I’ve been running a couple of blogs for a while now, and I have one cycling specific one where I did something particularly fun the other day. I went for a ride with my friend Simon, and while stopped at a cafe, I recorded our conversation. I forgot to bring my list of questions, but it worked out ok in the end anyway – because Simon and I can talk bikes all day.
Why don’t you head over to spokes-person.com and have a read of the interview. While you’re there, subscribe to receive future posts directly in your mailbox.
This is probably the least cohesive of the films, and most outlandish. A blinded JCVD trains new-Kurt. Kurt’s girlfriend comes to Thailand and is promptly kidnapped and threatened with sexual violence. Tong-po is now Icelandic.
I can’t express how poor this film is without significant spoileres. But hopefully for your sake you’re not going to watch this.
Kurt dies during the final battle. But somehow he’s brought back to life minutes later with some magic injection into the chest, after which he returns to the ring and fights Tong-po blindfolded for a bit, which somehow makes him better at fighting. Then he removes the blindfold and wins the fight.
Years’pon years ago (I’m guessing some time in the late 2000s, as in the decade between 2000 and 2009, not 2999 – language is confusing) some creative genius (according to me, not Art Critics) toasted some 140 slices of toast, bought a tube of liquid nails and stuck a rectangle of toasted bread slices to the wall. I always thought it was delightfully quirky. Confident that it was a transient piece, with toast being both biodegradable and delicious, I felt lucky that I got a chance to see it in its full greige and brown glory.
I didn’t really think about the persistence of liquid nails.
Perhaps the artist didn’t either.
It’s now 2025 and whenever I walk past that wall I see the blobs of liquid nails still on the wall and I’m reminded of the bits of toast that once adorned the wall.
I’ve been having some problems with malformed video files from yt-dlp when getting videos from iView. Some videos from the same source come out fine, some are unplayable, and some seem fine but then stop playing part way through. Today I decided to dive reasonably deeply into the downloading options and have come to a prompt that works. Some of the command might be redundant, but this works, so I’m going to stick with it and I’m also going to post it here for future-me when I have forget.
That was what it took to render my system, running Ubuntu 24.04 unbootable. I’d been trying to install the free version of DaVinci Resolve and was running into dependency issues with:
libapr1
libaprutil1
libasound2
libglib2.0-0
I found a page that promised that it skipping the package check would let me install the software, then I could disable the bits of Resolve that needed those packages. Hunky dory. Off we go.
Until I went to reboot my system that was acting a little oddly.
My hotkey for bringing up a file explorer (configured to satisfy years and years of Windows use) was launching the Disk Usage Analyser. I’ve always (or maybe longer) had Windows+1 in Windows bound to the Snipping Tool, so I’ve replicated that in Ubuntu for the screenshot tool. This didn’t work either.
Rebooting the system left it hanging on a text-only screen showing what was had loaded. No notable warnings. Some red herrings that looked like errors (that my disk’s UUID wasn’t being used, for instance) but were just notices. I tried the usual recovery steps from the recovery console. Fix broken packages. Check disks. No issues. Then I read that I should uninstall nvidia drivers and this is where things went wrong again. Different errors. More different errors.
So I tried to find the repair-install mode of my Ubuntu Live USB stick, but I don’t think that exists. But what I could do was this, and it took a fair bit of delving into my brainbank for memories that it was possible. I could mount the existing root partition as the current root partition in the running Live system and do further troubleshooting that way.
Here are the steps. They’re fun.
You have backups, right?
Firstly, find out the name of your root partition. This will need a bit of knowledge that I won’t (or can’t?) explain right here. In essence you’re looking for the correct partition type (Linux filesystem [1]) that is the right size (in my case, around 70GB[2]), on the right disk (I have a 500GB NVMe disk as the system disk[3]).
So the partition I have to mount is /dev/nvme0n1p5
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p5 /mnt
Then mount /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys and /run with this neat little for loop
for dir in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount --bind $dir /mnt$dir; done
Now the magic happens with chroot
sudo chroot /mnt
You are now kinda mostly ish sorta running your existing copy of Linux. I ran the following commands and it fixed it. I didn’t reboot between each command, so can’t tell you exactly what fixed it, or if it was maybe the whole thing.
