I’m on a roll with problems (3270)

So I started MVS in hercules mainframe emulator on Manjaro. Went to start a x3270 terminal. It did not exist…no problem I’ll just install it. So I installed it. But it said it required a restart. Hardly anything requires a restart. Ok I need to try and shutdown MVS manually. Found manual said something like shutting down bsppilot, and gave the command…it didn’t know what I was talking about. So reentered with leading /. That seemed to work. Couldn’t they just show that in the command? Of course the script wanted to know if I wanted to (S)top or (C)ontinue or something like that. So I type C…it didn’t like that! I type /C…it didn’t like that either!!! Anywho I seemingly got it to end…returned to hercules prompt. Restart…good! Start MVS…good! Start x3270, and I get this…

Just look at that wonderful menu and error message!

USB Mic issue

So the USB mic issue that I had on Linux Mint apparently is not an issue on Manjaro. I’m pretty sure I used it on Mint with no problems before. The problem is if I record a 10sec clip in audacity, it plays back in about as nano second. I deleted audacities setting folder with no change. However my webcam mic works fine on Mint.

Large Manjaro update/So much to do

Over a GB with 227 updates. Looking at “uname -a” output doesn’t seem to be using a new kernal. Or is it?

To do…

  • Find out why. See above.
  • Get Hugo to use relative addressing so I can move hugo static site to subfolder.
  • See if I can use “Samson Q2U Recording and Podcasting Mic”

Kernal Stuff

[bill@bill-ms7b79 ~]$ uname -a
Linux bill-ms7b79 5.9.16-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Dec 21 22:00:46 UTC 2020 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[bill@bill-ms7b79 ~]$

==> Warning:
-> Kernel has been updated. Modules of the current kernel
-> have been backed up so you can continue to use your
-> computer. However, the new kernel will only work
-> at next boot.

It would be nice if the above message told what new kernal should be!

uname -a has been showing 5.9.16-1-MANJARO for a while now!

Cursor highlight for videos

I see these highlighted cursors all the time on YouTube, but trying to find out how to do it wasn’t easy. It’s so easy to loose track of that mouse pointer in a video. Install some obscure package or some double talk answer. It seemed almost like it was some trade secret. After some digging. I found this link. Better yet…let’s cut to the chase and just go here, download, extract and move to your .icon directory. Not the big containing folder …the individual cursor folders. There were about 7 different colors for the highlight. I wanted yellow but it looked pea green on my screen. Then select from mouse pointer, where your Themes setting is.

x3270 wide screen

I hadn’t played with mainframe emulation for a while, and I was reviewing my notes. So I started up MVS using the TK4- package. I then used the x3270 terminal emulator to get a TSO/ISPF session as I always did by typing “x3270 127.0.0.1:3270” and as usual I found viewing 132 column listings tedious [PF10/PF11 to scroll left/right]. So I was reviewing the documentation and found I could get a 132×27 screen by including the “-model” option, like so x3270 -model 3279-5 127.0.0.1:3270. And you can see below the 3279-5 also uses colors. You give up some rows but gain more columns and color. Oh man I wish I knew this earlier. Don’t you hate it when you find a simple solution, you could have been using all along, that you didn’t know about? I hadn’t seen this used in any video or read about it earlier. And it certainly makes life easier especially when viewing output. Of course it also helps when viewing the output of wide data sets…less scrolling!

132 columns
So who’d you rather?
132 columns (left above the Hercules console ) or 80 columns (right)

VLC loop buttons

Well I’m a genious. Just as VLC has announced a big interface design, for it’s upcoming 4.0 version, I decide to figure out the meanings of the icons for looping. I’ve used VLC for years, it began in 2001, so maybe 2 decades, And never took the time to figure out the differences. They could have come up with more meaningful icons, IMHO. The middle button is the loop icon.


Loop Off


Loop All


Loop One

If you look at them the only difference between Loop Off and Loop All is the shade. I guess that spec in the middle of Loop One, is a 1. Going to the trouble of documenting this, it doesn’t seem that hard. And yet through the years I just kept mindlessly clicking the button until it did what I wanted. How about just a simple ASCII character? O,A,1…(O)ff, (A)ll and (1).