[Just a quick post to get info in one place, sorry!] Info I have a GPD Pocket: running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS with a BCM4356 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (PCI ID 14e4:43ec) with some issues: It appears like only 2.4GHz networks are being detected, and not 5GHz networks. That being said, our router is dual-band and I can’t see either network. Attempting to connect to a random 2.4GHz network crashes the network manager (WiFi icon/settings entry disappears, then reappears after a few seconds). dmesg doesn’t seem to contain anything relevant, apart from maybe: /usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/netplan failed with exit status 1. Connecting a phone over USB and using USB tethering was working fine when this all started, but that seems to have stopped working too now (: Updates Did the country code change and rebooted, now is displaying 5GHz networks (or at least, my network…) — attempting to connect to it still crashes the network manager. Resolution!!! With some prompting by a littlefox, I dug through journalctl -f a bit deeper and found references to stable-ssid being an invalid macaddress for a given network (i.e. a yaml file in /etc/netplan) — at this point I was getting pissed off so I just rm /etc/netplan/*.yaml and retried connecting to a network… which worked. ...

Ole Hedeager, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Content Warning: suicide/self-harm This post was adapted from a mixture of an old blog post, and something I posted on my Wikipedia user page. According to my site views, nearly 150 unique visitors saw my (now removed) blog post the other day - normally I’d be pretty happy about that, but the post yesterday really wasn’t great. It’s not that it was badly written, but on reading it back today it just isn’t the type of post I want to making. Let me explain why… ...

I made a fedi post about ADHD-y burn-out earlier, and it got me thinking — we should probably try to normalise: “Today I got stuck on what should have been a really basic programming task and I needed to ask for help” in our everyday lives, if not for my own mental health, for (often newer, but not always) developers getting really down and upset because they are struggling with something. I see that way too often in the communities I’m active in and in mentoring that I do. ...

Although getting a pointless degree in Community Governance Studies1 would allow me to preface the shit I spout with “as someone with a degree in..”, half the points I (try to) make about The Wikimedia Community™ really are just common sense — they are rarely “deep insights based off my 10+ years volunteering”, nor things I’ve figured out in my year-and-a-bit working for the Foundation in a community-facing-ish role. That’s not to say there aren’t deeper insights to be figured out by long-term volunteers, staff, or those with specific industry experience in community governance, but these probably ain’t it. ...

Excuse the mess, I’m rebuilding my blog using https://gohugo.io (and it’s going swimmingly)..