It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
17: Persistence
As someone who is comfortable with installing and reinstalling and restoring configurations and working my way back to what it was before, just with time and scripting, and exporting and importing, it's not the end of the world when an entity or a corporation pulls a milkshake duck, or decides they, too, are going to chase the snake oil bubble and start cramming LLM-related features into their browsers, or operating systems, or any other piece of software they can control. I will freely admit that it sucks to have to do all of those operations on the regular, or even on the occasion, but it is something that I have become used to, as I've been throwing things around here and there, and making it work better. The hardest part, sometimes, is re-learning where you've stashed all your configuration tweaks and where they get applied to. But the more it gets done, the easier it is to remember where all the pathways are, and what you want to do with them. Perhaps in some future world, I'll remember to save the configuration files first, and back them up, and then retrieve and paste them back in and all will be well.
And, when I make these kinds of decisions, as it turns out, sometimes I learn some new and interesting things, like the way that some apps, even if they don't exist in the package manager, are self-contained enough to run on the system. Therefore, I now have my preferred browser running on a system that doesn't have it in the package repositories. At least, not at the moment, since the new version is built on one version up from where my current distribution wants to be.
This is also a crossover post with the Adventures in Home Automation series, because, for the third time, I have managed to get my television with the attacked Raspberry Pi and the broken IR receiver talking to Home Assistant, and being controllable from there. In the previous incarnations of this situation, I managed to clone some git repositories, recognize that some of the things they wanted to do with containers and running the thing as they would like to wouldn't work, because they were asking for some much older versions of Debian, which were probably the newest versions of Debian at the time, but whose archive pointers had completely fallen off and were no longer available. One promising entity written in go worked for a little while, and then the go language changed versions, and the old script just went "nope" compared to the new version, and I don't program in go, so I couldn't fix it. The second promising entity was written in python, and in a previous version of Debian, I seemed to gather all the right libraries from the system tools and get very close to making things work, before I dropped a piece from a completely different script, meant to make it possible for a remote control to function as a game controller, I believe, into the other script, because it looked like it might work. And it did, to my surprise. So that was version two, running stably and with a systemd service for running on boot, happily working its way along.
Then the Debian version underlying the single-board computer's Linux changed, and that meant not only rebasing, but reinstalling, reconfiguring, re-adding, and otherwise bringing things back into the system I had, and reinstalling and reconfiguring the communication broker so that the SBC could communicate with Home Assistant (and the router, now that it had some Optware installed that would send information about router operations and connected machines over that same protocol, using that SBC as the broker for the messages.)
The last component that needed to work was the bridging script that reported information using HDMI-CEC to read the bus for status and then transmit commands from Home Assistant to turn that screen on and off. In the intervening time, the library that the python program used to communicate had jumped a major version number and changed its entire syntax in the process. Luckily, the error that appeared mentioned that a single flag could be set so that it would use the old version of how it was set up, and that saved me a lot of grief trying to figure out how to re-spec the script to use the new library. The flag may deprecate at some point, and then I will have to walk the script up from the previous version to the current version. Hopefully, when that's necessary, there will be a nice conversion guide posted somewhere that explains what the equivalent commands are, and where to put the components of the previous command in the new syntax. For now, however, the scripts themselves are sorted, thanks to adding one piece of code at the right place to the thing itself.
What's not working is that in this new version based on Debian Trixie, the library I had installed from the earlier version was no longer present. And that meant a significant amount of looking around to see if there was something suitable that would serve in its place. The testing repository, the one that would be in the next release (Forky), had the library I thought I had installed on the previous version. So, I did something that is recommended against, and added the testing repository and pulled the version of the item from there, expecting it all to set up and go.
No dice. So I uninstalled that particular set of libraries, because pulling from different releases is a good way to break it. Option two: since it's a python script, I can potentially set up a virtual environment for Python, separated from the system-managed Python installation, then install the necessary libraries through the pip package manager to the virtual environment, and run the script out of that, so long as said script can communicate out and have Home assistant pick up what it's laying down. That's easier to manage with some software packages like pipx to handle the creation and management of the virtual environment. I get the environment set up, and the library that I think will work installed, and the script bombs again with the same error as it had before, So the virtual environment approach isn't going to work, either.
All this time, I'm using my search engine skills to try and figure out what the error is, but there aren't a whole lot of posts on the subject, and most of the time, it keeps coming back to a couple of places, including a GitHub issue that seems like it's exactly about the problem that I'm having, and that somehow the problem was fixed in a subsequent release of the software, but I don't see how they got from point a to point b, as I read and reread the information and keep trying to figure out where the library is that I need to install from the package manager to get the functionality I had before.
This is one of those things where sometimes you need to let your brain background solve a task. Humans are, after all, persistence predators, and while flashes of insight are often cool, they often come more after you have been chewing on a problem for a while, letting it background-process while you work your way toward greater understanding. There was a study, I believe it was in one of my graduate school texts, where a professor gave students a list of riddles to try and solve over the course of a day. At the lunch break, the professor collected the tests and had the students do their lunch break activities, but at places along the way in the building, the professor had placed representations of riddle solutions, and the thing that was being tested was whether the presence of those solution prompts helped the students solve more riddles. I can't find the study, and so I may not be representing it accurately, but sometimes you go through an entire something and as your brain twists and turns on it, and eventually, you do some up with something that actually qualifies as a solution to the problem. It's the idea of "distracting" your conscious processes so that some other process can take over the solving of things, or the integration of information. Sometimes sleeping on it is the right answer to the situation.
In my case, the actual solution came when I finally realized that I was making an assumption that one of the forum posts explicitly denied was a good one to make, and that instead of installing a package from a repository with a similar name, but not actually containing what was needed to succeed, what I instead needed to do was follow the instructions that were given in the right place and compile the damn library myself. Which there was definitely a recipe for, and for the specific architecture and device that I was using. Download source, pass appropriate flags to the compiler, make, make install, all of the things that are involved in compiling a library from source, and guess what? As soon as I had compiled the correct library, the script worked perfectly as I ran it, with the "use the old version please" flag set for the library that did some of the work.
I felt very stupid afterward, because everything kept funneling back to these posts that said "no, that package is not the library you need, you have to compile the library from scratch, and this is the way to do so." I didn't want to do that because I'd rather use the package manager to produce the thing that I needed, instead of compiling something from source. Actually doing what the thing said only took a few minutes and would have avoided many months of grief and not understanding why things weren't working, even with the ability to search up the specific error message and find the post that described it accurately and said what the solution was. Once I managed to read the post correctly and drop the preconception I had, things went much more smoothly.
So this is about the persistence of solving problems, of trying to get to a solution that works for me, and sometimes the disappointment that comes when someone is satisficing rather than looking for a full solution. It's about persistence, because apparently I keep wanting to tweak and shuffle and suggest and do things until they're exactly right, instead of mostly right. It's also about how that persistence sometimes means it's hard to let go of the situation if it's not perfect and optimized and works in all cases. And how it can be annoying to have to deal with people who deliberately want to keep introducing nonsensical edge cases into your perfectly working system, or who believe that if you don't debate them on their nonsensical edge cases or absurd questions, they have somehow "won" and proven themselves smarter than you, because you refused to engage with bad faith tactics. As the somewhat ineffectual advice given would tell us, we can only control ourselves, we cannot control other people. (In pursuit of perfection, we seek control, and sometimes the control that would produce perfection is the control of others, and therefore, perfection will always be beyond us. In theory, this realization is supposed to help us not seek that level of control. In practice, there's still a lot of frustration that comes from not being able to do the things flawlessly and well, and sometimes even more aggravation when things are going out of our control and we don't even know why.) Given how often I end up having to engage with the absurd and the nonsensical, I'd like to believe I have a greater tolerance for other people being Wrong on the Internet (or in my workplace), but there's still sometimes that bit where I want to believe that with enough persistence, I will be able to prevail over the things that bother me, or the people that bother me.
It's also, though, about persistence, the concept that we first learn about when object permanence makes it into our head, that the world is not, in fact, limited to what we are experiencing with our senses, and that our senses (and our minds, if you want to get Zen about it) are misleading us about the nature of our reality. Just because the ball disappears behind the paper doesn't mean it winks out of existence entirely, only to return into reality when the paper is raised. (At least, at the Newtonian mechanics level. Quanta and their friends behave very differently, and we are finding more and more that the act of observation collapses all the possibilities into an observed real, such that whatever organ we are using to perceive the possibilities with inscribes what the result will be onto those possibilities.) The past and the future are constructions, only Now is reality, and only for the now that we experience Now. Many of those constructions are useful, and society rests on our ability to construct things about past, future, and pattern so that we can attempt to impose some amount of order upon the chaos, so as to make it livable and manageable. (That's karma, baby.) We persist in things all the time. Error. its opposite. The horrors persist, and so do I (or but so do I.) Nevertheless, she persisted. He's baaaack! So many things that we have in our history and our lives are about the application of human-sized amounts of influence and force until the desired result is achieved, sometimes even with a great array of things standing athwart, sabotaging, or attempting to cause failure in the way. Because we are not the kinds of beings that let go easily, or give up, and we do much greater work when there are more of us, so we can each take a turn at persistence while someone else rests up for their next turn. The idea about the arc bending toward justice is not a thing that happens by itself, it happens because there are people bending the arc into the desired shape. We will not complete the work in our lifetime, but neither are we excused from doing the work during our lifetimes. And through the ages, thanks to our persistence, we build and sustain things that are greater than any one person and one lifetime. (It's frustrating not to see when it finally clicks into place, but ours is not to know the day or the hour, apparently.)
Only a little while longer, and some of the decisions that I made in the past, decisions that were absolutely correct, will finally have discharged their consequences. It always seems impossible until it is done. Keep at it.Current Mood:  accomplished Current Music: ROZEN - Lost Woods
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Dec. 18th, 2025 @ 12:07 am
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Everything I've previously read by M.T. Anderson emotionally devastated me, so I despite the fact that Nicked was billed as a comedy I went in bravely prepared to be emotionally devastated once again.
This did not happen .... although M.T. Anderson cannot stop himself from wielding a sharp knife on occasion, it it turns out the book is indeed mostly a comedy .....
Nicked is based on a Real Historical Medieval Heist: the city of Bari is plague-ridden, and due to various political pressures the City's powers have decided that the way to resolve this is to steal the bones of St. Nicholas from their home in Myra and bring them to Bari to heal the sick, revive the tourism trade, and generally boost the city's fortunes. The central figures on this quest are Nicephorus, a very nice young monk who had the dubious fortune of receiving a dream about St. Nicholas that might possibly serve as some sort of justification for this endeavor, and Tyun, a professional relic hunter (or con artist? Who Could Say) who is not at really very nice at all but is Very Charismatic And Sexy, which is A Problem for Nicephorus.
The two books that Nicked kept reminding me of, as I read it, were Pratchett's Small Gods and Tolmie's All the Horses of Iceland. Both of those books are slightly better books than this, but as both of them are indeed exceptionally good books I don't think it takes too much away from Nicked to say that it's not quite on their level: it's still really very fun! And, unlike in those other somewhat better books, the unlikely companions do indeed get to make out!
I did end it, unsurprisingly, desperately wanting to know more about the sources on which it was based to know what we do know about this Real Historical Medieval Heist, but it turns out they are mostly not translated into English. Foiled again!
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Dec. 18th, 2025 @ 12:13 am
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The Secret of Us episode 10:
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Dec. 17th, 2025 @ 10:55 pm
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Today was alright! Work was actually pretty great, which is nice --it is satisfying to have a ~good day~ at the workplace every once in a while (and slightly surprising to occur in this, the last full week of the year).
Not the last week, mind. I have a day and a half of work next week. It's not great!
But yeah, classes 1 and 4 went well-as-expected, class 2 was just fine, despite my co-teacher having meetings literally every class 2 this week, my circle idea went really really well (well enough that I forwarded it off to the circles team and assistant principal to be all ~hey look at this~), I spent class 3 prep hanging in the break room with three other math teachers I like...all good things!
It was the annual "professional development the week before break" PD, which is never very serious. It could be a better meeting: they could give us a longer time to just....hang out and eat cookies and chat with coworkers. But we did a cute little "family feud" style game, which was fun ("what excuse do students give for cutting class? survey says....."), and I won one of the raffle gift baskets for the scholarship fund. It is...uh, the third time in like....four years that I have gotten one of these. I am only putting in $20 worth of tickets, which I feel is a very reasonable and normal donation to the scholarship fund! I am just very lucky!!!
In actuality, the real trick is that my policy is to look at the ~13 baskets, say "no booze, no gift cards (boring!)" and that both focuses my tickets marvelously, and means I'm not going for the "high value" items. Look, I can't help it that all my coworkers like booze and amazon, I will be over here squeeing over my backstage pass to the school play and several chocolate bars and little leather handmade notebook and set of keen gel pens! It's still not as sweet as the year I got homemade cookies every month for the rest of the year, but it's pretty good.
After, I managed to make it to the holiday show rehearsal, which means that I've made it to one rehearsal this year, which might be more than last year. I got to see all the dances we're doing, and throw my name a couple places in the script. Just have to figure out what to wear or whatever (bonus points for something I can rush home and not change before darting off to the train).
After, I spent a bunch of time rifling through email and YouTube to try and put together a bookmarks collection of all the holiday shows I've been in (every year I've taught, including 2020, when we did a socially distanced one over zoom). Eventually copies, and home again home again, where my Getting Things Done kinda ran out in favour of playing video games.
But I did help get the dishwasher emptied and a bit of kitchen task, and I ran my last load of laundry --I haven't put any of it away yet, but it's clean at least. I did a bunch of closing and organizing tabs, and a very little bit of other like, electronic organization. Not, like, dealing with emails or anything (don't be ridiculous) but at least some brain management.
Now I'm upstairs to write my words and listen to music and do some Chrimbo-present-pre-planning. It is....uh....the holiday is quite soon actually, and if I'm going to contribute to my family's usual wretched excess, I should get on that. I wonder if it's too late to just use the heifer international catalog I got sent to buy everyone goats...
~Sor
MOOP!
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IDK. I did go outside, checked the chickens food (bother, just realised I didn't check their water).
Temps are supposed to be 30+ today and the next few days, alas, before cooling down on Christmas Day. By which we mean "mid-20s".
CRIPES. It's a week to Christmas.
My mother wants us to go over on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day. *sigh* I just don't want to do "Christmas Day", and then "Christmas Day But With The Stepbro's Family".
I don't seem to have gotten COVID - still testing clear, just feeling generally tired.
--
It's six hours later and it's crazy hot out there.
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Last week while taking out the trash, I noticed that the clouds were low in the sky and really thick and ropey, like a plush carpet. Hurried home to grab the camera as sunset was coming soon and I wanted to be sure I caught the look.
( Read more... )
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I was right to say I do not understand one goddamn thing that happens in Amos Burton's head when I asked for him for Yuletide.
I don't know that I have the Chrisjen Avasarala/Bobbie Draper series of my heart in my fingers, but I will be over here shippin' it like whoa.
Overall, they were a lovely ride. The audiobook reader learned to pronounce gimbals very late in the canon, and got the stress pattern wrong in Avasarala, but was quite good at voice distinction, and definitely didn't do the All Women are Falsetto crap.Current Music: I am wearing a hat / After winter, I'll marry / I'm entitled to that
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I have finished the daisy which covers the tea stain on this t-shirt! I am very proud of myself.
Satin stitch, French knots, stem stitch, and fishbone stitch.
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Dec. 17th, 2025 @ 07:53 pm
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I discovered at the grocery store the other day that Tony's Chocolonely now sells mini individually wrapped chocolates as well as large chocolate bars!
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The trouble--one of the troubles, anyway--with locking up one’s monstrous offspring in the attic is that one must then tell less-monstrous offspring, “Your brother is a monster and we keep him in there so he can’t hurt anyone,” and they decide they quite like monsters. Then you tell them, “So you must never, ever open this door,” and they decide to whisper through the keyhole and pass notes under the door. Then you tell them, “Family secrets have to stay in the family,” and they decide they and their monstrous sibling will simply have to find a new family in that case.
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LL#1344
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) hannah and James Marsters have got you.
1969 by Alex Dimitrov is Hannah's recommendation to start with, and it's a banger. Wander the archive of that tumblr and enjoy!Current Mood: poetically inclined Current Music: He's invoking the powers of Bryan Adams!
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I realised earlier today that I never actually got around to uploading photos from last year's Glow Wild. Since we'll be going to this year's on Friday, now seems like a good time to remedy that...
( +6 )
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No writing, alas, but tomorrow I have a writing session with my beta reader, so hopefully that'll get me going again. How about you?
Tally:
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Day 16: china_shop, brithistorian, sanguinity, trobadora, badly_knitted, garonne, goddess47, garonne
Day 17: china_shop, garonne
Bonus farm news: Housemate made parmesan cheese (well, it will be after a year's storage) which gave us 20 liters of whey as a byproduct, which I am now boiling down to Scandinavian whey "cheese". It's brown and sweet from the caramelized sugar of the whey, and not actually cheese. (Note: we do not have cows. We bought the milk from a farmer's market.)
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⌈ Secret Post #6921 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
01. 
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #988.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
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I am the stage of being ill with a cold where it feels like I will never be well again, I barely even remember what it is to not cough, and all is doom. Woe, woe is me. [From experience, this stage is usually about two days before I actually get fully well, but try telling my feelings that.]
(brought to you by having to miss yet another hockey practice tonight, the penultimate one of the year, and being sad about it)
Cheering myself up with the news that Heated Rivalry comes to the UK on 10 January. I am going to be very normal about it. Meanwhile I await a delivery of Rick Riordan books from my dealer the buddy who got me into them, and Instagram is doing its usual creepily-accurate targeting, supplying me with Yorkshire Percy Jackson and advertising a PJ musical in Peterborough next spring.
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The deadline has passed, and the main collection is temporarily closed. ETA - now open again!
Congratulations to everyone who has posted! Pat yourself on the back, take a breath, and then please check wordcount, formatting, html; check that you've uploaded the correct version, and that all your text is actually there. You can get to what you've submitted from your Statistics page, or from your Works in Collections. Your story should be marked as "complete" rather than one or more of multiple chapters yet to come.
To all who didn't make it this year: it happens, and we hope you enjoy the collection reveals.
To all who are still working on beta jobs, treats, or pinch hits: thank you and good luck!
Pinch hits coming!!
Post-deadline pinch hits will be available soon at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png) yuletide_pinch_hits. This next round will be due at 9 AM UTC, 22 December.
See what time that is in YOUR timezone
See countdown
Beta requests
We have outstanding beta requests on the Yuletide Discord (please see the #hippo-want-ads channel), and more betas are always welcome at the Dreamwidth beta post.
There is also an Away from Keyboard post up on the participant community, for you to (optionally) let your author know if it'll be a while before you can read your gift.
If there seems to be an issue with your posted work, we'll contact you via the email address associated with your AO3 account. Please check you can access that!
Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Participant DW | Participant LJ | Pinch Hits on DW | Discord | Tag set | Tag set app
Please either comment logged-in or sign a name. Unsigned anonymous comments will be left screened.
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Hello everyone! You have two more days to slip your theme suggestions into the suggestion box for our rounds in 2026. I went ahead and added some more themes to the pool, taking popular suggestions from past years but also filling in a few more gaps in our coverage (vampires! aliens!), so take a look at the list and see if it doesn't shake something loose.
I'll close that post the morning of the 19th and put up the big theme poll on the 20th. If you're going to be out and about around that time, you can track the admin: poll: theme tag. Just click on the little bell icon or "track" link on any post with that tag, select "Someone posts an entry tagged admin: poll: theme," hit save, and you'll get an email when the big poll goes up. You'll also get an email every time I post a theme poll thereafter, which is monthly. If you don't want that, you can cancel the notification later; it's the same process, just uncheck the box and hit save.
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tired