Noisy utility company email
Why do utility companies feel the need to email and phone to advise of their readiness for an impending storm? Would I otherwise suppose they were not ready? And, if they were indeed not ready, then what?
On top of this, my phone rings incessantly with this nonsense, advising me that they are prepared for the coming nor'easter (for those of you unfamiliar with this type of storm, these are particularly nasty - high winds, lots of rain - in the northeast US). Anyone living on Long Island (New York State) more than a year should be quite familiar with these regular occurrences. So, why is my Inbox filled with this junk? (Okay, my Sophos UTM catches most of these, but sadly can't do anything about the telephone ringing.)
This is a tremendous waste of resources. Don't tell me that you're ready, just focus on being ready.
Regular readers here will know of my profound distaste for poor email etiquette, and sending superfluous email falls into that category. Messages should be sent when relevant (they don't need to advertise to me; I have no real choice in the matter, other than slapping immense, ugly solar panels all over my roof).
Navigating Coinbase’s customer support
A company with which I am involved recently reconfigured its Coinbase account. This was precipitated by a change in the Stripe API, where Stripe shifted away from Coinpayments.net to another exchange for handling cryptocurrencies.
So, while this company had a prior arm's length arrangement with Coinbase, it never actually had to deal with the entity directly...until recently.
Hate KDE Plasma5 on openSUSE Leap 42.1? Me, too.
After severely breaking my well-oiled openSUSE 13.2 installation, and wasting a couple hours trying to fix it (unbootable), I finally bit the bullet and just did an in-place upgrade to Leap 42.1.
Of course, the first thing I noticed was that my display driver was incorrect (max res 1024x768). The second thing was that the desktop was all but unusable.
My first assumption at that point was that it was just the resolution, and that I was indeed missing something which was somewhere off-screen. However, after installing the proper radeon driver, I was left with the same, barely usable desktop. What happened?
Apparently, the openSUSE team decided to switch to KDE's Plasma5 from KDE4 as the default desktop. Not only is Plasma5 unfinished (unfinished=still missing some expected functionality and components common to KDE4), but it seemed (for me) to leak memory badly and do a number of other not-very-nice things when moving windows and such. In addition, the kicker was awkward to use, cluttered to read, and decidedly non-SuSE in appearance.
I tried a few new themes, thinking that perhaps it was just the rather unbranded, default KDE theme which was at fault, but alas, nothing would help.
I stumbled upon this thread in the openSUSE forums, which provided some great links.
Once I got KDE4 back (as well as my old familiar desktop selector menu at login), I discovered that my Apper widget was missing from my panel. I fixed that by downgrading to Apper from plasma5-pk-updater, then uninstalling plasma5-pk-updater and friends (breaking the pattern to satisfy the dep solver), and then marking Apper as locked and plasma5-pk-updater (and friends) as taboo (never install).
Perhaps at some point I'll provide a detailed set of instructions for all of this, but for now, my heartfelt thanks to Wolfgang Bauer (wolfi323) for his wonderful repo and build of plasma5-session (which allows switching back and forth between desktops).
JFS chkdsk options on OS/2
As most of us OS/2 users know by now, IBM never fully finished fleshing out the original port of JFS to OS/2 from AIX. This is especially true for the documentation of the (few) utilities related to JFS (see my other post concerning the JFS service log).
Fixing broken folder classes in CommuniGate Pro 5.4
I'm not sure how far back IMAP folders were "classed" in CommuniGate Pro (I should look), however today, when logging in via webmail to accept a calendar invite, I noticed that my calendar wasn't showing as a calendar, but instead like a plain IMAP folder.