Using sysrq on my laptop - documenting mostly for myself.

My laptop has started freezing sometimes, not sure why. Usually, I can just force power off using the power button and start it again, but it has happened twice that I had to recover the system by booting via a USB drive, chrooting, and recovering the damaged files using fsck or pacman magic.

The linux kernel has:

a ‘magical’ key combo you can hit which the kernel will respond to regardless of whatever else it is doing, unless it is completely locked up.

(More details on archwiki and kernel doc)

To enable, I did:

echo "kernel.sysrq = 244" | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/sysreq.conf
sudo sysctl --system

However, to trigger this on my laptop, I was not able to find the right key combination for SysRq. I was able to make it work using an external keyboard that has a PrintScreen binding on a layer, by using the following:

Press Alt and keep it pressed for the whole sequence: PrintScreen - R - E - I - S - U - B

Currently, PrintScreen on my external keyboard is bound to Caps lock long press + Up arrow.

I reviewed this recently, and found that I needed at least one device where I was logged in to 1password to be able to restore everything. So, I've started keeping a paper key with the 1password secret key so that I can restore it as well.
One addition I wanted to do was to have some kind of manual encryption in the paper key so that I'm secure as well.

According to https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemctl.html , the possible states are not constant and new systemd releases can both add and remove values. This command can be used to display the current set of possible values:

systemctl --state=help

I can think of two reasons:

1. You're not setting trap_exit and the process is exiting with normal reason. But it seems you're setting this.
2. The exit message is somehow getting "eaten" by some other receive -> _ in your gen_server process.

Also, I don't think live reload should affect this. It should work across reloads.
Can you share the full code of your gen_server?

Found Samuel's nice post on capturing data for org via email.

This is very close to what I was looking for to be able to do GTD capture on-the-go either from phone apps like Braintoss or from any email app.

One addition I would like to make is handling attachments in the email by downloading them and attaching to the org entry.
This would be useful for voice notes from Braintoss - it does transcription of the audio and adds it to the email body, but sometimes it doesn't work so well and I have to fall back to listening to the audio. It will also be useful for forwarded emails containing attachments.

#GTD #Emacs #OrgMode