Brother HL-L2350DW and WiFi

I bought a new Brother HL-L2350DW because my old Brother printer was needing a new drum and had some other minor issues. It served me well for many years. However, I noticed with the HL-L2350DW that after it went to sleep, it wouldn't wake up to print. Hitting buttons, opening and closing the lid on it, etc. didn't help. After a little Googling I found a culprit. I had to change a setting on my router (Asus RT-86U). It's under Wireless->Professional. I had to switch "Airtime Fairness" to "Disable." Thankfully it just has to be on the 2.4Ghz channel so it shouldn't be a big deal to my network (hopefully).

Now if I could just figure out how to get my Chromebook to work with it without using Google Cloud Print . . .

UEFI and Slackware 14.2

I inherited my dad's computer that has Secure Boot/UEFI. Here's what I had to do to get elilo to work:

1. Create an initrd (I'm using the generic kernel). I used this command in the /boot directory:
   mkinitrd -c -k 4.4.115 -m ext4 -f ext4 -r /dev/sda3
   This assumes that you are using ext4 and that /dev/sda3 is root
2. Copy initrd.gz, vmlinuz-generic-4.4.115, and vmlinuz-huge to /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware
3. Edit elilo.conf to reflect the boot parameters you want. Mine looks like this:
   default=generic
prompt chooser=simple
delay=100
timeout=100
#
image=vmlinuz-generic-4.4.115
     initrd=initrd.gz
     root=/dev/sda3
     label=generic
     description="Slackware64 14.2"
     read-only

image=vmlinuz
     root=/dev/sda3
     label=huge description="Slackware64 14.2 Huge"
     read-only
     append="root=/dev/sda3 vga=normal ro"

HDMI Sound in Slackware64 14.2

Phew! Gotta blow some dust off the ol' blog! Anyway, I recently installed Slackware64 14.2 and AlienBob's Plasma 5 packages. I was struggling to get HDMI sound to work. After lots of searching, trial, and error, I finally figured it out. I found that I had to go to the Configuration tab in pavucontrol. There were two options for built-in audio. The one profile said "Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output." I left that one alone. The other one said "Analog Stereo Output." I had to change that one to "Off." Then it worked fine.

Get Your Full Calendar History on Your Android Device

For a long time, Google only let you get one month of your Google calendar's history on a new device. More recently, they've upped it to a year. Much better, but not when you have FOUR years worth of history to preserve. I've done this several times, so I know it works. I'm just putting it here so I don't have to do a web search for the answer the next time.

1.  Go to your calendar on your computer. Click on the down arrow to the right of "My calendars." Select "settings."
2. Click "Export calendars" and unzip the file that you download.
3. One of the .ics files that is unzipped (assuming that you have more than one calendar) will have your username as part of the file name.
4. Click "Import calendar" and choose the .ics file from step #3.
5. Once it's done uploading, your phone/tablet will sync and you will have your full history!

This will NOT create duplicate entries. Essentially it "touches" (if you are familiar with the Linux command of the same name) all of the entries, so that the device thinks they're new and need to be synced. I got an error saying something about that three of my entries failed to sync, but it worked fine.

Not Dead Yet

Well, I ended up taking an unexpected two month break from guitar. A bunch of things were going on and I just lost a desire to play. Thus, my "Road to Freaking Awesome" ground to a halt. A little over a week ago, I got the desire back. I've put down sweeping for a moment and have been learning George Lynch's solo on "Breaking the Chains." It's relatively easy for a Lynch solo, but requires lots of precision bending. I'll be getting back to the sweepy goodness soon.

Fatsort

We just got a sweet new Pioneer deck installed in our car. The problem is that if you have music on a USB stick, it plays them back in the order they were saved to the device. Touching the files won't help. Thankfully, an enterprising soul developed Fatsort that will reorganized the file allocation table on a FAT32 or FAT16 device so that things will play in the proper order aka alphabetically. Very cool and easy to use. I heart the OSS community.

Four String Sweeps

I started working on four string sweeps today. The good news is that I seem to be picking them up more quickly than I anticipated. I suppose now that my fingers are more used to sweeping semi-properly, it's only a matter of adding an extra string. Hopefully this isn't a one-night phenomenon.