One of the things I’ve greatly missed, since switching my home machines to Linux, was the program NaturalReader. It sounded fairly realistic and had decent integration with the OS. And it was the program that got me thru college. Needing to do more reading than normal, I started to see what sorts of options there are for ArchLinux. I’ve dabbled with things like Orca before, but it was too heavy and didn’t do the one thing I wanted, which was the ability to highlight the text and have the computer read it to me.

With the advent of EFI, the Grub bootloader has become something that seems more trouble than it was worth. So I chose to use Gummiboot as my bootloader and all was well….until recently. I decided to switch my AUR package maintaining software from yaourt to pacaur, main for a change of pace. This tipped me off on a couple things that I was unaware of, mainly that several of my AUR packages were orphaned and not being maintained.

This process is fairly simple, though it can take some time depending on home much data is on the disk. # btrfs balance start -fv -dconvert=single -mconvert=single -sconvert=single /mnt/b2 # btrfs device delete /dev/sdb /mnt/b2 It worked while the pool was online, and also online on the root disk.

gpg --output a.gpg --encrypt a gpg --output a --decrypt a.gpg I learned new information about gpg encrypting, it is still obtuse, and here it is. I set myself as the default recipient, and that made life easier If default recipient is not set gpg --output a.gpg --encrypt --default-recipient-self a

While searching for a good way to break up my large files into smaller pieces, I found the split command. I made a very large error in my implementation of the split command when I forgot to put a M at the end of the –bytes flag, and the command ended up spliting a 8GB file by 1986bytes. split --bytes=1986M a a.sp This results in a very large number of files.