From time to time, often after I've restored from sleep or finished playing a Steam game, one of my CPU cores is pinned at 100% with no indication of what might be doing it. Running htop, btop, or GNOME system monitor all show the same thing: CPU0 at 100% while the rest are doing near-nothing, and no process in particular seems to be using those resources.

If I restart, it's back to normal, and sometimes I can play a game in Steam or let the computer go to sleep and it doesn't do this, but it happens often enough that's annoying/confusing so I'd like to know if there's a way to either (a) diagnose which processes are using which CPU cores, or (b) somehow "reset" the checking of these values to make sure that something's not just being misreported.

This is a desktop system running Arch & GNOME.

I've been writing code professionally for 24 years, 15 of which has been Python and 9 years of that with Docker. I got tired of running into the same complications every time I started a new job, so I wrote this. Maybe you'll find it useful, or it could even start a conversation, but this post has been a long time coming.

Update: I had a few requests for a demo repo as a companion to this post, so I wrote one today. It includes a very small Django demo user Docker, Compose, and GitLab CI.

It would seem that I have far too much time on my hands. After the post about a Star Trek "test", I started wondering if there could be any data to back it up and... well here we go:

Those Old Scientists

The Next Generation

Deep Space Nine

Voyager

Enterprise

Discovery

Important Note: As the source material is incomplete for Discovery, the following table only includes line counts from seasons 1 and 4 along with a single episode of season 2.

If anyone is interested, here's the (rather hurried, don't judge me) Python used:

#!/usr/bin/env python

#
# This script assumes that you've already downloaded all the episode lines from
# the fantastic chakoteya.net:
#
# wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/STDisco17/ http://www.chakoteya.net/STDisco17/episodes.html -m
# wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/Enterprise/ http://www.chakoteya.net/Enterprise/episodes.htm -m
# wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/Voyager/ http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/episode_listing.htm -m
# wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/DS9/ http://www.chakoteya.net/DS9/episodes.htm -m
# wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/NextGen/ http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/episodes.htm -m
# wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/StarTrek/ http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/episodes.htm -m
#
# Then you'll probably have to convert the following files to UTF-8 as they
# differ from the rest:
#
# * Voyager/709.htm
# * Voyager/515.htm
# * Voyager/416.htm
# * Enterprise/41.htm
#

import re
from collections import defaultdict
from pathlib import Path

EPISODE_REGEX = re.compile(r"^\d+\.html?$")
LINE_REGEX = re.compile(r"^(?P<name>[A-Z']+): ")

EPISODES = Path("www.chakoteya.net")
DISCO = EPISODES / "STDisco17"
ENT = EPISODES / "Enterprise"
TNG = EPISODES / "NextGen"
TOS = EPISODES / "StarTrek"
DS9 = EPISODES / "DS9"
VOY = EPISODES / "Voyager"

NAMES = {
    TOS.name: "Those Old Scientists",
    TNG.name: "The Next Generation",
    DS9.name: "Deep Space Nine",
    VOY.name: "Voyager",
    ENT.name: "Enterprise",
    DISCO.name: "Discovery",
}


class CharacterLines:
    def __init__(self, path: Path) -> None:
        self.path = path
        self.line_count = defaultdict(int)

    def collect(self) -> None:
        for episode in self.path.glob("*.htm*"):
            if EPISODE_REGEX.match(episode.name):
                for line in episode.read_text().split("\n"):
                    if m := LINE_REGEX.match(line):
                        self.line_count[m.group("name")] += 1

    @property
    def as_tablular_data(self) -> tuple[tuple[str, int, float], ...]:
        total = sum(self.line_count.values())
        r = []
        for k, v in self.line_count.items():
            percentage = round(v * 100 / total, 2)
            if percentage > 1:
                r.append((str(k), v, percentage))
        return tuple(reversed(sorted(r, key=lambda _: _[2])))

    def render(self) -> None:
        print(f"\n\n# {NAMES[self.path.name]}\n")
        print("| Name             | Total Lines | Percentage of Lines |")
        print("| ---------------- | :---------: | ------------------: |")
        for character, total, pct in self.as_tablular_data:
            print(f"| {character:16} | {total:11} | {pct:19} |")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    for series in (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, DISCO):
        counter = CharacterLines(series)
        counter.collect()
        counter.render()

I'm working on a some materials for a class wherein I'll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we're including a section we're calling "foot guns". Basically it's ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I've got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like... just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

A break from the usual in this community, but I trust it'll be appreciated. I think this is very solarpunk: using technology to improve the lives of all creatures.

His original post , titled I can't sleep, is some brilliant writing. When we talk about the chilling effect that criticism of Israel creates in industries everywhere (including ours) this is what that looks like.

I needed something for a presentation I'm doing on advanced Linux, so I thought something like this might be appropriate.

Annoyingly, I can't seem to get Bing to generate an image that isn't square.

[For reference, I'm talking about Ash in Alpine Linux here, which is part of BusyBox.]

I thought I knew the big differences, but it turns out I've had false assumptions for years. Ash does support [[ double square brackets ]] and (as best I can tell) all of Bash's logical trickery inside them. It also supports ${VARIABLE_SUBSTRINGS:5:12}` which was another surprise.

At this stage, the only things I've found that Bash can do that Ash can't are:

• Arrays, which Bash doesn't seem to do well anyway
• Brace expansion, which is awesome but I can live without it.

What else is there? Did Ash used to be more limited? The double square bracket thing really surprised me.

The other day someone was complaining about the new ad blocker-blocker on YouTube and I mentioned that it might be fun to write a Firefox extension that would just load up yt-dlp and play the video through mpv.

It turns out, writing a Firefox extension is easy and tricking Firefox into launching yt-dlp isn't much harder (though it does require some annoying configuration on the user's end).

Anyway, if you're a Linux user, feel free to try it out. I don't know how much I'm going to pour into this, but as an exercise of "can this be done", it was pretty good for a few hours on a Friday night.

I'm working on a little program that'll launch different browsers based on the content of the URL passed and I'd like to set it as the default Web app in this list (under Settings → Default Apps). I've written a .desktop file based on the epiphany.desktop file, but it doesn't show up when I hit [Win]+o+p+e and it doesn't show up in the default apps either, so I'm hoping that someone here can explain what I've done wrong.

Here's the contents of the opening.desktop file:

$ cat ~/.local/share/applications/opening.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Opening
GenericName=Web Browser
Comment=Open links in the right browsers
Keywords=web;browser;internet;opening;
Exec=opening %u
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/daniel/.local/share/applications/opening.png
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;application/xhtml+xml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;multipart/related;application/x-mimearchive;message/rfc822;application/x-xpinstall;

Any criticisms are much appreciated!

...but I think I'd probably be miserable there.

I'm violently allergic to pollen, am terrified of bees, wasps, and grasshoppers, and generally despise bugs and dirt. My ideal world would see everything paved in marble. No cars, (obviously) with a quiet, sustainable, walkable communiy, but green, as beautiful as it is, causes me a great deal of pain.

It's there any place for me in a solarpunk world?