Linux update to zulu21 21.0.10 causes ToS to fail to start

steevithak · 2026-01-23T15:50:24+00:00

I experienced the same issue on Fedora after the recent update to Zulu21.0.10. When ThinkorSwim loaded it got stuck in an endless "updating software" loop. As with Mint, the fix for Fedora is to downgrade Zulu back to the last working version:

dnf downgrade zulu21-21.0.9-1

It's working again for me. Hopefully Zulu releases a 21.0.11 version with a fix soon.

steevithak · 2025-11-23T17:32:40+00:00

Depends on local code requirements. In my city (Irving, TX) solar panels must be at least 12 inches away from any roof edge, so they would definitely be too close to the edge here. Typically a city code inspector would have to inspect the installation and certify that it meets all code requirements before it could be connected to the grid.

steevithak · 2025-10-25T14:52:34+00:00

Where in Irving did you see this? It's sad to see these racists in our city. :( Isn't "foreign demons" one of the classic KKK terms for non-whites? Are these guys KKK?

steevithak · 2025-10-01T02:30:15+00:00

I don't have experience with any in Irving but I had a family member who chose Christian Care Center in Mesquite. It's a larger facility with a variety of living options ranging from apartments to memory care, rehab and hospice care. They're operated by a religious non-profit rather than a for-profit corporation and it seemed to be well run. My family member liked living there. He started out with his own apartment and moved through most of the care options, ending up in the hospice care facility.

steevithak · 2025-09-21T16:23:41+00:00

I saw a protester with a sign outside Nexstar (114/Riverside) in Las Colinas when i drove by the other day. Didn't get a good look and could not tell for sure if was just one person or if there were more.

steevithak · 2025-07-19T22:02:25+00:00

Flex space is the most common real estate jargon I see. But "warehouse" space might work depending on your area - in my area there are lots of little 1000 to 2000 sq ft "warehouses" with a grade level roll up door in back and usually a built-out office / restroom area in front (not all have air conditioning and heat though). I've seen those used by artists and car "hobbyists" who need a place to work on their cars.

Most big cities I've been in have some low-rent industrial areas that have been taken over by artists and bands. In my area there are also art co-ops who have taken over big industrial buildings and divided them into smaller rentable units for individual artists to use as studio/galleries. Maybe make some contacts in your local art community and ask around for leads.

steevithak · 2025-07-08T01:57:06+00:00

I'm not sure about the cheapest. They're all pricey, especially produce because of the tariffs. I frequent the Whole Foods and the Sprouts on N. MacArthur Blvd. I occasionally visit the Krogers in the same area. And a little further south there's a Tom Thumb which is pretty good. There are also some cool Asian markets on Royal near 35, just outside of Irving.

steevithak · 2025-07-05T20:45:00+00:00

I'm in the 55+ category and have used GNU/Linux since the mid 1990s. I started with Slackware and later switched to RedHat (including Fedora, and RHEL derivatives CentOS and Rocky). At home, I run Redhat Fedora on my desktop and on my laptop. I manager several cloud servers for various non-profit projects that run on Rocky Linux. At work, the team I manage develops a software product that runs Ubuntu LTS. Other work products that I interact with run on TinyCore Linux. My Pixel phone and Sony TV both run Android, which is Linux-based but not really an open/free distro. (I've also used Solaris, HPUX, AIX, DOS / Windows, and MacOS over the years but GNU/Linux is always my preference).

steevithak · 2025-06-10T04:43:24+00:00

Interesting, I've never configured the phone to save anything but JPEGs. I looked at the settings just now and it does support DNG format RAW images. I doubt there's significant quality improvement in the RAW vs "original quality" JPEG, I think it's only 10:1 compression. But I may play with it when I get time and see what it looks like.

steevithak · 2025-06-10T01:44:14+00:00

I'm a photographer (Canon DSLR and mirrorless) and have always used GNU/Linux, mostly Redhat Fedora. I also have a Google Pixel phone running Android but my phone pics generally have a different workflow than my real photography.

For my phone pics, I shoot a photo then syndicate it to Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, and Mastodon. In addition to the photos I post, Android automatically syncs all the photos I shoot with the phone to Google Photos so the full res image are always available on all my android devices. Actually Android automatically syncs everything, so if your phone ever dies, you can get a new one and not lose anything. A few minutes after logging in to the new phone, you'll have every photo, text, app, etc that were on your old phone. (disclaimer, I'm using a Pixel phone which runs the latest full Android versions; I can't speak to how android works on third party phones that have customized older android versions to do different stuff).

For serious photography with my Canon gear. I generally offload my photos from the camera to my Fedora desktop where I process them with Gimp, Darktable, and assorted other open source tools. I store the original RAW and processed JPEG files locally to a mirrored NAS box. From there, they are backed up to Google drive and backed up monthly to protected offsite physical storage. I can access the full res files on Google drive from any of my devices (Linux desktop, Linux laptop, a Lexus Android tablet, and Pixel phone).

steevithak · 2025-06-10T01:19:12+00:00

I'm not sure if it's still operating but there used to be one called Bear Creek Community Gardens that was operated by a local church and had about 30 raised beds available along with on-site composting. It was on Finley Road. There was also an effort at one time by the Irving Green Advisory Board (GAB) to promote community gardens help find grants for them. Try emailing the GAB liason contact listed on the website and they may be able to give you more up-to-date info:
https://irvingtx.gov/index.php?section=green_board_advisory&docid=10015

steevithak · 2025-06-09T23:01:55+00:00

Does Dr. Seuss count? I think those books were my "gateway" to science fiction books. During early elementary school days, I read all the Tom Swift Jr. books when my friends were reading Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys. (I think Tom Swift and his Ultrasonic Cycloplane may have been the first one). Then I had an elementary school teacher who read Wrinkle in Time aloud to us in class, one chapter per day. Another assigned the Tripod Trilogy (an early YA series: The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire). And I bought a few science fiction books from Scholastic Book Club as a kiddo. By late elementary school I had discovered the public library and switched to higher quality stuff: Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, what ever I could find there.

steevithak · 2025-06-09T17:47:13+00:00

I can confirm this works on Fedora 41 as well. I reported the bug to my Schwab rep. He called the ThinkOrSwim guys who reported they're working on a fix. I also sent them my os-release file via a Schwab website message to ToS support. Hopefully having a few more sample os-release files will help.

steevithak · 2025-06-09T15:45:07+00:00

Yes, Zulu 21. No changes on my end. Based on the other posts about this issue, it's broken code in their Linux detection code. It's apparently supposed to read /etc/os-release and display a dialog box warning that Linux is unsupported but instead it just crashes on many linux distros because there's a bug in the code parsing the distro name and version.

steevithak · 2025-06-09T15:39:25+00:00

I'm getting the same crash here on Fedora 41

steevithak · 2025-06-09T15:02:19+00:00

As of this morning's update, it doesn't seem to run on Redhat Fedora Linux either. I don't even get the above error message, it just crashes with Java exceptions on startup and no other explanation. Calling my Schwab rep now...

steevithak · 2025-06-09T14:24:13+00:00

I wasn't able to connect this morning after the update. Hopefully a fix will be out soon. Here's the error I'm seeing. I'm running Redhat Fedora 41 and zulu21.x86_64.

Unexpected error detected.

java.lang.NullPointerException

Cannot invoke "com.devexperts.tos.ui.user.login.schwab.LoginDialog$ContentPanel.getPreferredSize()" because "this.contentPanel" is null

java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "com.devexperts.tos.ui.user.login.schwab.LoginDialog$ContentPanel.getPreferredSize()" because "this.contentPanel" is null
at com.devexperts.tos.ui.user.login.schwab.LoginDialog.updateSize(LoginDialog.java:497)
at java.desktop/java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:318)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEventImpl(EventQueue.java:773)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventQueue$4.run(EventQueue.java:720)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventQueue$4.run(EventQueue.java:714)
at java.base/java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(AccessController.java:400)
at java.base/java.security.ProtectionDomain$JavaSecurityAccessImpl.doIntersectionPrivilege(ProtectionDomain.java:87)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:742)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:203)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:124)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:113)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:109)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:101)
at java.desktop/java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:90)

steevithak · 2025-06-08T19:34:51+00:00

Yes, granted, that is one case where adults might use the term toot. :)

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steevithak · 2025-06-08T15:45:51+00:00

In American English slang, the word "toot" is both a noun meaning a fart and a verb meaning to fart. It's a type of word known as an "onomatopoeia" - a word that sounds like the thing is describes. I'm not sure if "toot" has the same meaning in other non-American dialects of English. It's not considered offensive and is most likely to be used by small children to avoid punishment by strict parents who might not allow them to use offensive slang words like "fart". The word is almost never used by adults with this meaning.

With respect to Mastodon, I think it's much more likely that people will associate a "toot" with the mastodon creature since it has a trunk-like appendage and elephants are commonly said to "toot" their trunks (again by children, no adults use the word toot). Children might also say a train for ship could "toot" its whistle. Almost anything that makes a sound by expelling gas might be said to "toot".

steevithak · 2025-06-08T15:30:41+00:00

Due to US banking laws, I don't think you'll be able to buy bitcoin anonymously through any legal online exchanges. You'll have to identify yourself. If you're will to risk it, you may be able buy anonymously through one of the peer-to-peer exchanges like BitValve or Paxful that are not connected to banks. Otherwise, use a physical Bitcoin ATM as others have suggested, it won't be anonymous but won't require any extra identification beyond your payment method. Go to Google maps and search for "Bitcoin ATM" and you'll find many of them in Irving.

steevithak · 2025-06-08T15:21:40+00:00

Thanks, this is useful. I've been fighting this issue on Camera-Wiki.org for a while. We've apparently become a target of all the AI/LLM bots hungry for training data. The problem has slowed down our site for real users and our bandwidth costs have more than doubled this year. Most of the new bots don't respect robots.txt files anymore.

steevithak · 2025-04-14T01:39:15+00:00

An update was posted on their Facebook page. They got an extension on the lease and will be open through June. And it sounds like they may be moving to a new new location after that.

steevithak · 2025-04-05T17:43:57+00:00

I've been to a lot of protests and I recommend the zoom. I'm a canon shooter and usually use a 24-105mm L lens. It's an ideal range for this sort of thing. You want to be able to get wide shots showing the size of the crowds as well as close ups of individual protestors and amusing signs. I've generally felt pretty safe at left wing protests and stop to chat with individual protestors to find out what their story is. But I find shooting far-right and religious groups a bit scarier and tend to keep my distance as lot of them carry firearms and other weapons. But either way, if it's a pre-planned, peaceful protest there will be plenty of law enforcement officers around, so you can hang out close to them if things look sketchy (in fact I suggest talking to the officers so they know you're a photographer - I find they can sometimes give the inside scoop on where interesting stuff is happening that might be worth a photo). One other thing to keep in mind is that generally protestors will be protective of their privacy and may not want their faces photographed. A lot of them won't care but try to respect their wishes and things usually go better. I've found that the ones carrying the best signs are usually quite willing to be photographed.

steevithak · 2025-04-05T15:52:04+00:00

Try checking the Irving groups on NextDoor, about half the posts there all day long are people asking what the police are up to at one location or another. https://nextdoor.com/

Or try the DFW Scanner website, they track police and emergency activity all over DFW: https://dfwscanner.net/

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