What the USB?

My mouse stopped responding and the keyboard didn't react. The lights on both stayed on.

Hmmm, they are both plugged into my monitor as a USB hub (never been a problem).

• Step one: Unplug and re-plug mouse into monitor. Mouse stays dark.
• Step two: Unplug and re-plug monitor into USB 3 port on the motherboard. Now both the mouse and keyboard are dark.
• Step three: Plug mouse into other USB 3 port on the motherboard. Dead.
• Step four: Unplug all USB devices and plug mouse into USB 2 port on motherboard. DEAD!
• Step five: PANIC!! but notice that the Conky on screen display is updating...
• Step other: ...
• Step six: Press RESET Button and re-plug everything into their normal ports.

Everything comes up normally and works fine...

What did I do before it all went haywire?

Plugged in my phone to the USB port on the monitor and used adb to transfer a single file, unplugged it and boom, that's when the mouse stopped moving.

I have been using Linux in various forms for over 25 years, but I have never seen this happen before.

Looking at the /var/log/messages and /var/log/kern.log there is no smoking gun. Just lots of different messages about me unplugging and re-plugging USB devices into various ports.

There was a single log in messages that seemed a little off

xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: Timeout while waiting for setup device command

But that is pretty generic, so, I guess I just get on with my life and try and forget it...

Step other: Should have been to ssh in from my phone and restart cleanly. That would have been the well thought out and considered approach. :D

Trouble with the Kan

I have a lot of projects that stall, but I want to get them finished. Digging them up then presents the problem of what state are they in and what needs to be done. Which can lead to I-cannot-be-bothered syndrome, because I am not progressing the project and time is "eaten".

I went looking for a Kanban board. Had to be free, open source, offline and run on my system. In the end I settled on something I used use in the quite distant past Nullboard

Kanban is simply post-it notes in columns and comes in various guises.

The beauty of Nullboard is that it is essentially just a single HTML file that you run in your browser and that's it! Ideally you want the few files that come with it to get fonts and other niceties but they are no required.

All the code is in that single JavaScript file and the data is preserved in the browser's local-storage. This means it is slightly volatile. You can manually export the data or set up and agent that backs it up regularly.

This does mean that it is very bare-bones, but for my needs and the in balance for the complexity of the alternatives, I will take it.

I added it to my local lighttp server and now I have a Kanban board for projects I am trying to progress.

$SERVER["socket"] == "127.0.0.1:8090" {
  server.name = "nullboard.jumpstation.co.uk"
  server.document-root = "/var/www/nullboard.jumpstation.co.uk/"
  server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/http_error_nullboard.jumpstation.co.uk.log"
  accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/http_access_nullboard.jumpstation.co.uk.log"
}

and updated my /etc/hosts file

    127.0.0.1   nullboard.jumpstation.co.uk

Will this actually get my projects moving * shrug *, I hope so.