November 2020 was a shocking month, for example. The days grew shorter, and the precious few rays of light were unavailable to most of us as we stayed indoors, hiding from the rain and wind. Those of us who willed ourselves out for a run or walk in such inclement conditions returned home drenched and cold, and no boost in endorphins post-workout could compensate for the harsh brutality our bodies and minds had just endured. The whole month was a grainy black-and-white film of oppression, depression, and suppression, and we had to survive thirty days of it.

December was arguably worse, the only solace coming in the form of the shorter month before the holiday season (which for many, was a pyrrhic victory resulting in a little more sleep but exponentially greater loneliness, isolation, and boredom).

Rumours and reports of vaccine distribution reached our ears in late December-early January, but these felt intangible and far away. January slapped us with thirty-one dark, rainy, snowy, windy days. In an inverse-November pattern, the days grew unnoticeably longer, and felt even more so as we willed ourselves to climb to the top of the hill and say goodbye to the month. For those of us in healthcare, January represented a cacophonic combination of dark...

When I first encountered the issue after upgrading to 5.4.0.31, I followed a recipe somewhere (lost the link, sorry) that asked me to add this line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf:

# 13 May 2020 - fixing dummy output with 31 kernel upgrade
options snd-hda-intel model=generic

The other oft-suggested answer was to try options snd-hda-intel dmic_detect=1, but this disabled my microphone, so I stuck with the above model=generic variation.

The second file to edit was /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, where I added this (ref):

# Kernel regression fix
# https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/06/fix-no-sound-dummy-output-issue-in.html
blacklist snd_soc_skl

However, with the latest 5.4.0.34 upgrade, it appears the standard snd_hda_intel driver has been superseded by the SOF project:

oracology@andromeda:~$ lspci -v | grep -i 'Audio'
00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller (rev 30)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller
    Kernel driver in use: sof-audio-pci

From this helpful link, I came to know that the SOF driver requires the aforementioned line in alsa-base.conf to be changed to options snd-intel-dspcfg dsp_driver=1. This re-enabled my audio, but the microphone stopped working again.

By an extension of logic based on the pattern I found with snd_hda_intel, I tried this, which finally worked to re-enable both speakers and microphone:

# 9 June 2020 - Updated...

Recently however, I found myself needing to use non-G email for formal reasons (where a Gmail address just wasn't suitable), and with this need came the somewhat shocking realisation that I finally needed to use calendars for personal reasons. Having paid very little attention to this space for a few years, I was immediately surprised to discover quite a sophiscated Free Software product called Baïkal that touted both calendar and address book synchronisation (the official technology standards are "CalDAV" and "CardDAV", respectively).

My friends and readers will increasingly be aware that I place a great emphasis on Free Software (not open-source!) in my personal life for as many aspects of technology as possible. Whilst I am unable to become a 100% purist, I try to push towards that ideal bit by bit. I am content with evangelising the message as much as possible by using a Free Software operating system (currently Ubuntu Budgie 20.04;...

Here are some rules of nature that magically get enforced as soon as one exits immigration and begins the slightly urgent canter to the luggage retrievals area:

• Don't ever expect to be first at the carousel. Someone will always beat you. Take your time; there's no point pulling a hamstring after a 12-hour flight.
• Every bag will look like yours.
• Having gone to great lengths to add unique identifiers to your suitcase (like coloured ribbons or vintage stickers), you will still be unsure when the bag goes past you the first time.
• You will identify your bag as soon as it has sailed by an inconvenient distance away, and will need to break social protocols and forcefully move other passengers to retrieve it (although in our post-Coronaviral world, I am curious to watch the awkwardness ensue as we try to use the air around another passenger to Force-push them out of the way sine tactu/contactu).
• There will always be at least one plain metal or cardboard box with a large sign identifying the passenger and a correspondence address. This will never be yours, but you will have a moment of doubt.
• If you try to read the baggage tag, you will need to roll the tag and crane your...

• A test or diagnostic is a method to determine positive/negative state about some aspect of a disease or illness.
• A treatment is any sort of approach to help the body remove the existing disease. Some treatments are full cures, and others help manage symptoms until the body is able to take over and cure itself completely.
• A vaccine is a method of preventing a disease from occurring (i.e. it confers partial or full immunity on the individual against a particular disease or strain of disease).

There are active research projects and trials in all three areas.

Tests/Diagnostics

There are two flavours of tests: one test type, like the one outlined in Appendix 5 in the Public Health England COVID-19 Standard Operating Procedure, determines whether a subject currently has COVID-19 using a technique called real-time Reverse-Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (or real-time RT-PCR), whereas the second type determines whether a subject has had the disease. Keeping in mind that many cases of COVID-19 are completely asymptomatic, it is important to produce both types of tests to provide better population-level counts about the prevalence of the disease and to determine who needs hospital-based treatment.

For a better understanding...

Ever since publishing my previous entry on my putative Covid-19 infection, I have been asked on several occasions how I think I caught the bug. Keeping in mind, again, that I have not yet been tested (due to lack of broad availability of kits for low-priority people, a group of which I am proud and relieved to be a member), I thought I would try and isolate how this might have happened in case future tests return positive.

I am not attempting a comprehensive correlative or causative study here; it is a relatively superficial and qualitative thought experiment on where and when this could have happened to try and understand how easy/hard it is for the virus to spread.

Note: I have linked to several data sources in the previous article for facts that I have restated here.

Here are the data points so far:

1. I first felt symptoms (dry throat) on March 14th. I define this as Day 1.
2. The first day I felt the fever was Day 4.
3. The fever lasted till about Day 9.5. I did not have a thermometer so it was difficult to say with certainty, but assuming the morning fever stopped after Day 8 and the evening weakness stopped at Day 11, I am averaging this to Day 9.5.
4. Anosmia and ageusia started on Day 8. It has continued into Day 14 consistently. I felt some restoration of taste on Day 15, so I will assume, for the purposes of this article, that things...

2020/04/03 Update: Several people have asked me if I could smell onions as I was chopping them for food prep. during my anosmic phase. The answer is NO. It is the strangest sensation to chop onions without having a clue as to their pungency. I also did not cry whilst chopping them, which is another odd disconnected feeling and should highlight how completely anosmic I was, and how I did not really have a hope of being able to smell much else! It is a great relief to me that the anosmia and ageusia were short-lived. I believe I am now merely hyposmic, as my smell palate is returning. My sense of taste has also returned most of the way.

2020/04/02 Update: I posted some information around current approaches to testing, treatments, and vaccines against SARS-CoV-2.

2020/03/28 Update: I posted a qualitative analysis of how I might have gotten ill.

My best self-isolated greetings to everyone! A few days ago I thought I had some of the classic early symptoms of Covid-19, so I thought I would document my symptoms and progress every day, in case it helps others understand what a (mild) infection might look like.

Disclaimer 1: I have NOT been tested yet. I took the route of self-isolating to avoid potentially spreading it, or burdening the health services unnecessarily. I could very well have had a 'flu, but influenza generally does not hit me this hard, nor does it last for as long. I do intend...

After many years of dormancy, I have decided to revive this site for my projects and thoughts.

As the new year begins, irresistible parallels have been drawn to the dawn of the original "Roaring '20s", and I sense optimism and hope amongst many of us. My key mantra for this year is to simplify wherever possible, and this is my way to "go back" in time (note, not backwards). To that end, I thought it would be fun to figure out ways to adapt my habits to this latest iteration of the '20s.

This Site

I like the flat-file concept provided by GravCMS primarily because it feels free of bloat, and rather "old-school". I get to connect via SSH into the server and update these pages in VIM (although there is an excellent Admin module I have installed in those rare cases I need to rely on a GUI editor as I stumble through recollecting my Markdown syntax).

In my day job, I work with unfathomably large data sets across myriad concurrent database connections, millions of file I/O operations, and the like. It is cool, but I miss the elegance of simple, unconnected computing, and so have chosen a more spartan approach in my personal life.

This feels somewhat inspired by Dr Richard Stallman (RMS), guru of GNU and an originator of the Free Software movement; one time over dinner I asked him about the cadence and process with which he interacts with his emails. To...