23/04/2019

XPS13 webcam doesn't wake up (BIOS fix)

The XPS13 9370 (summer 2018's model) webcam is horrible anyway (still stuck at the bottom of the display). However, it didn't help that it stopped working when the laptop resumed after suspend (all Kubuntu versions I used from 18.04 upwards).
According to this Dell support discussion, it was a BIOS problem that was fixed in BIOS 1.5.0 - I had 1.3.3. Updating seems to have fixed the problem.
Steps:
Get the current BIOS installer from here.
Put it on a flash drive (unless you've got a USB-C one, the Dell dongle works. MicroSDs don't)
Plug in your power supply.
Press F12 during re-boot, select BIOS Flash Update. There should be a drop-down menu top left on the next screen that lets you select and browse the flash drive. Pick the EXE installer. Install. Reboot.

do-release-upgrade or don't

I couldn't resist the lure of the Dingo, but it took me some time to get there. Long story short: do-release-upgrade is a picky bitch. It kept and kept and kept coming up with a "Your python3 install is corrupted. Please fix the '/usr/bin/python3' symlink." message. That message is produced by a script downloaded into /tmp during the installation process and IMO *should* just make sure that the /usr/bin/python3 symlink points to a correct python binary (might have to be 3.6). After all, the update scripts have a "#!/usr/bin/python3" header.
However, over the years, people have had to resort to the weirdest workarounds:
  • Make sure /usr/bin/python and /usr/bin/python3 point to python3.6
  • Reinstall default python3 
  • Purge anything done by update-alternatives (sudo update-alternatives --remove-all python)
  • Purge python2.x
Reader, I tried all of them.
update-alternatives --display python
sudo update-alternatives --remove-all python
sudo apt install --reinstall ubuntu-release-upgrader-core
sudo apt install --reinstall python3
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/python3.6 /usr/bin/python
sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/python3.6 /usr/bin/python3
sudo apt-get remove --purge python2.7-minimal
In the end, purging python2.7 did the trick. That involved uninstalling inkscape and bits of TeXlive, but it was a small list of dependencies that could be reinstalled after the update. Still, a mess. Serves me right for not bothering to do a clean reinstall.

11/04/2019

articletitle, article-title, gnah!

Joseph Wright is an awesome person who provides handy biblatex styles for numerous journals.
Some of those require article titles in the submission reference list which are later removed for publication, so it makes sense to put in a switch when you load the package:
\usepackage[style=science,articletitle=true]{biblatex}
(the switch is defined in the science.bbx file, btw.) All hunky dory,  except for the fact that the most recent texlive shipping with ubuntu (TeXLive 2018.20180824) still provides biblatex-science from 2016, where the switch is called article-title. I hope the newest versions get into TexLive soon, apparently he's done quite a bit of cleanup.
https://github.com/josephwright/biblatex-science/issues/1
Update: Fixed in the TeXlive 2018.20190227 that came with the Dingo upgrade. Gnah. Now my work desktop and laptop have different versions of the script.