August 2020 – Something Odd!

Masters of the Universe Barbarian Style

A long time ago in 1987 a game called Barbarian made it’s way to the popular computers of the time. It featured brawny characters fighting to the death to rescue the scantily clad princess (or some such nonsense, game stories didn’t make much sense back then).

It was a great game with memorable music, fluid graphics, gruesome bloody moves and a goblin that would kick the head of your decapitated foe off the side of the arena. The gameplay got boring with time of course but and it was probably more infamous for the cover photo than anything else..

Anyway, after the short history lesson, I discovered that Andrea Baldiraghi announced the release of a new Masters of the Universe game on pico8. It’s inspired by Barbarian as Andrea says on the game homepage.

It has your favourite Masters of the Universe characters and even a rendition of the theme toon. In my first fight I managed to chop the head off Skeletor but the second devolved into a bloody fight to the end when I exhausted my opponent.

It’s embedded above, give it a go. Press Z to attack, X to defend and use the cursor keys to move!

How many cars are on the road?

If you go along to the Transport Infrastructure Ireland website right now you’ll find a map of Ireland with lots of green dots.

These are the locations of cameras recording the volume of traffic on the road. It’s been interesting looking at some of the roads around Cork during the last year. Here are a few charts of traffic on the N20 between Blarney and Cork.

In January traffic maxed out at 1200 vehicles a day in the early morning with a similar bump in the evening.

February was similar, with slightly less vehicles per day.

The Covid-19 Lockdown bit in March. Schools closed on March 12th, pubs closed soon after. Most people who could were working from home. It made a big difference to daily traffic into Cork. From a high of 1200 vehicles in January to 400 in April.

In March only 800 vehicles a day made the journey into Cork. The 2km rule was introduced.

April was worse. The number of vehicles halved. Only 400 vehicles made the journey.

There was a very slight increase in traffic in May to 500 vehicles a day.

June saw a return to March numbers. 800 vehicles a day.

July was similar. Slightly more than 800 vehicles a day.

August isn’t over yet but numbers are slightly down again to less than 800 vehicles a day. Schools return at the end of the month so that will probably make a small bump.

How does this compare to last year? Here are the charts for July and August 2019.

July 2019 when almost 2000 vehicles travelled the road between Blarney and Cork.

August 2019 when Irish people went abroad and the country was noticeably quieter. 1100 vehicles a day.

It’s interesting to see those charts. The lockdown caused a huge drop in traffic as expected. Emissions from cars were down this year of course but agriculture remained the same so our impact on the environment didn’t change much. It’ll probably be worse as people use their cars rather than take public transport.

Out of curiosity I looked at the traffic volume going into Dingle from the Inch Strand side of the peninsula for July this year and last year. There wasn’t much of a change. 500 cars a day passed there in 2020 while only an extra 100 cars made the journey in 2019. They’ll be happy about that in Dingle!

Anyone for Takeaway Pints?

Along with what seemed like a large portion of the country I stayed in Dingle recently. The town was packed. We stayed in a B&B on the edge of town and every day around noon the road outside was a traffic jam of cars snaking through the town. Most people wore masks in the shops but of course there were a few rat lickers too.

I did notice that a lot of people had several empty pint glasses on their tables, and while they may have eaten a €9 meal there was no sign of food. I spotted a happy young couple cross the road with plastic glasses of beer and sit down by the statue of Fungi. It was upsetting given what’s happening with Covid-19.

Now we’re in lockdown again. It’s not the same lockdown we experienced from March onwards but people became lax, and the virus made it’s way into factories. Multiple outbreaks in meat processing plants locked down 3 counties last week. Yesterday the news nationally wasn’t good:

1 death and 190 cases confirmed.
76 are men and 111 are women
75% are under 45 years of age
75 are confirmed to be associated with outbreaks or are close contacts of a confirmed case
14 cases have been identified as community transmission
48 are in Kildare, 46 in Dublin, 38 in Tipperary, 20 in Limerick, 7 in Clare and the rest of the 31 cases are in Carlow, Cork, Kerry, Kilkenny, Laois, Louth, Meath, Offaly, Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow.

And so the restrictions:

All outdoor events will be limited to 15 people, down from 200, under strict new limits on public gatherings agreed this afternoon.
Under the restrictions that will remain in place until 13 September at the earliest, indoor events will be limited to six people, reduced from 50, except for businesses such as shops and restaurants, which are subject to separate rules.
Weddings will be exempt from the new restrictions, meaning they can go ahead with 50 people.
The measures agreed by Cabinet will mean that matches and other sporting fixtures will have to take place behind closed doors.
Gardaí will be given new powers to enforce rules around social gatherings, particularly in restaurants or bars serving food, and in private homes.
Under the measures agreed by Cabinet, people will be advised to work from home and to avoid using public transport, unless absolutely necessary.

Which leads some to say the GAA should encourage weddings at their matches so 50 people can watch.

Still confused, here’s a clear explanation.

new restrictions explained pic.twitter.com/h1XIBHhin1
— Killian Sundermann (@killersundymann) August 19, 2020

These graphs are not good are they?

Schools open soon. Hopefully we can reduce the community spread or we’ll be closing schools within a month.

Oh yes, watch out for Storm Ellen tonight. There’s a status red warning for Cork!

One of those rare bugs

I can’t login to my Raspberry PI3. When I ssh into it the password is rejected. When I plugged a keyboard and HDMI cable in the login would fail silently at first and then after reboot it would tell me the password was wrong.

Fearing the worst, that the small machine had been hacked, I plugged it out and attempted to go into single user mode but even that didn’t work. I tried various cmdline.txt changes, I saw an odd message saying:

sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

That wasn’t the worst. I even managed to generate a kernel panic once!

When I was just about ready to give up I plugged in the HDMI cable again and saw a strange libcrypt error show up.

/sbin/sulogin error while loading shared libraries: libcrypt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory

A quick search for that message brings me to the one thread on the Internet about it.

Unfortunately, I don’t have another Linux machine handy to copy libc6 from but I do have a backup of the SD card and that worked. I made a backup with Disk Utility (yes, don’t sneer, I can use dd too) and after making a new backup I restored the old backup with Etcher.

The last time I did an apt upgrade was just before a recent trip where I was depending on the RPI3 for my Plex music. Luckily the Plex server hadn’t restarted in that time and must have been using the old libc6!

Another tool that was useful here was ext4fuse which I installed through Homebrew. It’s even possible to mount an ext4 partition from an SD card image by first mounting the boot partition with Disk Utility, checking the device with df -h and then using the very next device number like this:

ext4fuse /dev/disk9s2 /Volumes/rpi -o allow_other

Read only access to the Raspberry PI/Linux part of the image! Strangely enough it doesn’t show in Finder but df shows it is mounted.

Now to make a new SD card backup before I update anything else with apt.