Herman Miller Aeron: Replacing the Gas Lift

Having documented other people's difficulties with replacing their Herman Miller Aeron gas lifts, it was finally time to do the same for my own 1999 chair. What are the current challenges and tools available for this activity in 2022?

Since acquring my late 90s Aeron, most of the common parts have been replaced (sunken seat pan, plastic clamshell hip bolts, torn seat back, fixed arm rests, wobbly castors, torn lumbar support, seat pan edge foam insert) but whilst the gas lift had always been sticky and the chair wobbled, this was put off due to the reported difficulties. However more recently this was no longer an option to defer replacement since the gas lift would no longer operate, being stuck after lowering. But how easy and what options for parts are available.

Disabling debuginfods and manually loading symbols

Fedora 32 introduced debuginfod which is meant to provide dynamic debug symbols to debugging tools. The problem I've found is that using valgrind is horrifically slow as the debug symbols are downloaded and processed. One way to avoid the debug is to disable debuginfod is to rm /etc/debuginfod/*.urls; echo "set debuginfod enabled off" > /etc/gdbinit.d/debuginfo.gdb. But how do we get our debug symbols for gdb?

A local Openshift 4.x development environment on your laptop

Having access to dev OpenShift 4.x cluster that you control is invaluable - Redhat now provides this ability through their Code Ready Container also known an crc

Setting up the rest of the cluster and dev ecosystem is a little complicated at first so here's a set of notes documenting how it can be done on an 8core / 16Gb Fedora 35 machine.

Custom live Linux USB image: Working around locked down ThinkPad

At work we are getting pushed into a hot-desking setup and each member of staff is being moved onto a thin client ThinkPad. Of course a thin client is nothing more than a customised and stripped down Windows 10 build that connects to the firm's virtual desktop infrastructure, via a combination of CiscoConnect and VMWare Horizon client.

Since we're being forced to carry the ThinkPad to and from the hot-desk office, I'm going to use the ThinkPad for my own dev purposes en route. The ThinkPad's BIOS is not locked down so we can get into the boot menu via F12 or the BIOS setup via Enter but setting my own dev environment is not straight forward.

Ardour DAW on Fedora

Whilst audacity is a well known and simple sound editor it has some limitations when compared to digitial audio workstations (DAWs): this space can be fileld with ardour and a number of basic plugins.