Vacation in Gdansk - notes

We used the Wydmy fast train from Bohumín - get the tickets and couchette reservations well in advance, especially when you want to go during or near weekends. There are two types of coupes - three or two bedded. If the complimentary muffin is not visible, check the cabinet above the washbasin (hidden inside the table in the coupe). The morning herbata is free. The return train leaves too late in the evening (11 p.m.) and ours was 20 minutes delayed, next time consider going further to the north so we can leave earlier.

Current state of all polish beaches; also wsse.
Polish public transport lookup for android (buses+trains)
Public transport in Gdansk - buy enough tickets in advance, they are more expensive from the driver and some stations don't have vending machines.
Tramwaje wodne - F5 only makes sense to board at Żabi Kruk, it only has 50 places and is full immediately; it'd be a shame to miss. The port is the best. Latarnia is nice. Need to visit Westerplatte the next time.
Weather - Windy seems to be better, also contains waves prediction
Maps - mapy.cz with offline maps are unbeatable
Local sport events in Gdansk
Skimboarding - free on Wednesdays
Triathlon Gdansk
Pomorski Klub Orientacji, Harpus 
Rodzinne Gry Parkowe na Orientację
Malbork - when going by train, get off at Malbork Kałdowo. Forget the audioguide, the people guides rock. 4 hours might be enough. On the other hand there's reduced entry after 17:15.
Camp Stogi - crowded and the tent area is very hilly. Not really quiet before 10-11 p.m., but we've been to worse. Mosquitoes in the forest

GPS coordinates of all Slovak villages

While I could get more or less complete GPS coordinates for Czech villages, I had little luck finding the same for Slovakia. In the end I downloaded OpenStreetMap data for Slovakia, cloned imposm.parser, and wrote a simple script to get comma separated values:

hajma@debian:~/bin/osm$ cat extract-towns.py
from imposm.parser import OSMParser
import codecs
import locale
import sys

# simple class that handles the parsed OSM data.
class HighwayCounter(object):

    def coords_callback(tags, coords):
        for x in coords:
            if 'place' in x[1].keys():
                if x[1]['place'] == 'village':
                    if 'is_in' in x[1].keys():
                        print("\"%s, %s\", %s, %s" % (x[1]['name'], x[1]['is_in'], x[2][0], x[2][1]))
                    else:
                        print("\"%s, Slovensko\", %s, %s" % (x[1]['name'], x[2][0], x[2][1]))
                   
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter(locale.getpreferredencoding())(sys.stdout)
# instantiate counter and parser and start parsing
counter = HighwayCounter()
p = OSMParser(concurrency=1, nodes_callback=counter.coords_callback)
p.parse('slovakia-latest.osm')

#learningpython

TRBP 2017, mission accomplished

I've joined the Trebic runners cup a bit late in the game, but I managed to get within the first ten in my category. Let's see how 2018 will be.

HROB 2017

My goals for this year's Mountain Orienteering Championship:

• Don't get lost - check
• Don't be the last one - check
• Finish at worst as fifth from the end - check

Restoring Windows backup

A relative of mine asked me to restore a couple of files from backup CDs created by the windows native backup utility.
It turned out more difficult than I initially expected.

First, unlike other tools, the windows backup utility zips the files using the backslash as a directory separator and none of the Linux decompression tools can handle that.

Second, the files were encoded with one of the Windows native encodings, and none of the Linux decompression tools handle that (apparently unzip on Ubuntu is patched to add support for filename encodings, but Debian, as usual, is lacking).

What a mess ...

1. unzip with bsdtar as unzip would scramble the non-ascii filenames
$ bsdtar xf ../Backup\ files\ 7.zip
2. convert filenames to utf-8
$ convmv -r -f cp852 -t utf-8 --notest .
3. recreate the directory structure
$ cat y.py
#! /usr/bin/env python

import os
import errno

# already created directories, walk works topdown, so a child dir
# never creates a directory if there is a parent dir with a file.
made_dirs = set()

for root, dir_names, file_names in os.walk('.'):
    for file_name in file_names:
        if '\\' not in file_name:
            continue
        alt_file_name = file_name.replace('\\', '/')
        if alt_file_name.startswith('/'):
            alt_file_name = alt_file_name[1:]  # cut of starting dir separator
        alt_dir_name, alt_base_name = alt_file_name.rsplit('/', 1)
        print('alt_dir', alt_dir_name)
        full_dir_name = os.path.join(root, alt_dir_name)
        if full_dir_name not in made_dirs:
            try:
                os.makedirs(full_dir_name)
            except OSError as exc:
                if exc.errno == errno.EEXIST and os.path.isdir(full_dir_name):
                    # the pass already exists and is a folder, let's just ignore it
                    pass
                else:
                    raise
            made_dirs.add(full_dir_name)
        os.rename(os.path.join(root, file_name),
                  os.path.join(root, alt_file_name))
$ python y.py

Turris becomes mine

Three years ago I was lent one of the test Turris routers, that later became Turris Omnia. As promised, I'm now able to buy the machine for a symbolic prize of 1 CZK (0.04 USD).

LineageOS

It looks like my phone is one of the first few to receive regular LineageOS builds.
Yay!

[SOLVED] Microphone stops working when I plug in my headset

Recently I joined a phone meeting and only after a while I realized the other participants couldn't hear me.
Rather an embarrassing experience...

The laptop's built in microphone works fine, but as soon as I plug in my headset it's muted.

Apparently Windows, or the audio driver, think the device I plugged in has a microphone when it hasn't or vice versa.

The solution is to go to Control Panels, Realtek HD Audio Manager, in the top left corner click the Folder icon next to the analog hole image, and tick the 'Enable auto popup dialog' checkbox.
With this done, when one plugs a headset, windows will ask what type it is and act accordingly.

Yay!

Where to put update zips for CyanogenMod 13

On my nicki device, the cyanogenmod updater downloads the updates to /storage/emulated/0/cmupdater, so when it reboots to recovery, they aren't available.
They have to be moved to /data/media to be usable.

Living without Google Play

Amid the news about Google Play turning on location tracking without consent, let me share how to avoid it.
Step one - install CyanogenMod on your phone.
Step two - do not install Google Play.

Now you have a clean foundation to build on, but how to install apps without Google Play? That's actually quite easy - most opensource apps can be had at the F-Droid store.
To install proprietary apps, I use Raccoon on my desktop to download the apk files from Google Play. Once I move them to the phone they can be installed by tapping on them in the file manager.

Sony headphones useful again

The headphones from my old Xperia Ray turned out to be incompatible with my new Xperia M. They are still fine, but I can't use them with the new phone.
Also they can't be used with a simple MP3 player as the TRRS jack passes the audio output through the microphone, so it's barely audible.
There's the 'press mute button' workaround, but it's quite user unfriendly to keep holding it while cycling...

So, to fix them permanently, I opened the microphone enclosure (a fingernail works well).

You'll notice the two wires marked G and R that connect the mute button.
When shorted, the effect is the same as if the mute button was pressed permanently. And that's what I've done.
A blip of the solder gun and the headphones can be used!

Flipping a GPIO bit on OrangePi PC

Here's the header pinout: http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/09/26/status-of-orange-pi-boards-gpio-support/

Here's the steps: https://linux-sunxi.org/GPIO

So, to up pin 12, a.k.a. PD14 I do:

echo 110 > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo "out" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio110/direction
echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio110/value

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - startup error

I got my free copy of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It installed just fine, but upon startup it'd show a window with "The local sound file is missing please see Readme.txt file for technical support." and quit.

Googling didn't help, so I started looking around.
I found it interesting that there were soundlocal.big and soundlocal.fat files under the Support\inst\data\EN game subdirectory, but there was only soundlocal.fat under the Sound subdirectory. And indeed copying the missing file to Sound fixed the issue.
I'm not sure what happened, but there wasn't much space available wile I was installing it. Perhaps the installer didn't do a proper job of assuring there was enough space and this file got lost as a result.

So far this was the only issue, the game ran smoothly from then on, but after five minutes I found out I don't like the game at all and wiped it :-)

[SOLVED] gqrx crash on startup

I plugged the SDR dongle in and launched gqrx. All seemed to go well, however as soon as I git the 'Start DSP' button, it crashed with

gqrx: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librtlsdr.so.0: undefined symbol: libusb_handle_events_timeout_completed

Googling for the error message found just a few hits: An ages old bug caused by bad versioning and a newer question without answer.
If the web doesn't have the answer, I'll need to find it myself, so ...

hajma@debian:~$ ldd -d /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librtlsdr.so.0
 linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffc29380000)
 libusb-1.0.so.0 => /usr/local/lib/libusb-1.0.so.0 (0x00007f9ea0fd7000)
 libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f9ea0c2c000)
 librt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0x00007f9ea0a24000)
 libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f9ea0807000)
 /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f9ea13f3000)

hajma@debian:~$ readelf -s /usr/local/lib/libusb-1.0.so.0|grep libusb_handle_events_
    60: 0000000000005e70   215 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   12 libusb_handle_events_time
    80: 00000000000058a0    92 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   12 libusb_handle_events_lock
   237: 0000000000005e70   215 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   12 libusb_handle_events_time
   258: 00000000000058a0    92 FUNC    GLOBAL DEFAULT   12 libusb_handle_events_lock

Indeed, there's no libusb_handle_events_timeout_completed in there.

hajma@debian:~$ grep libusb_handle_events_timeout_completed /usr/include/libusb-1.0/libusb.h 
int LIBUSB_CALL libusb_handle_events_timeout_completed(libusb_context *ctx,

but the header file has it, what's up? It took me a minute or two to realize that the library resides in /usr/local/lib. That's an unusual place for a Debian library, isn't it?

hajma@debian:~$ ls -l /usr/local/lib/libusb-1.0.so.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Jan 25  2014 /usr/local/lib/libusb-1.0.so.0 -> libmchpusb-1.0.so

and googling for libmchpusb-1.0.so found me the answer:

This is actually a library supplied with Microchip's MPLAB-X software I installed two years ago. It seems to be an ongoing source of frustration for their users :-)
/usr/local/lib is included by default on Debian:

hajma@debian:~$ cat /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libc.conf
# libc default configuration
/usr/local/lib

For the time being I workarounded this with simply removing /usr/local/lib/libusb-1.0.so.0 and it works quite well:

A new screen for Xperia Ray

After three plus years, the screen of my Ray was seriously scratched.
I got a replacement one from Aliexpress for 16 USD some time ago and have just found enough time and courage to install it.
I followed this disassembly guide, but with the slight modification suggested by Ιωάννης-Πάρις in the first comment below the video.
All went well though there are bits of glue coming out at the edges here and there :-)
I prolonged the useful life of the device by a year or two, not too bad.

Which OpenWRT version to use?

If you want a relief from the never-ending stories about flaws in router firmware and the incompetence of vendors to deliver fixes, OpenWRT is about the only relatively sane option and I've been using it for almost a decade, since the White Russian release.

OpenWRT has a development branch or trunk which may be a bit experimental and a Stable branch. A Stable branch is released about once a year. Their documentation says that basically anything beyond the current stable release is unmaintained. Is it really so? Well, it's open source, so it should be easy to find out.

Attitude Adjustment, or OpenWRT 12.09, has seen its last commit in September 2014, so it's dead indeed.
Barrier Breaker, or OpenWRT 14.07, on the other hand has seen an update five days ago, so it's certainly moving. But is it still fresh and safe to use? I did a quick and simple check to find out.

There were twelve security vulnerabilities (possibly more, but these were easy to filter) fixed in Chaos Calmer (OpenWRT 15.05, the current stable release) during its lifetime. I grepped for them in the Barrier Breaker sources and here's the result:

	Fixed in Chaos Calmer	Fixed in Barrier Breaker
CVE-2015-3193	12/03/15	12/07/15
CVE-2015-3194	12/03/15	12/07/15
CVE-2015-3195	12/03/15	12/07/15
CVE-2015-5291	10/18/15	Still vulnerable!
CVE-2015-3143	07/12/15	Still vulnerable!
CVE-2015-3144	07/12/15	Still vulnerable!
CVE-2015-3145	07/12/15	Still vulnerable!
CVE-2015-3148	07/12/15	Still vulnerable!
CVE-2015-3153	07/12/15	Still vulnerable!
CVE-2015-3236	07/12/15	Wasn't vulnerable
CVE-2015-3237	07/12/15	Wasn't vulnerable
CVE-2015-1793	07/09/15	07/09/15

There's a bunch of security issues lurking in the code unfixed.
It looks like an older release may still get some support in the first few months after it's been replaced, but it's not really wise to delay the update.

Arduino development in Solaris Studio

The unbeatable advantage of the Arduino IDE is that it just works, together with the large library of examples. However it really sucks as a source code editor.
Fortunately there's an Arduino plugin for Netbeans (and therefore for Solaris Studio, which is just thinly veiled Netbeans bundled with the Oracle compilers).

The trouble is the Netbeans plugin URL download button gets you the Windows version, but do not despair. The author apparently plays with Linux too, and there's a tmp/linux folder in the repository, containing a functional Linux version of the plugin.

I only had to alter the default Makefile slightly to adjust for Debian's packaging of the Arduino software and my version of the chip:

8,9c8,9

8,9c8,9
< COM_PORT = /dev/ttyACM0
< BAUD_RATE = 115200
---
> COM_PORT = /dev/ttyUSB0
> BAUD_RATE = 19200
11,12c11,12
< ARDUINO_BASE_DIR = /home/jaques/opt/arduino-1.6.5-r5
< ARDUINO_CORE_DIR = ${ARDUINO_BASE_DIR}/hardware/arduino/avr/cores/arduino
---
> ARDUINO_BASE_DIR = /usr/share/arduino
> ARDUINO_CORE_DIR = ${ARDUINO_BASE_DIR}/hardware/arduino/cores/arduino
20c20
< ARDUINO_MODEL = atmega328p
---
> ARDUINO_MODEL = atmega168
22c22
< ARDUINO_PINS_DIR = ${ARDUINO_BASE_DIR}/hardware/arduino/avr/variants/standard
---
> ARDUINO_PINS_DIR = ${ARDUINO_BASE_DIR}/hardware/arduino/variants/standard
38c38
< AVR_DUDE = ${ARDUINO_BASE_DIR}/hardware/tools/avr/bin/avrdude -C ${ARDUINO_BASE_DIR}/hardware/tools/avr/etc/avrdude.conf
---
> AVR_DUDE = ${ARDUINO_BASE_DIR}/hardware/tools/avrdude -C ${ARDUINO_BASE_DIR}/hardware/tools/avrdude.conf

What can go wrong with Debian upgrade

When I moved from testing to stable I thought it'd be enough to just stop updating testing a while before the release, modify the apt sources and dist-upgrade.
And indeed all seemed to be working well.

Until now.

I wanted to install wine32, but there were all sorts of errors popping up.
I narrowed it down to libxml2 - it wasn't possible to install the 32-bit part:

# apt-get install libxml2:i386
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 apache2-bin : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libabw-0.1-1 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libaugeas0 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libe-book-0.1-1 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libepub0 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libetonyek-0.1-1 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libfontforge1 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libgdraw4 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.6.27) but it is not going to be installed
 libgeoclue0 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libgtk2.0-0 : Depends: shared-mime-info
               Recommends: libgtk2.0-bin
 libgupnp-dlna-2.0-3 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libmate-window-settings1 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.6.27) but it is not going to be installed
 libopenconnect3 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libplist1 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libstoken1 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 libxml-libxml-perl : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.7.4) but it is not going to be installed
 marco : Depends: libmarco-private0 (= 1.8.2+dfsg1-6) but it is not going to be installed
         Depends: zenity
 mate-media : Depends: mate-media-pulse (>= 1.8.0+dfsg1-3) but it is not going to be installed or
                       mate-media-gstreamer (>= 1.8.0+dfsg1-3) but it is not going to be installed
 mate-settings-daemon : Depends: mate-settings-daemon-pulse (>= 1.8.2-4) but it is not going to be installed or
                                 mate-settings-daemon-gstreamer (>= 1.8.2-4) but it is not going to be installed
 python-libxml2 : Depends: libxml2 (>= 2.9.1) but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
It took me a while to realize that my libxml2 was actually of higher version than the one in Jessie! As soon as I downgraded it, the installation of wine32 went well...

# dpkg -l |grep libxml2
ii  libxml2:amd64                         2.9.2+dfsg1-1+b1
# apt-get install libxml2=2.9.1+dfsg1-5
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:
  libxml2
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 downgraded, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 800 kB of archives.
After this operation, 413 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
Get:1 http://ftp.cz.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main libxml2 amd64 2.9.1+dfsg1-5 [800 kB]
Fetched 800 kB in 0s (2,198 kB/s)
dpkg: warning: downgrading libxml2:amd64 from 2.9.2+dfsg1-1+b1 to 2.9.1+dfsg1-5
(Reading database ... 285067 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libxml2_2.9.1+dfsg1-5_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libxml2:amd64 (2.9.1+dfsg1-5) over (2.9.2+dfsg1-1+b1) ...
Setting up libxml2:amd64 (2.9.1+dfsg1-5) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-18+deb8u1) ...

# apt-get install libxml2:i386
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
Recommended packages:
  xml-core:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libxml2:i386
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 833 kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,910 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.cz.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main libxml2 i386 2.9.1+dfsg1-5 [833 kB]
Fetched 833 kB in 4s (168 kB/s)      
Selecting previously unselected package libxml2:i386.
(Reading database ... 285066 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../libxml2_2.9.1+dfsg1-5_i386.deb ...
Unpacking libxml2:i386 (2.9.1+dfsg1-5) ...
Setting up libxml2:i386 (2.9.1+dfsg1-5) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-18+deb8u1) ...#

http://blog.hajma.cz/2015/04/fixating-testing-to-jessie.html

Současná umělecká díla v krajině - mapped

As much as I like the book,it's got one major flaw - there's no map with the location of the objects, so it's a poor choice for trip planning.
So I created a custom map with mapy.cz using their custom point feature.
Initially I included names of the authors, but I quickly ran into length limitations (they store all the info in the URL and impose their own limits; a sign of poor QA, the limit to save the map is somewhat longer than the limit to load it), so there're just the names of the objects.
Here's the map.

Disable MMS auto-retrieve in the source

Okay, so this is no rocket science, but here's how to set the default to something sane, in the sources:
~/android/system-ics/packages/apps/Mms$ git diff res/xml/preferences.xml
diff --git a/res/xml/preferences.xml b/res/xml/preferences.xml
index bdae567..92bae55 100644
--- a/res/xml/preferences.xml
+++ b/res/xml/preferences.xml
@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@
                       android:key="pref_key_mms_read_reports"
                       android:summary="@string/pref_summary_mms_read_reports"
                       android:title="@string/pref_title_mms_read_reports" />
-    +                           android:key="pref_key_mms_auto_retrieval"
                       android:title="@string/pref_title_mms_auto_retrieval"
                       android:summary="@string/pref_summary_mms_auto_retrieval" />