April Music

Music I’ve bought in April.

Hey, it’s been a slow month.

The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey (Mingus Session Outtake)

The Joni Mitchell Archive series has reached the Hejira/Mingus era, and this is probably my favourite box (er so far). I mean, the first box was extremely entertaining, with lots of early very folky songs, many of which I hadn’t heard before.

But this box just has so many excellent versions of some really fabulous songs, like The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey.

THE EX 2025 - GREAT! From the new album 'If Your Mirror Breaks'

The new album from The Ex is, well, it’s a new album from The Ex. Lots of fun.

I started following GRRL on Twitter, and I’ve been listening to some of the recommended albums (always posted with Bandcamp links; that’s much appreciated). This album by Weiss is an old glitch thing, and I think it’s kinda fab.

Does anybody have an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9280-8e with old firmware?

(Different card depicted for illustrative purposes.)

[Edit: Oops! I originally called the card 2108-8e, but it’s really called 9280-8e — 2108 is apparently what it’s called in BIOS, but not the actual model name.]

Some months back, my MegaRAID card (used for this) died, and I bought a new old one. But it came with a too-new firmware — I want to spin down the disks (because I’m using this to watch movies, and 98% of the time they’re idle), and that stopped working in some firmware version or other.

That is, if you try to spin down the “logical drives”, it says this:

/opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -LDSetPowerPolicy -Maximum -L0 -a0                                     
Adapter does not support Power savings on logical drives.

Exit Code: 0x01

Now, LSI was bought by some other company, who was then bought by somebody, and they’re now owned by (*shiver*) Broadcom. They helpfully have older firmware versions on ftp, but none of those are old enough.

That is, the oldest one there is 12.9.0-0038, and that is too new (it’s from March 2010). So I need either a card with an even earlier firmware where that command works? I’ll pay! Lots of money!

Or if somebody has squirreled away earlier firmware versions, I would love to get get a copy and test it to see if it’s old enough.

For reference, the files are called things like 12.9.0-0038_SAS_FW_Image_APP-2.90.03-0933_9280-4i4e-8e.zip.

And the card I’m looking for identifies itself as 03:00.0 RAID bus controller: Broadcom / LSI MegaRAID SAS 2108 [Liberator] (rev 03)
.

*crosses fingers*

If I can’t find old firmware, I think I have to start looking at a brand new solution for all of this, and I really don’t want to.

The Making of a Kitchen Clock: A Photo Essay

I used to have a all-in-one computer on this kitchen bench, because I thought it would be useful to use to look up recipes and stuff. But I never used it, so half a year ago I downsized to the two boxes you see above. The one to the right has an Emacs-based music player, which is all I thought I needed.

But I forgot how useful it was to have the time and date in the kitchen: The time to say how long to cook things, and the date to throw away spoiled goods.

I could be sensible and just buy a clock, or I could cobble together a mess of Raspberry Pis, Emacsen and lots of wifi, so of course I bought a Pi Zero 2 W and a round screen and started hacking.

But what should the clock look like?

I’m kinda averse to using colours for designs, but it’s a shame to THROW AWAY ALL THOSE MILLIONS OF COLOURS and just go for black and white, eh?

But you gotta admit that simple looks better.

Oh, yeah, the date…

Eh… Oh yeah, I also wanted it to display the outdoors temperature (I’ve got a Weathergoose hanging out the window).

Eh? Eh?

Eh?

Eh?

Oh well, I don’t know. In any case, there’ll be virtually no code running on the Pi, because it’s just 512MB and I’m using Emacs to generate SVGs to make the clocks. So it’s generating these on a server and pushing them to the Pi ahead of time via ssh (i.e., it’s generating the next minute), and then once a minute, the Pi changes the display. (It doesn’t display the seconds, you see.)

Anyway, this means that I can tweak the look endlessly on the server, which I, er, probably will do.

(Is this the right way to calculate the minute and hour hands, by the way? Hm…)

I got this stupid case for the Pi… so many tiny parts.

After procrastinating for half a year, I’m now actually going to build the clock today!

The connectors on the clock are side mounted…

… but there’s all these adapters.

So… like this? But are there any Pis that have connectors in that configuration? I mean, it’s a full size HDMI and a USB A, side by side, and I can’t recall any that looked like that? I’m probably misremembering.

In any case, this doesn’t fit the Pi Zero at all, so I guess I’ll have to do, er, something… It would have been more useful if the adapters didn’t change the gender of the ports, but I guess that’s DIE for you.

It’s alive!

Oh, yeah, I need a keyboard while futzing around initially (before I get ssh up), so I need a third connector, and the Zero only has two, so it’s hubbin’ time.

See! LOOK HOW EASY.

I wondered how a round HDMI screen would work, but it (of course) just reports itself as a 720×720 screen, and then throws away all the pixels that are outside the circular screen.

Which makes things, er, fun to work with, but I just need to get wifi and ssh up and running, and then I can do everything remotely.

Tada!

But what’s that banding? Er…

This is what it looks like on my laptop screen.

dmesg says:

simple-framebuffer 1e876000.framebuffer: format=a8r8g8b8, mode=1280x720x32, linelength=5120

But fbset says:

fbset

mode “720×720”
geometry 720 720 720 720 16
timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
rgba 5/11,6/5,5/0,0/0
endmode

So the framebuffer is only 16 bits!? Whut?

The banding effect is kinda cool, but I wanted to figure out how to get 24/32 bit colour depth, and I failed.

I spent several hours googling, trying things, and rebooting: The decidedly most time consuming part of this project, and I still failed. Yes, I’ve tried all the video=HDMI-A-1:720x720M-32@60D kernel parameters and /boot/firmware/config.txt variations I can google myself to, but I failed.

So here’s my data: I’m using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, running Raspbian 12 (bookworm) (aka. Raspberry Pi OS), and I’m using the standard framebuffer to display things, and I’m only getting 16 bits. Do you know how to fix this? (Only answer if you’ve fixed this yourself, not if you’ve googled an answer that doesn’t include all those three things.)

To display the image on the frambuffer, I first tried using fbi. It works, but it’s fiddly: It needs to run continuously — you can’t just call it to set the framebuffer (because then it’ll blink, for some reason or other), and it caches images, but only three of them. So you need to point it to three images, and then tell it to update every second, and then switch out the three images, and eh.

But I’d totally forgotten how simple frambuffers are: You just need to squirt RGB values to /dev/fb0, and that what appears on screen!

Er uhm. Oh yeah, it’s 16 bits, with 5 bits for blue, 6 for green and 5 for red… er..

convert ~/clock.png -type truecolor +flip -strip -define bmp:subtype=RGB565 bmp:- | tail -c $(( 720 * 720 * 16 / 8 )) > /dev/fb0

ImageMagick to the rescue! So I just convert the png to bmp and then chop off the header, and the squirt it to the device. High tech. (Code on Microsoft Github.)

Anyway, back to the building the clock: I think I have to use the connectors, because just using normal side-mounted plugs will get in the way of the walls of the box.

Look what I found in a drawer! That looks promising… and now for the power?

Yeah, this isn’t going to work…

But yes! The snakey thing fits!

One last test… OH NO I”VE GOT AN OFF BY ONE ERROR IN THE MONTH no I didn’t. It’s not showing the months, but instead the day of the week — in French. Oh la la, trés a la mode.

OK, it’s cutting time. But not this box.

This box.

See?

So it’s 80mm in width (the bits that need to go into the box).

I bought a Dremel set to do the cutting this time, but er I forgot to read the instruction manual, and I don’t wanna do that now, so let’s just use a drill and a jigsaw.

Drill baby.

OOPS! I totally didn’t notice that the blade on this new battery jigsaw is super duper coarse. It says “Fast Wood” — it rips the box to shreds. And I seem to not have bought any appropriate blades for this jigsaw…

Fortunately, I still have my old mains powered jigsaw.

Behold! The difference!

Cut cut cut…

Done! You’ve never seen such even and straight cuts ever!

And I adhered to that age old saying “measure once, cut twice”. I don’t know why it’s better to cut twice, but who am I to argue against passed-down wisdom like that.

(What I’m saying is that the width was actually 83mm, not 80mm.)

So dirty!

Yes, everything fits! Actually, I could probably have used the side-mounted plugs — I forgot how thin the walls of this box is.

Pluggeti-plug… Nice and snug.

Yeah, this also goes into the box — power to various other things here, and USB power for the Pi.

IT WORKS!!!

See? So much better than just buying a clock.

Book Club 2025: The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I discovered that they’d published a complete, illustrated version of the Earthsea cycle a couple weeks ago. I’m not overly fond of omnibus editions, but this is illustrated by Charles Vess, and I love his artwork, so I thought that this might be a good time to re-read these books.


Because of course I’ve read these books before. I read the first one (in translation) when I was about 10-11 years old, and it had the cover above. I had that book, so I read it several times, but the other two of the first trilogy I borrowed from the library, so I probably just read them once?

(Man, that’s a weird cover. Le Guin complains about horrible covers, but she doesn’t mention this one.)

This book is massive. It’s just almost 1K pages, but they’re big pages. Looking at the original editions, it looks like the six books altogether were 1,400 pages, and this one also includes some other short stories and stuff, so there’s some heft to this book.

Vess does illustrations of key scenes, as well as title plates…

… and one colour piece per book.

Charles Vess has done some extremely stylish comics, and those are mostly pen and ink. This is just pencil, and of course it’s good looking, but I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed.

I was also going to quibble about how he depicts some things, like the dragons, but the artwork was done over four years, and in collaboration with Le Guin. I guess if she say’s that that’s correct, I can’t really argue. Darn!

Now, as for the text itself… I mean, just reading it, I don’t think this format is ideal? I guess they had to limit themselves to under 1K pages or something, so they had to step down the font size slightly. I mean, it’s not uncomfortable, but it’s just a smidgen too small. And since the pages are so big, they felt the need to increase the line height, so that your eyes can snap back to the left side of the page without losing place.

I just thing the look of these pages isn’t ideal. But it does give you the feeling you’re reading some old huge grimoire, which is probably what they were going for, and that’s fun.

But since it’s uncomfortable to hold, and also slightly uncomfortable to read, I just read the old editions I had. D’oh! But I did look at the illustrations, too.

(And I couldn’t find The Other Wind, so I read that from this new collection, along with the afterwords and the extra included short stories and stuff.)

So how is it? Presumably, you’ve all read these books — or at least the first three.

I had forgotten how oldee tymey the first book is. It’s written in a style halfway between fairy tales and modern “classic” fantasy. That is, people are introduced like “and then he met Grumbledork, who would go on to sail to Vinklebump and vanquish Zomplefart, the dragon, but that’s a story for another day”, etc etc. As someone who hates fairy tales… I really enjoyed it. As much as I did when I was 11.

I think the second book, The Tombs of Atuan is generally considered to be the best? It’s written in a very different way, and it is indeed very good. But I think of the first three books, I prefer the third, The Farthest Shore. It’s like a remake of the first book (a road movie, but at sea), but the encounters are more memorable and vivid — like the people who live at sea all their lives, in the floating cities, and so on. And it has the most moving end.

Then 30 years passed, and the fourth book came, Tehanu. If you were 11 years old in 1991, and read the four books in quick succession, you’d get whiplash when you got to the fourth one: It starts with a five year old girl who was raped and then put into a campfire to burn to death. (And that’s just the first page.) But if you grew up with the first three books, and then got to the fourth as an adult (as I did), then it seemed quite natural: It’s a brutal, angry book, and it’s fantastic.

Ten more years passed, and we got a short story collection — but times have moved on, and “short” isn’t the same as in the olden days. The first story in the collection is about two thirds the length of the first novel. All the stories are solid, and we retrench a lot from the harshness of Tehanu. Le Guin says she wrote the stories to figure out herself how to finish off the series with the fifth novel, and to explore things about Earthsea. Now, nothing strikes more fear into a reader’s heart than an author who wants to “explore things” in their universe: You’re likely to get a story filling you in on the “lore” of the second lieutenant mentioned in half of a sentence in book two, and nothing in the short story must affect the “proper” novels whatsoever. But of course, Le Guin does nothing of the kind: She writes interesting stories that fill in the milieu and enriches your love for the world, and not trite info dumps or backstory you’ve never asked for.

And finally, the sixth and final book came hot on the heels of the fifth, and it’s a novel that manages to be a wonderful ending to the entire series. I had totally forgotten that. It echoes the first and third books storytelling wise, and concludes the storylines started in the fourth book, while starring (sort of) Tenar from the second book. Some people when they finish a series like this seem to have a checklist of points they go through and make everything neat — Le Guin is way too smart to do something like that, but it’s a really solid ending to the cycle.

(Except that there are a few more short stories included in this collecion. The final story was published in The Paris Review originally in 2018, after Le Guin had died, and is a very moving coda.)

So to sum up: These books are still darn good, and even better than I remembered.

And now I want to read something that’s not fantasy.

The Books of Earthsea (2018) by Ursula K. Le Guin (buy new, buy used, 4.46 on Goodreads)