Yesterday, I woke up to my Element desktop being down. After ruling out a firewall issue and replicating on multiple clients and IPs, I discovered that Synapse could not connect to its database.

journalctl logs:

Jan 08 17:28:52 justmatrix matrix-synapse[343655]: File "/opt/venvs/matrix-synapse/lib/python3.11/site-packages/psycopg2/__init__.py", line 122, in connect Jan 08 17:28:52 justmatrix matrix-synapse[343655]: conn = _connect(dsn, connection_factory=connection_factory, **kwasync) Jan 08 17:28:52 justmatrix matrix-synapse[343655]: psycopg2.OperationalError: connection to server at "X.X.X.X", port 5432 failed: Connection refused Jan 08 17:28:52 justmatrix matrix-synapse[343655]: Is the server running on that host and accepting TCP/IP connections?

It’s been some time since I’ve made it all the way to Glen Helen Amphitheater. Seeing Limp Bizkit for the first time felt like a good enough reason. At the height of my nü-metal listening days, they were easily in my top 3.

The supporting acts were all unknown to me and I don’t think I liked any of it. Limp’s setlist had all the hits but I didn’t like all the tape breaks. That could’ve been a couple more songs. Some deep cuts from Significant Other would have been sick. They also didn’t play the full song in the case of Re-Arranged and Nookie. And Break Stuff was played twice. Disappointing.

I’ve been on a TMNT kick lately with the new games, movie and tv show and thought, “You know what? I’m going to go back and read the original comics.” For the first time. I don’t think I’ve actually ever read a comic book from start to finish before. I started things off with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Collection Volumes 1 through 5. These books focus on stories by co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. They omit guest issues. For the sake of completeness and curiosity though I wanted to read those too but decided to fill those gaps digitally. That’s where Komga comes in.

I found out about this show late and ended up on the floor. I can’t do standing anymore but decided to tough it out since I hadn’t seen him before. This ticket was $47, which is a nice break from some of the other concerts I’ve been to lately.

Entering the venue, I was greeted with an error. After moving around a bit, it finally worked. Just give us a paper ticket, man. It’s much easier to get in that way. But I know, you’d rather lock us in to your scummy platform and control the second-hand market, too, while claiming it’s to protect us from losing our tickets. I’ve never lost a ticket in my life. In fact, I still have all my old ticket stubs. Watching that paper and ink fade is oddly gratifying.

Every time I record a gig, I just press record and forget about it. I don’t stop and start for each song. That seems like it’d be prone to error as you don’t know what’s going to happen in a live setting. I do want them separated though, so I do it later at the computer with Ardour. For this post, I’m working with version 8.6.0.

One method you might consider first is:

I’d been wanting to make my next upgrade for the past few years but what delayed things is that I decided I wanted to run a more open BIOS next time around and that comes with various limitations and compromises to consider. Depending on how strict you adhere to the free/open-source software ideology, you could be relegated to ancient hardware circa 2008-2009. For my needs and preferences, I couldn’t do it, but I respect those who can. I wanted reasonably modern hardware, a desktop not a laptop, and a flash process that didn’t require hardware flash tools. So this is not 100% blob free and Intel’s ME is still present.