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.

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()

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.

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.

[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.