Recipes

Over the years I occasionally used this blog to introduce the food I like. It got bad enough that it even got its own category. Discussing some of those recipes with my wife made me realize how many other recipes are not written down but just in our heads. Even worse, we saw how many recipes have gone away when our respective mothers died. Food we can only try to recreate from memory.

And no, these are not necessarily Croatian recipes in their purest form. While both my wife and I are Croats, our families have a really mixed culinary identity. Moving to USA only made things more diverse as we couldn’t easily find Croatian ingredients or they came at exorbitant prices. Even worse (for purity), we found some new ingredients we really like and those pushed out some that are more authentic.

Different ways wife and I cook, approach the ingredients, and generally think about food also made our family cooking something unique. While there might be a better recipe for each food item we prepare, our variant is not half bad and it’s definitely easier to cook within the limited confines of one’s own home. If nothing else, it’s food our kids adore and maybe having a recipe at some point in the future will allow them to make their childhood food and recreate those flavors.

If Croatian, or more precisely Croatian/American, food is something that piques your curiosity, do check out medved.cc and maybe make a meal or two.

Small C# InfluxDB client

Well, after doing InfluxDB client bash and Go, time came to do the same in C#.

I will not go too much into details as you can see the source code yourself. Suffice it to say it supports both v1 and v2 line protocol. And usage is simple as it gets:

var measurement = new InfluxMeasurement("Tick")
  .AddTag("t1", "Tag1")
  .AddTag("t2", "Tag2")
  .AddField("f1", 42)
  .AddField("f2", true);
client.Queue(measurement);

Source code is of course on GitHub and project is available and NuGet package.

The Minimal InfluxDB Client in Go

While you can get a proper InfluxDB client library for Go, sometime there’s no substitution for rolling one yourself - especially since InfluxDB’s Line Protocol is really easy.

It’s just a matter of constructing a correct URL and setting up just two headers. Something like this:

func sendInfluxData(line string, baseUrl string, org string, bucket string, token string) {
    var url string
    if len(org) > 0 {
        url = fmt.Sprintf("%s/api/v2/write?org=%s&bucket=%s",
			  baseUrl, org, bucket)
    } else {
        url = fmt.Sprintf("%s/api/v2/write?bucket=%s",
			  baseUrl, bucket)
    }

    request, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", url, strings.NewReader(line))
    request.Header.Set("Content-Type", "text/plain")
    if len(token) > 0 {
        request.Header.Set("Authorization", "Token " + token)
    }

    response, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(request)
}

And yes, code doesn’t do error checking nor it has any comments. Deal with it. ;)

Dazed and Confused, but Trying to Continue

Illustration

From time to time, I would see the following slightly poetic statement on my console.

Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 31 on CPU 3.
Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?
Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

The first Internet search brought me sadness and dismay - my hardware was failing. It took going a bit deeper to find that AMD servers have that issue quite often even in the absence of real hardware failure.

Solution? Disable darn C-States. It’s a server after all.

PS: And no, even if you want to keep C-States, reason 31 is nothing to worry about - it’s been happening on my system for 2 years before this and I had no issues with it. It’s just annoyance and nothing more.

Recording Both Microphone and Speaker Under Ubuntu 21.04

When one records audio under Linux, issue that quite a few applications have is recording both microphone input and headphone output. And that’s true for SimpleScreenRecorder, otherwise really good recording application.

However, Linux always has a way around those restrictions and those can be actually found on SimpleScreenRecorder pages if you look deep enough.

pactl load-module module-null-sink \
  sink_name=duplex_out sink_properties=device.description="\"Duplex\ Output\""
pactl load-module module-null-sink \
  sink_name=app_out sink_properties=device.description="\"Application\ Output\""
pactl load-module module-loopback source=app_out.monitor
pactl load-module module-loopback source=app_out.monitor sink=duplex_out
pactl load-module module-loopback sink=duplex_out
pactl set-default-sink app_out

Trick is to essentially create two new output devices (i.e. sinks). One of them (app_out) will just be a target toward which applications should direct their output. Magic happens with the second output (duplex_out) which combines application output and what comes from microphone.

Now when you record audio, you can just point application to Duplex Output and record both sides.

PS: To make these changes permanent, they can be entered into /etc/pulse/default.pa. Of course, quoting rules are bit different so adjust accordingly if you have a space in your description.

…
# Recording setup
load-module module-null-sink sink_name=duplex_out sink_properties=device.description="Duplex\ Output"
load-module module-null-sink sink_name=app_out sink_properties=device.description="Application\ Output"
load-module module-loopback source=app_out.monitor
load-module module-loopback source=app_out.monitor sink=duplex_out
load-module module-loopback sink=duplex_out
set-default-sink app_out
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