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.

...so I found out how to fix it

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:

The Next Generation

DS9

Voyager

Enterprise

Discovery

Note: This is a limited dataset, as the source site only has transcripts for seasons 1, 2, and 4

If anyone is interested, here's the (rather hurried) 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
#
# 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"
DS9 = EPISODES / "DS9"
VOY = EPISODES / "Voyager"


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_percentages(self) -> dict[str, 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[k] = percentage
        return {k: v for k, v in reversed(sorted(r.items(), key=lambda _: _[1]))}

    def render(self) -> None:
        print(self.path.name)
        print("| Name             | Percentage of Lines |")
        print("| ---------------- | ------------------- |")
        for character, pct in self.as_percentages.items():
            print(f"| {character:16} | {pct} |")


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

My father is 75 and not very capable on a computer. He's got an old MacBook Air at home behind a typical ISP router for which he has no access controls (so no port forwarding).

My immediate need is actually not his machine at all, but the Raspberry Pi I installed at his house before I left the country and forgot to enable cron on so it's not doing what I need yet. However, it would be really nice if I could also do one of the following as well:

• VNC (or something) into his computer whenever something "isn't working" rather than doing the talk-him-through-it dance over Skype.
• Install a new OS (the Mac is no longer supported by MacOS). I don't know how plausible this is though.

My current plan is to email him a shell script that should create a reverse SSH tunnel to a server in Montréal or something and then I can shell into his Mac through there. It's not ideal though since we're still talking shell scripts and he's easily frustrated.

I know that in Windows land there are all sorts of tools scammers use to take over a machine remotely. Does Mac allow for the same thing? Note that I only have Linux machines available to me on this side of the Atlantic.

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.

I've got a very simple Kodi setup:

• Arch Linux on a laptop behind the TV
• Media files on a server upstairs, shared over NFS

I've been running Kodi quite successfully on this machine for years, but with the Omega update, videos play without audio for about 10seconds, then freeze. Sometimes if I wait a while, I see subtitles for the episode while the video is frozen. Music doesn't play either. The interface freezes too, to the point where I have to kill -9 it. Switching from Wayland to Xorg hasn't had an effect.

I tried deleting ~/.kodi and restarting, but nothing changes.

Has anyone else run into this?

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.

I've been playing a lot of Fallout 4 over the holidays. I started and finished the Nuka World DLC (killed all the baddies), made it to level 90, etc.

Today I was playing on my Deck as the battery got a little low (11%) so I saved my game, exited the game, and went to shut down.

As it was shutting down, the Deck displayed a message, something like "Syncing to Steam Cloud" as the logo was spinning.

A few hours later, on a full charge, I booted it back up, started Fallout 4 again and... some of my old saves are there, but only about 30% of them, and critically not the most recent ones.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? Is this a known issue? Can I fix it, or report it? I've basically lost interest in finishing the game now.

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.