One of the reasons for wanting to get this sorted is to restore the search facility that bitweaver provides in the background, but while I could identify which pdf contained a search term, getting the generic viewer to do more than simply highlight it took a couple of abortive days with Claude. Not totally wasted time as I now have a much better appreciation of how to debug the javascript in firefox, but much of what was being documented actually worked at all! I have a large list of extra code which was intended to solve the simple problem of putting the search term in the find bar of the viewer so that the previous/next buttons worked. I had specifically asked about passing this in the pdf.js code but that path was avoided, however a github pdf.js issues described a fix that sounded perfect. The only problem was it's code is 9 years old and trying to find out how to apply it was not easy. Eventually I found that 'if ('search' in params)' is now 'if (params.has("search"))' on line 1250 of the viewer.mjs file. Another bit of fun since my nginx setup would not allow .mjs files to run ;) . But the next question is just what do I add to emulate the old example. This actually turned out to be easier than anticipated and the new code is.

I am considering if there should be a highlight param that just highlight but does not open the find bar, but at least I am now in control, and the bitweaver highlight param opens pdf files with the same highlighting as other directly generated content.

The NEXT step is to get uploading pdf's to automatically populate the liberty content object's data field with the pdf's text layer. It's working perfectly when I update existing pdf's, but I need a slightly different hack to allow that to happen on initial upload. That and getting bitweaver to actually index the pages with the search module. All the parts are there, and hopefully without AI assistance I'll get it sorted quicker!

The problem with php was simply down to incompetent craw bots hitting every date in the calendar on the timeline pages that phpgedview creates. Add to which, most of them were still on the todo list to clear all the warnings and errors that PHP8.4 was creating for them, hence the large file size. I no long have phpgedview active, having switched to webtrees, following my completion of updates to the firebird driver for laravel/illuminate. Style wise it even follows the same style as the rest of the Bootstrap3 backed bitweaver framework. Wins all round. Now I just need to find time to add more of the current information that the family tree is lacking.

With the php-fpm.log file only growing a few megabytes a day, I spotted a couple of PHP8.4 niggles which I've picked off and I will have another go at the remaining bugs over the weekend. The stats display process had an update and no longer tells me which site it is processing which is something I've asked about but not seen a reply yet. Other problems such as a niggle trying to get phpgedview to redirect to webtrees, I'd asked the question, and the following day posted the fix myself. Claude can actually be useful at times but only after you have spotted why his first responses will never work. I did consider a subscription to duck.ai for a better service, but I don't see that it is 'intelligent' enough yet to be worth paying for, and once I hit the days limit, we are probably off track anyway, so a fresh start the next day is actually more productive!

So with the servers running nicely and almost clear reboot logs, the next step was to address a few niggles on the desktop machine. The first was the fact that the wifi connection was not working, and various attempts in duck and Claude had not given any real answers to the error messages. I tried a more general enquiry and an interesting forum post popped up saying switch off and take the battery out. It was for a laptop, but it prompted me to consider that while I had rebooted and even shut down, I had NOT pulled the mains ... That proved to be the magic bullet, and the wireless just popped back into live and reconnected without any other work needed. "probe with driver mt7921e failed with error -5" cleared without any explanation of why it had failed.

Next problem was one that has been bugging me for a while but I'd been putting up with. Hum from the computer speakers when nothing was being sent to them. It goes away as soon as a sound channel is created, but then after short while after a ping, or playing some music, the hum comes back. The consensus is that this is a known problem and is caused by the speaker socket essentially being switched off and so floating without an earth. The rant question has to be WHY! Digging through all sorts of fixes from Claude and on-line made no difference despite knowing exactly what was happening. Currently there is no hum ... but then neither is there and sound from the windows box or the TV since I've currently got the powered speakers plugged directly into the desktop machine. I need a better solution but for now it will have to do! There is still an error caused by the module module-x11-xsmp not initializing when pulseaudio starts up but as with the network driver error, no explanation of what needs to be fixed.

A few short errors related to the printer were cleared by simply deleting the the config files as they were apparently no longer needed. The printer is still working and 4 fewer lines in the log.

The ping pong between X11 and Wayland has been an ongoing irritation. That module-x11-xsmp would not initialize because it could not find an X11 session was just annoying as it was running the X11 session fine, and all of the applications that need X11 - or at least used to - were working. I'd been avoiding switching back to Wayland as it seemed to cause it's own problems, and that is at least in part because the two simply do not play well together! After logging in on a Wayland session, first problem was the left and right monitors were switched, so once I worked how to navigate the mouse to the System Setting window I had to swap them back. That had caused more problems in the past, but this time it simply blanked the screens and opened up again the right way round. A quick check of KiCad 9.0 ran it up without any warnings and the font sizes look good. Rayforge is also displaying with the right fonts and a layout that actually works, so perhaps we are not far off a usable Wayland session!

The next niggle is plasma rather than graphics. The saga of the 'global menu'. The latest setup ended up with my having a 'global menu' on the start bar so I could use several packages, but they only really worked on the middle screen. I never subscribed to the idea that this should be separate to the related window, and on a multi screen display, more so. So after various questions, it seemed that I simply needed to 'disable' the global menu. Starting by dropping the widget, and also removing the global bars button from the LibreOffice window. The final piece of the jigsaw turned out to be a reboot to get the windows recreated cleanly, and magic, we have the files menu back below the title bar on all of the windows ... and available which ever screen one is working on. The one thing I'd had trouble with was not being able to hit 'recently opened', but once it was back I was only seeing the current module files, so spreadsheets. Fortunately the fix was just a tick box away below the list, and the document I was looking for popped up. NOW the question is 'why is LibreOffice not opening in this Wayland session! And the fix ... don't use Wayland :) However dropping back to X11 had the same problem, so reboot and it's working again in X11, and now also in Wayland ... and Wayland seems to have remembered the correct screen order, but for some reason is not seeing the 4k TV next door, which X11 mimics the right hand monitor on happily.

A useful nixCraft article also provides further links to the problem ...

I decided as a new year 'resolution', although it's more of an old TODO item, to finally do something about making my desktop, tablet and phone work together better. The original plans at the end of the last century was for a website that would handle email archive, calendar, contacts in addition to the facilities that bitweaver currently provides. The original tikiwiki roadmap made some of the steps difficult which is why some developers forked tikipro which was later renamed bitweaver due to pressure from the tikiwiki project and because it's aim was to weave together the various bits we wanted. I developed a very flexible contacts app for bitweaver which I am still using, but which does not integrate with the mobile devices easily, however the contact apps on the mobile do not allow the secondary material anyway, so access through the bitweaver powered website is the still useful. One aspect of that is listing notes, messages, emails and events related to a single contact which was the base for the security sites operating process, but with James's death the use of that has also been retired. Hence the review of just where I am today.

I had set up myhomecloud.co.uk back in 2011 with the plan then to run owncloud on that, but other things got in the way, and while adding the myhomecloud.uk when the protection provided by that particular can ran out, neither domains were being used as originally planned. Given the history contained in the business sites, switching to this domain in my semi-retirement gave a clean sheet to blog and write material going forward, but still without some of the original extensions. Hence having another go at owncloud, which has now morphed into nextcloud.

The own thing that seems to be fairly obvious is that nextcloud has the same limitations that tikiwiki was pushing towards and anonymous browsing of material was not well supported. While developing the client management system I expanded the content management security to allow various levels of anonymous access. Enquirysolve although better known as Postfield after the company who handled the installation initially and which did not die when they sold out the railway, had pure anonymous access and a generic access level when accessed from a site specific domain name. Only private material needed a login to view it. So there is still a place for bitweaver which nextcloud currently can not replace (although I may be wrong there?). Anyway, rdmcloud.uk has been added as the home for the rainbowdigitalmedia nextcloud hosting and is working well.

Lots of little rant points in all of that, and more to come ... I never subscribed to 'composer' when it was initially pushed, partly because it needed autoload to be integrated into all of the code base and there was little to be gained at the time. While bitweaver today (at least my version) happily uses autoload, it retains the nice feature that I have been using for years, and while I have several live sites, there is only one copy of the code and external libraries, something which I've not been able to reconcile with the composer ethos for file structure. So apparently needing composer to install nextcloud was something I was not comfortable with, and my own copy has been installed direct from github without resorting to the composer installer, something which I think is now biting as a couple of extra apps are not loading properly via that route. Cookbook is something I've looked at in the past for bitweaver but it failed to install automatically and the manually loaded build is just giving a blank screen.

Another area that I've had fun with in the past is Music and while that app has installed nicely, getting the existing archive to display properly was contorted. Nextcloud - Music is the discussion on the fine detail, but the rants relate to the way MusicBrainz tries to enforce it's standards on how content is managed. Discogs is in my book the more accurate reference as it is built on the physical media and while MusicBrainz does have facilities for different releases of a particular album, the management of remixes some 50 years on from the original can be fun. I will put my hand up that many of my files I no longer have the original vinyl and CD's which were lost in the 2007 flooding around here, so while some I can rebuild with the help of the physical media, getting the legacy stuff to play ball is proving fun. What I have done in the last couple of days is once again processed a 20CD set, "30 Years Of Pop", or is that "30 Years of Pop" since MusicBrainz complains about the "Of" and prefers "of" as it does with several short words. The long story is on the wiki, but I now have the local collection complete with embedded cover images and a matching collection in MusicBrianz, having cloned the missing disks from Discogs. The Music app is displaying them nicely and now Plex and Jellyfin are doing a better job due to the embedded metadata provided via Picard. The next step is the 64 disk "Classic Composers" collection which is already on MusicBrainz from the time in the past which I processed that. The thing missing in Music is going to be "Composer" as a grouping rather than "Artist". Something that Plex attempts and fails at as does Jellyfin, but I think that if I can get the top folder structure right, Music may do a better job. It will at least give me albums that have various artists and composers in the album view! I just need to ensure that the embedded metadata has a clean "album" tag, something that I am also appreciating in tidying modern releases such as Pink Floyd's The Wall and The Wall (2007 Remaster) ... At least my collectors edition of Shine On is still on the shelf having not been in the workshop on Honeybourne Airfield in 2007 when a foot of water flowed across the site.

I must also fix the bitweaver search function which has stopped indexing and so that site search is not working properly for this new material. :(

It would be nice if white actually meant white? I was getting to the end of the reel of white bg filament and so opened up the Geeetech white reel, which looks identical as a filament, but as soon as it started printing one saw a distinct grey colour as you will see from the picture. I've got two reels of this 'white', and have just tried to request a return on the second roll, but Banggood's on-line return process will not let me select the product to return. I went to the on-line chat, and was somewhat surprised when after asking the first question I was bounced to a real agent who has now created a ticket, so lets see what happens. 

The other job I have been working on the last few days has been progressing well, and I've just ordered a mixed set of filaments in 20 colours so I can complete the remaining cassettes in the wire storage rack.

My spreadsheet consists of 7 columns, with date(A), type(B), source(C), extra(D), out(E), in(F) and balance(G). Each page of the statement is handled individually to keep things packaged, and the start is to highlight the type and info columns on the statement. This is cut and pasted as raw text into the next C box on the yearly spreadsheet. This results in a list of transaction types followed by the detail, so next step is to shuffle the type list over to column B. Simply highlight, and then move left one column. Next the 'BALANCE BROUGHT FORWARD' can be deleted And the rest of the list needs each secondary field moving right and up in line with the first field value. Click and hold the value, drag right to the D columnto highlight, release and click on the highlight which can be dragged right and up to the line above. The third field needs a little hand editing but don't happen very often. All of mine are paypal payments that resulted in a currency change. Most are easy to spot, and the INT'L ones have the third field copied into the second field value. This leaves a lot of blank lines which can be selected with and then deleted on mass. The resulting tidy list can then be moved up to align with the type list If there is a mismatch between the two lists then it may be a missed second value, or first value moved over that should not have been. Just which values go where becomes second nature in time.

So we now have the list of transactions, one per line, and the dates and amounts can now be copied over. The date column will result in a shorter list as only the first transaction on a date is tagged, and paste is helped by flagging the list as 'date' as you paste. Then the dates can be shuffled down the A column to the right lines. The next column is the out amounts, and this has a similar problem with the lines that have in amounts instead being missed off. Another niggle is that the amounts may or may not be displayed with the £ symbol. A little academic, but for some reason some values come in as a raw number, while others get the text tag ' added which can cause a problem later. I normally select the column and reapply the '£ 123.12' currency format which then displays the ' on the problem lines and that can be deleted using replace all function for speed. Once tidy, the list can be shuffled to restore the gaps for in values and given there are normally only a couple I simply type them in, along with the balance figures, although if there are more than a couple cut and paste may be faster.

Repeat for each page of the statement and it does not take too ling to complete. It WOULD however be nice I one could simply download a ready sorted .csv? Given the mess of secondary fields I think I can see why it's not done, but even that could be addressed in the build process.

Not having mains power in the garage, I'd replaced a number of battery powered items over the last year, using Lidl's Parkside tools for consistency and the discounts. They are not the best quality tools, but given the low level of use, they should perform well. I'd be using the jigsaw with the blade that was fitted, but needed to switch to a metal cutting one to sort out the bars on the 3D printer. But the supplied metal cutting blade would not lock in. It seems that the 'standard' 't shank' blades are a little wooly on just what the profile shout be? Althougn I suspect at least part of my problem is that the quicklock holder does not have any guide to position the blade initially. Since I needed some finer blades anyway I picked up a set market as 'Bosch' which rolled up in a couple of days and this morning I dried one from theat pack, with the same problem. A closer inspection of the tang of the blades that do lock in showed that the shoulder of the tang is smaller and hitting the blade I wanted to use with a file, I modified it to match. It is still a little difficult getting it aligned, but at least it is locked in. So I can get that job done and worry about the next blade when I need it.

I tried following through with Parkside's website, which forwarded me to Lidl customer service, who have passed the buck to 'Grizzly/Novo' and provided contact details for them. This just seems like another supplier who can supply spares for Parkside tools and there is no mention of repairs or support. A single metal jigsaw blade is being sold at £4.99 + shipping, while I only paid £8.10 all in for the 14 I now have and which I can modify to make usable. The question perhaps is just where the fault is in all of this?

I would have popped a question up on the Model Engineer forum, but it seems due to my stay in prison I'm banned from that site :(

So just where do I go next? At least I have now been able to watch 4k resolution videos with surround sound in the lounge. The TV was not smart enough to play them even when copied to a local disk drive. I just says 'there is no audio with this media', and the same often happens with the HD films as well. Even playing via Plex can be fun at times again with no audio, or continually stalling during playback. I've actually watched the entire Harry Potter series finally without any interruptions!

Now to get back to something I've not played with in years, xrandr, and some of it's newer tools. I had a nice setup across four HD monitors many years ago, so I know it can be done. Just need to stop all the 'smart' stuff from messing with a proper setup!

I am expecting later this week to get an answer to the Stage 1 complaint over the handling of this that will apologise for not making it clear that I am not allowed to use the loft, but the fact that the tenancy agreement makes no mention of that situation is more than an 'apology' matter? Amending the tenancy agreement now gives me further grounds to challenge the situation?

I have already been making may notes for a Stage 2 response to that being the case. There are basically three things being quoted as reasons that the space can not be used, but all three, while they were relevant 40 years ago, today's regulations specifically address and so if I was living in a more modern social housing complex, they would not be relevant. That I do need to address the structural issues that the poor quality of the original roof system is exactly what I have been trying to discuss with the housing association for over 6 months ready for when I became an assured tenant. There has already been a complaint about some of the handling of that and yes I am in arrears on my rent as I am on housing benefit which pays in arrears, and now that we have had a PROPER discussion on that, which again should have take place when I moved in, I am paying and extra £10 a week which will result in my slowly being more and more in credit when housing benefit is paid!

So the three reasons given so far.

1. Safety - it's not safe to use the space because it is not floored out and it's not safe to cover.
2. Damp and mould - Not sure on that one
3. The insurance prevents it due to the fire risk - In which case why is it not in the tenancy agreement?

All three of these applied to most buildings built before the 1991 building regulations, such as the flat here, but since that came into effect in 1992 these problems have been addressed. Social housing is not exempt from those regulations, and while builders will still cut corners, most find adding a few hundred pounds of flooring means they can add several thousand pounds to the sales price, even in 'affordable' housing.

Going into more detail, one of the things about 'fire safety' was that in many older building, social and private, the fire walls that are mandatory today were simply not fitted, so the loft spaces became communal. Had that been the case here I would have been kicking up a bit more of a stink before now, but the loft area is private to the flat. SO what other problems come under the 'fire safety' claim?

Damp and mould comes under a similar set of rules with loft space ventilation also now being addressed by current regulations. The fact that the flat here still only has it's now tired three inches of old glass fibre despite claims in the various energy efficiency certificates to the contrary can't be disputed and it something I am happy to add to the discussion.

I have added my own flooring in an area supported by walls below and make no apology for doing that as I had not been told I couldn't. What I would like to do is expand the area used which could provide a 6 metre square area which will take my G gauge railway nicely, but it does require additional joists to carry that weight, and what I have been trying to establish is just what will be required.

I have made mistake which have left me in the situation I am today, and I am currently expecting that I will be resident here for hopefully another 20+ years so I would like to make things comfortable for that period which making use of the loft space will facilitate and I see not problem in addressing the objections to that use? Roll on Friday.