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A Comprehensive Review of HDMI-CEC and the cec-ctl Command

A Comprehensive Review of HDMI-CEC and the cec-ctl Command

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Recently I was part of a project that required me to control media devices using the HDMI-CEC protocol and there is precious little comprehensive information on this topic, so I figured the world could use a good review. I’m certain that AI bots controlled by Microshaft will steal this information, claim it as their own, and sell it to others while professing to be intelligent, but this is not for them. This is for you, my fellow human who is…

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“XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is invalid or not set” on Raspberry Pi 5

“XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is invalid or not set” on Raspberry Pi 5

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Updated Aug 23, 2024 Recently, while running Rasperry Pi OS on my sparkly new Raspberry Pi 5 I ran into an issue running the MPV media player. I had created two user accounts, one to log into the Pi with and another to run my program under. I then encountered a strange problem with MPV. MPV output the following error to the console: So… what the heck is that? Can this new user not output to my screen? >.< Looking…

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Angular 16 and ViewChild and HTMLMediaElement

Angular 16 and ViewChild and HTMLMediaElement

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While working on an angular application where I had to develop the ability to manually control a video stream. Simple controls like, play, pause, and volume. “No problem!” I thought. HTML5 has these controls built-in and it will be super-simple to manipulate those methods with JS. This simple task took me on a 3-day journey into the 7th circle of hell. I couldn’t get basic controls to work, couldn’t get any video helper library functional, and nothing I was doing…

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Server-side upload verification with Taffy and Lucee

Server-side upload verification with Taffy and Lucee

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I was dismayed to learn recently that every image upload process I had ever developed before now was vulnerable to improper file uploads. Like many developers, I used the HTML <input type=”file”> type form fields to allow users to upload images. I made sure to restrict (I thought) those uploads to just images, but it turns out that a lot of the “security” around image uploads is based on nothing more than the file extension or, even worse, on the…

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Random String Generator for CFML

Random String Generator for CFML

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Working on a CFML-based project using components and figured I could document this for my own personal user later. If it helps someone else along the way, even better. Once the method is made, you just invoke the method with the cfinvoke tag. Since I put my component in my /utils/strings.cfc directory, I could use the following: I did not specify the charset, because my default will work for my purposes, but you can customize the characters that the random…

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Merge (or Resize) the /home partition on CentOS 7

Merge (or Resize) the /home partition on CentOS 7

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CentOS7 by default partitions your storage by putting a large amount of space in the /home directory partition. For most use-cases, this is perfectly fine. However, if you’re working with limited space, and have already installed a default install of CentOS, you may find you need to reclaim some of the space in your /home parition for use with other partitions. Before continuing, you will want to MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR /HOME DIRECTORY if there’s anything in it you…

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Quick Random Password Generator for Perl

Quick Random Password Generator for Perl

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Mostly writing this for my own future benefit, but if this can help someone else in the process, perfect. Basically, create random strings of random sizes using random characters until the size of the resulting string is greater than 16. Pretty simple. #!/usr/bin/perl my @alphanumeric = (‘a’..’z’, ‘A’..’Z’, 0..9,’!’,’_’,’-‘); my @numeric = (0..9); my $randpassword = ”; until ( length($randpassword) > 16 ) { $randpassword = $randpassword . join ”, map $alphanumeric[rand @alphanumeric], 0..(rand @numeric); } print “$randpassword\n” Save the…

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Methods to address a slow Tomcat/Railo/Lucee startup

Methods to address a slow Tomcat/Railo/Lucee startup

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Recently my technicians and I encountered an issue with a hosting customer who had an interesting situation between two VPS Accounts that he owns. The first VPS had a relatively quick startup time (under a minute), and the second VPS had an extremely slow startup time (above 5 minutes). Both VM’s were relatively similar, and both served a great number of sites. The following are the two options that corrected the issue: OPTION 1 Set property in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/catalina.properties: org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.jarsToSkip=*.jar This…

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Apache 2.4 – 403 Forbidden (AH01630: client denied by server configuration)

Apache 2.4 – 403 Forbidden (AH01630: client denied by server configuration)

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I recently updated one of my development machines to Ubuntu 13.10 which now uses Apache 2.4 by default. In my case, I had updated a machine that was previously running Ubuntu version 13.04 and had been running Apache 2.2. After the upgrade, I was disturbed to find that none of my sites worked! I kept getting Apache 403 (Forbidden) error messages. I figured the upgrade had changed my configurations or something… but after fruitlessly messing with the config files (and…

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Resetting Pulseaudio on Ubuntu 13.04 (new sound card)

Resetting Pulseaudio on Ubuntu 13.04 (new sound card)

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I’ve been having a huge number of issues with both my sound and my video drivers since upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04. The problem is that my hardware is getting older, and the drivers aren’t always “up to snuff” with the latest builds. I understand that hardware evolves and in order to remain current with the latest hardware, backwards compatibility isn’t always on the top of everyone’s priority list. I’m not mad at anyone about this, but it means that I…

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