Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 30, 2020

How to fix vlc’s Core dumping issue while playing some videos

Filed under: Computer Software,Computer Tips,Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:37 PM

Over the past 2 days I found that the VLC install on my computer was suddenly having issues playing some of the video files on my computer. Initially I thought that it was a problem with the video file, then I realized that this was also happening with videos that had be playing fine earlier. When I ran vlc from the command line to play the problem video it gave the following output on screen when it crashed:

[00005587b42751b0] dummy interface: using the dummy interface module…
[00007f00c4004980] egl_x11 gl error: cannot select OpenGL API
[00007f00c4004980] gl gl: Initialized libplacebo v2.72.0 (API v72)
[00007f00c402a310] postproc filter error: Unsupported input chroma (VAOP)
[00007f00bd986e50] chain filter error: Too high level of recursion (3)
[00007f00c4028d40] main filter error: Failed to create video converter
[00007f00bd986e50] chain filter error: Too high level of recursion (3)
[00007f00c4028d40] main filter error: Failed to create video converter
[00007f00bd986e50] chain filter error: Too high level of recursion (3)
[00007f00c4028d40] main filter error: Failed to create video converter
[00007f00bd986e50] chain filter error: Too high level of recursion (3)
…
…
[00007f00c44265c0] chain filter error: Too high level of recursion (3)
[00007f00c4414240] main filter error: Failed to create video converter
[00007f00bd9020d0] main filter error: Failed to create video converter
[00007f00cc047d70] main video output error: Failed to create video converter
[00007f00cc047d70] main video output error: Failed to compensate for the format changes, removing all filters
[00007f00c4004980] gl gl: Initialized libplacebo v2.72.0 (API v72)

A google search told me that a possible solution was to disable hardware acceleration in the Video settings but that didn’t fix my problem. So I took a look at the kernel.log file in /var/log and I got the following error when the program crashed:

Sep 30 21:11:44 StarKnight kernel: [173399.132554] vlc[91472]: segfault at 28000000204 ip 00007f2d8916c1d8 sp 00007f2d8aa69db0 error 4 in libpostproc.so.55.7.100[7f2d8915c000+1d000]
Sep 30 21:11:44 StarKnight kernel: [173399.132568] Code: 98 48 8d 44 07 20 0f 18 08 8b 44 24 08 4d 8d 0c 1a 4d 8d 04 2b 85 c0 0f 85 cb fd ff ff 4c 8b 6c 24 28 4b 8d 04 29 4b 8d 14 20 <41> 0f 6f 01 43 0f 6f 0c 29 41 0f 7f 00 43 0f 7f 0c 20 43 0f 6f 04

Spent about an hour searching for the solution using the details from the kernel.log but got nowhere. Finally I found a forum post where one of the solutions offered was to remove the vlc configuration files, since I didn’t have any other bright idea’s I renamed the vlc config folder by issuing the following command:

mv ~/.config/vlc ~/.config/vlc_09302020

Then I started vlc and just like that everything started working again. 🙂 Not sure what caused the settings to get borked in the first place but the issue is fixed now so all is well.

– Suramya

The Dark Prophecy (Trials of Apollo 02) by Rick Riordan

Filed under: Reviews-Young Adult Fantasy — Suramya @ 2:39 PM

The Dark Prophecy (Trials of Apollo 02)
by Rick Riordan

Description:

Zeus has punished his son Apollo–god of the sun, music, archery, poetry, and more–by casting him down to earth in the form of a gawky, acne-covered sixteen-year-old mortal named Lester. The only way Apollo can reclaim his rightful place on Mount Olympus is by restoring several Oracles that have gone dark. What is affecting the Oracles, and how can Apollo/Lester do anything about them without his powers? After experiencing a series of dangerous–and frankly, humiliating–trials at Camp Half-Blood, Lester must now leave the relative safety of the demigod training ground and embark on a hair-raising journey across North America. Fortunately, what he lacks in godly graces he’s gaining in new friendships–with heroes who will be very familiar to fans of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Heroes of Olympus series. Come along for what promises to be a harrowing, hilarious, and haiku-filled ride. . . .

Buy From:

Rating:

Review:

In the second entry to the trials of Apollo series we rejoin the Apollo/Lester, Leo & Calypso who are on the way to Indiana to find the second Oracle. During the quest they need to depend on each other more often and we learn more about Apollo’s past history with some of the major characters in the books and how that is causing the current mess they all are in. Apollo grows up a bit through the course of the novel and even though he is still self-centered and narcissistic to the core its good to see him start showing empathy towards the other characters. Plus his commentary on House-hold chores is hilarious along with the usual pop-culture references.

The book also briefly references other Pantheon’s so it will be interesting to see if that is expanded in the future books and if we have a crossover or not. Since this is a YA Fantasy the fight scenes are detailed enough to be fun but not so that it’s too gory. However there are a few scenes that younger readers might find a bit frightening. So parents would need to keep that in mind.

The book nicely sets up the next entry into the series and I am really looking forward to reading it.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book for any Fantasy book lovers.

September 29, 2020

Mounting a Network drive over ssh in Windows using WinFsp & SSHFS-Win

Filed under: Computer Software,Computer Tips,Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 1:16 PM

I have computers running both Windows & Linux and at times I need to share files between them and I have been looking for a convenient way to access the files from my Linux machine from my Windows machine without having to run SAMBA on the Linux. This is because historically SAMBA has been a security nightmare and I don’t want to run extra services on the computer if I can avoid it. Earlier this week I finally found a way to mount my Linux directories on Windows as a network mount over SSH using WinFsp & SSHFS-Win and I have been running it for a couple of days so far without any issues. (So far)

Follow these steps to enable SSHFS-Win on your windows machine:

Install WinFsp (Windows File System Proxy)

WinFsp is a set of software components for Windows computers that allows the creation of user mode file systems similar to FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) in the Unix/Linux world. You can download it from the project’s GIT repository. The Installation file is available by clicking on the download link under ‘Releases’ near the top right corner of the page. The latest version is WinFsp 2020.1 at the time of this writing.

You install the software by running the MSI file you downloaded and the default options worked for me without modification.

Install SSHFS For Windows

SSHFS-Win is a minimal port of SSHFS to Windows. It is available for download from the project’s Git repository. You can compile from source or download the installation file by clicking on the download link under ‘Releases’ near the top right corner of the page. The latest version is SSHFS-Win 2020 at the time of this writing.

Please note that you will need to have WinFsp installed already before you can install SSHFS-Win successfully.

Usage:

Once you have installed both the software you can start using them and map a network drive to a directory using Windows Explorer or the net use command. Instructions for use are as below (Taken from the project Documentation):

In Windows Explorer select This PC > Map Network Drive and enter the desired drive letter and SSHFS path using the following UNC syntax:

\\sshfs\REMUSER@HOST[\PATH]

The first time you map a particular SSHFS path you will be prompted for the SSH username and password which can be saved using the Windows Credential Manager so that you don’t get prompted for it again. In order to unmap the drive, right-click on the drive icon in Windows Explorer and select Disconnect.


Visual demo of how to Map a Network drive using SSHFS-Win

You can map a network drive from the command line as well using the net use command:

net use X: \\sshfs\suramya@StarKnight

You will then be prompted for the password and once you authenticate you can use the new drive as usual. You can unmap the drive as follows:

net use X: /delete

I find this quite useful and hope you do as well.

Thanks to MakerLab, Department of Computer Science, HKU for pointing me in the correct direction

– Suramya

September 28, 2020

The Hidden Oracle (Trials of Apollo 01) by Rick Riordan

Filed under: Reviews-Young Adult Fantasy — Suramya @ 11:57 PM

The Hidden Oracle (Trials of Apollo 01)
by Rick Riordan

Description:

He was once an immortal God. Now, he’s a teenage boy called Lester.

Apollo has angered his father Zeus for the last time.

So, how do you punish an immortal?

By making him human. Obviously.

Cast down from Olympus, he’s weak, disorientated and stuck in New York City as a teenage boy.

It’s the first time he’s been without his powers, and he has to survive in the modern world.

Which isn’t an easy feat for a four-thousand-year old deity, especially one with as many enemies as he has.

Apollo needs help, and he can only think of one place to go . . . an enclave of modern demigods known as Camp Half-Blood.

Buy From:

Rating: (4/5)

Review:

After finishing the previous books I was in mood for something light and happened to see the latest book in the Trials of Apollo in my feed. That made me realize that I had only read the first two books in the series and the 5th book had come out. So I started a re-read of the first two books while I wait for the remaining three to arrive.

The first book in the Trials of Apollo series has Rick’s trademark humor and it was a welcome break after the past few books I had been reading. The book is very light reading with a light-hearted view of the world. The lead character Apollo or Lester as he is now known after he was transformed into a mortal by Zeus is very narcissistic and only thinks about himself, however due to the way it’s written the character doesn’t cross the line into obnoxious which would have been quite easy to do. I loved how he keeps referencing popular culture and taking credit for major achievements like the songs Beatles wrote etc. Over the course of the book Apollo starts to realize that he was way too self centered and how unfairly the demi-gods were treated by the Gods.

Some of the Demi-gods from the Percy Jackson books & the Heroes of Olympus do make a brief appearance but some of them will have bigger roles to play in the future books in the series.

Over all this is a good fun book and a great beginning to a new series in the Percy Jackson universe.

Happy World Tourism Day 2020!

Filed under: Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 3:16 PM

Today is World Tourism day, 2020 and thanks to the current ongoing Pandemic we can’t really travel anywhere to celebrate it. In fact its been over 6 months since we traveled anywhere, so celebrating the World Tourism day in such a situation seems to be a bit of a downer. However just because we can’t travel somewhere doesn’t mean that we can’t celebrate the past trips we have done. So here are some of the Trips that Me & Jani took in the past 4 years:

There were a whole lot of other places we also traveled to which are not listed here, you can check them out here.

Hopefully things will improve soon and we will be back on the road visiting new places and experiencing the best the world has to offer.

– Suramya

September 27, 2020

Using ncdu to Check Disk Space Usage In Linux

Filed under: Computer Software,Computer Tips,Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

One of the common tasks I face on my Linux system is to identify what files/directories are using the most space. The traditional way to find out is to go to the top level directory and run a ‘du -hs *’ (without the quotes) on the directory and then cd into each directory, rinse and repeat. The other option available is to right click on the folder in Dolphin or any other file manager and select Properties. With the same process as before when you go into each directory individually, right click and get the properties. This is very tedious and time consuming.

Instead you can use ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) for looking at the storage space utilization on your computer as it has a lot of advantages. It is designed to find space hogs on a remote server where you don’t have an entire graphical setup available. It is fast, simple and very easy to use. I have been using it for a while now and absolutely love it.

To Install ncdu on a Debian system, you can issue the following command:

apt-get install ncdu

Once you have it installed, the usage it very simple. Simply open a command prompt and issue the following command:

ncdu

It will start in the current directory and index all the sub-directories under it. The initial scan can take a while depending on the size of the directories under the current directory. But its comparable to the time taken when running du -hs on the directory. Once the program completes its scan, you get a simple ncurses based interface that you can navigate using the keyboard.


ncdu display for my home directory

All directories & are listed with their sizes in human readable format sorted by size with the largest files & directories at the top (in the default view). You can go into a directory by selecting it and hitting enter. The sizes for the subdirectory are immediately shown without having to run additional commands. You can also delete directories & files from within ncdu by hitting the delete key which is a huge timesaver.

If you haven’t tried it out do check it out. You will love it.

– Suramya

September 26, 2020

Source code for multiple Microsoft operating systems including Windows XP & Server 2003 leaked

Filed under: Computer Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:58 PM

Windows XP & Windows Server source code leaked online earlier this week and even though this is for an operating system almost 2 decades old this leak is significant. Firstly because some of the core XP components are still in use in Windows 7/8/10. So if a major bug is found in any of those subsystems after people analyze the code then it will have a significant impact on the modern OS’s as well from Redmond. Secondly, It will give everyone a chance to try and understand how the Windows OS works so that they can enhance tools like WINE and other similar tools to have better compatibility with Windows. The other major impact will be on systems that still use XP like ATM’s, embedded systems, point-of-sale, automated teller machines, set-top boxes etc. Those will be hard to upgrade & protect as is some cases the companies that made the device are no longer in business and in other cases the software is installed in devices that are hard to upgrade.

This is not the first time Windows source code has leaked to the internet. In early 2000 a mega torrent of all MS Operating systems going back to MS-DOS was released, it allegedly contained the source code for the following OS’s:

OS from filename Alleged source size (bytes)
——————— —————————
MS-DOS 6 10,600,000
NT 3.5 101,700,000
NT 4 106,200,000
Windows 2000 122,300,000
NT 5 2,360,000,000

Leaked Data from the latest leak


Alleged contents of the Torrent file with MS Source Code.

The leaked code is available for download at most Torrent sites, I am not going to link to it for obvious reasons. If you want to check it out you can go download it, however as always be careful of what you download off the internet as it might have viruses and/or trojans in it. This is especially true if you are downloading the torrent on a Windows machine. Several users on Twitter claim that the source code for the original Xbox is included as well, but the information is varied on this. I haven’t downloaded it myself so can’t say for sure either way.

Keep in mind that the leak was illegal and just because it has leaked doesn’t mean that you can use it to build a clone of Windows XP without written authorization from Microsoft.

Source: ZDNet: Windows XP source code leaked online, on 4chan, out of all places

– Suramya

September 25, 2020

Scientists find molecule to make bio-generated power more efficient.

Filed under: Emerging Tech — Suramya @ 10:06 AM

Producing Electricity is one of the great challenges of the modern world and We have been producing electricity by burning coal, using nuclear fission, Solar power, Wind Power etc etc for decades. However each of these have some drawback or other, and they are all not very portable. To power our portable devices & sensors we use batteries that are a big ecological issue as despite decades of effort most synthetic and molecular electronic materials remain bio-incompatible and nonbiodegradable. Plus the batteries only last for a limited time before needing to be replaced. Solar cells are good but don’t work at night plus we still need to store the power generated which brings us back to the battery problem.

Due to the above mentioned issues, we have been searching for new and improved ways to produce electricity that reduce the ecological impact of power generation. One of the ways explored is to use Microbial fuel cells powered by Bacteria, specifically Geobacter Colonies. Geobacter is a groundwater-dwelling genus of bacteria that lives in the soil beneath our feet and has the fascinating capability of producing electrons as waste much like how we humans generate CO2 while breathing. These electrons are then transmitted through what is essentially a giant snorkel of nanowire made out of a conductive material into the soil around the bacteria. In previous research, Nikhil Malvankar, an assistant professor at Yale University’s Microbial Science Institute in Connecticut and his colleagues found that when the Geobacter microbes are exposed to a small electrode in the lab they automatically assemble into interlinked piles of hundreds of individual microbes, capable of moving electrons through a single shared network. This substantially increases the amount of electricity produced by the microbes.

Now the question they had to answer was that how are the microbes able to transmit electrons through the interlinked piles efficiently so they set about using cutting-edge microscopy techniques to study the phenomenon. The first technique, called high-resolution atomic force microscopy, gathered information about the structure of the nanowires by touching their surface with an extremely sensitive mechanical probe and the second technique, called infrared nanospectroscopy used infrared light which was reflected off the nonowires to identify specific molecules. With these two methods, the researchers saw the “unique fingerprint” of each amino acid in the proteins that make up Geobacter’s nanowires.

During the study the team found that, when stimulated by an electric field Geobacter produced a previously unknown kind of nanowire made of a protein called OmcZ which is made of tiny, metallic building blocks called hemes. This new type of nanowire is over a 1,000 times more efficient in conducting electricity than the normal one. This new research has been published on Aug. 17 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology and it has paved the way to making the production of bio-electronics both cheaper and easier by increasing the power generated by the bacterial colony.

Once we figure out how to replicate this at scale then we will have the ability to generate sustainable power using just the microbes from beneath our feet.

Source: Scientists find ‘secret molecule’ that allows bacteria to exhale electricity

– Suramya

September 24, 2020

Can you spot a troll/bot account?

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 10:29 AM

Nowadays we have programmatic bots being used to spread misinformation & distrust on Social Media, in addition to the Troll’s who are just doing it for the lulz. A troll is a person who starts flame wars or intentionally upsets people on the Internet by posting inflammatory messages in an online community with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses for the troll’s amusement or a specific gain.

Can you identify these inauthentic accounts? Most people will say yes to the question but in reality it is hard to identify these accounts especially if they are run my competent people. spotthetroll.org is an online game that tests your ability to identify such accounts along with advice on what to look for when consuming Social Media. Its a great quiz and I found it to be quite fun, especially the section on what to look for when viewing social media to spot trolls/bots was very useful.

Each of the following 8 profiles include a brief selection of posts from a single social media account. You decide if each is an authentic account or a professional troll. After each profile, you’ll review the signs that can help you determine if it’s a troll or not.

I got a 5 out of 8. What’s your score?

– Suramya

September 23, 2020

Civvl is Uber for evicting people

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:16 AM

In the latest attempt by bottom feeders to capitalize on the current pandemic, we have a company called ‘civvl’ which calls itself, the Uber of Evictions. Basically this is a company which is coming in and saying, I’m gonna pay you money to go kick out people from their own houses. To rub more salt on the wound, they actually advertise that “this is a best time to get involved” and “it’s the fastest growing money making gig due to the COVID-19 pandemic” “Literally thousands of process servers are needed in the coming months due courts being backed up in judgements that needs to be served to defendants.” They use a standard language for gig works like flexible hours, be your own boss etc etc.

But imagine how heartless you have to be to literally start a company that will make money by kicking people out from their houses and capitalizing on the fact that the current pandemic will increase the number of people who will have to be evicted. When I initially read about the company I thought that it was a dark joke but unfortunately the company appears to be real and there are people who are signing up for it. I don’t blame them because you need to feed your family and you gotta do what you gotta do… But but coming up with this whole idea, I don’t have words to express myself right now. You need a special type of person to think of something like this and then implement it.

The company is based in the US and is live. I am not going to link to them because they don’t deserve any traffic and the owners need to seriously think about their life choices.

Source: Vice: Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People

– Suramya

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