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Jump over to technotes.gmi to see my first impressions and some of the initial trouble I had.
Nothing new to report. Busy with family stuff. The Mac Mini running OpenBSD and i3 continues to be a champ. If you want to add a fun read to your daily RSS feed, check out TICOM's Cybertek blog at cybertekzine.com. A lot of his older stuff (going back to the 1990s) has been uploaded to 20ForBeers BBS. You can find it on plain telnet at 20forbeers.com:1337 or ssh at 20forbeers.com:1338. Tell the sysop, Paulie420, that I sent you! For best results use SyncTERM to connect.
Someone on Mastodon pointed out that it seems like the Boomers are really excited for war to start up with Russia again. Being a Gen-Xer, and a military brat to boot, I pointed out that there's a certain level of comfort in being in a situation, even a bad one, that you've navigated before. The Boomers know (or think they know) what the rules are for living in a cold war. During the cold war, aside from the biggest hippies, everyone in the States was on the same side. We didn't have all of this peripheral nonsense that the kids take so seriously.
The problem, of course, is that the battlefield today is grossly different than it was in the 1980s. Yeah, we still have nukes, and MAD is still a thing, but it's not going to be US, Russia, and their proxies duking it out, we also have China and a number of other smaller powers and entities that are punching way over their weight class. Things have the potential to get uglier for us in the US than they have been for a long time.
New post on the tech notes page - check it out!
Had a bunch of crap going on at work, so I haven't been able to work on this... until today. Got i3 going and it works really slick. Just have to do the writeup.
I don't have a ton to say today. I've had a doozy of a cold for the past couple weeks and I think it may have finally broke. Woke up sore, but clear headed and mostly able to breathe.
This is not a judgy statement, but it makes me laugh when I see Youtubers posting their studio tours and they're rocking more mics and audio gear than churches I've run audio for. Yes, most churches are notoriously cheap (ignoring mega/seeker-sensitive types), but it's still good for a laugh.
Belated, of course. I don't spend as much time thinking about blogging and writting as I probably should. I've been thinking a lot about social media lately. I took a week off of Facebook and Instagram as a detox, which actually worked wonders for my mood and now, about a month later, the compulsive tendencies to doom scroll haven't returned. The only regular act I've been taking has been using Facebook's "memories" feature to go back and delete my past posts in bite-sized chunks. Trying to sanitize 10+ years of posts can feel insurmountable, but if you have time to poke through them on a daily basis it's not that bad.
Take this as a reminder to do a backup of your Facebook data as well, if you don't want to lose it.
Tech related, over at the 20FB BBS I uploaded a ton of TICOM's zines and books, enough that Paulie had to create a new file base :). It's great stuff and defeinitely has that old school hacker 'zine vibe with prepper stuff mixed in. It's definitely my kind of content.
I may start posting a little more often as I start tackling the OpenBSD learning curve. I realized recently that virtual machines have made me lazy; when you can roll back any "oops" at the click of a button you stop paying attention to the details. I don't like that.
Aside from ongoing cursing as I try to learn how to interact via SPI with the flash chip on my X200, there's not much to report. I wish the British good luck on their next attempt to blow up Parliament.
We're loving our new home in the midwest/south. We're around 5% mask use and nobody cares. I'll take the risks of too much freedom than the reverse. The pool is nice, and just being able to breathe is blissful. The job situation is still in the air, so we'll see how it goes. Next up, office and radio room build.
I've been a bit absent from gemini. The last month or two have been a whirlwind as we get ready to make a drastic life change. Currently most of my family's "stuff" is in a container, headed toward our new home in the middle of the country. I hope people are sane there; I cannot bear the covid hysteria much longer.
Not really. Getting ready for the big move out of the Seattle area. We've been wanting to leave for a while, but given the current anti-freedom and anti-police environment things have gotten dangerous here. If you want to catch me, find me on 2oForBeers or The Quantum Wormhole.
I've been put off for a piece of surgery I originally had scheduled for March of 2020, and finally had it completed. My quality of life has suffered because some tin pot dictator (our governor) decided to get between me and my doctor about what was right for me.
Now that I'm on the mend, I'm ready to get out of this place. 4-8 week recovery ought to be just enough to get out of this prototyranny before it fully develops.
So I've been geeking out on a couple of BBSes lately, and found a couple that will be regular haunts, I think. I'm playing a couple of games of LORD, and one of them has a bunch of "Other Places", which are basically in game modules (IGMs) that extend the functionality of the game, simulating, well, other places.
A lot of the IGMs out there are buggy, so I'll occasionally throw out of bounds input at them to see if anything interesting happens. Well, at least one IGM programmer decided to have some fun with "hackers" and instead of just sanitizing his input decided to SCREW anyone who messed with him.
I went to the bank in the IGM and attempted to deposit "-100" gold. With improperly sanitized inputs, this would have resulted in me getting 100 gold from the bank for free. This programmer was having none of that and instead conjured up a lynch mob that not only killed me, but drained my accounts, reduced all of my stats to zero, and took my weapon. So now my character is stranded fighting high-level monsters with nothing but magic skills. I now die a lot, so that's fun.
It may not be the 'rona, but I'm fighting the first cold I've had in 18 months or so. Woof. Relocation plans are continuing and there's some surprises afoot, so "interesting times" it is.
Yesterday I found that my local grocery store is carrying ploughman's pickle. Unfortunately it's Heinz, not Branston, but nostalgia won out and today for lunch I had a cheese and pickle sandwich. It's an old childhood favorite; I now feel the urge to go find a Franklin Ace 1000 and play some Flight Simulator or Hacker.
Every now and then I feel a little nostalgic for the old days (I say via a neo-retro platform... hardly a surprise), and seek out BBSes. This time I ended up on aBSiNTHE, and found a core of similar BBSes that share MRC (Multi Relay Chat, basically a shared chat platform among cooperating BBSes). All the classics are there, such as door games and such. Also, I found a great documentary that's not getting the airplay it should: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0OwGSX2IiQ. Check it out!
I don't know why I never thought of this before... I want to use PowerShell from my Linux box to do Active Directory administration. I have a dedicated management server, but I don't always want to be RDP'd to it.PowerShell on Linux is missing a bunch of capabilities for my purposes, and just using PS Remoting to get into my management server isn't suitable because of the double hop problem.
Kicking myself, I just remembered this morning that there's an OpenSSH server available for Windows now. Installed on a test server, started, SSHed in, opened PowerShell, and tested. Of course as expected, no double hop issue. This is going to be an amazing addition to my toolkit.
"We will not give in, without a fight!" I left my ThinkPads behind a while back. They've gotten a little old for some of my work, and while they could still be useful, they didn't fit my needs. I'm super cheap; I haven't paid a penny for any of my ThinkPads. At work, my past three jobs, we've been Dell shops. If ThinkPads hadn't jumped the shark with the six row keyboard I'd be lobbying hard to switch to Lenovo.
Today though, I decided to try Arch and i3 on my old X200. After the venerable T60, the X200 is one of my favorite machines. It's a beautiful device designed for work. Compare this keyboard, extremely similar to IBM's keyboards back to the old T20 series, nearly a 20 year old design, to the MacBook Pro. One allows for speed, accurate, CONFIDENT, typing. The other is flatter than an armadillo on the interstate. At least the MBP has a giant oversized touchpad </eyeroll>.
I thought it might be fun to see what the state of the modding community is for the X200, and I was mighty impressed. The folks at 51nb.com who have been making replacement ThinkPad upgrade motherboards for over a decade built a very compelling set of upgrades into an X200 chassis. 10th gen I5, 3000x2000 IPS display, 32GB RAM, three onboard storage options, it's enough to make any fan of the old ThinkPads drool.
The price for a fully built system is compelling as well, at around $1100. That's not bad at all for what is essentially a boutique system. The only major thing they're missing that I can see is a less proprietary BIOS like Libreboot or Coreboot. In the interest of modernization, converting to USB-C would be nice, too.
I know I sound like the old man yelling at the kids to get off my lawn, but come on manufacturers! It can't be that hard to make something good today. The mechanics are all done, and with miniaturization being what it is, you ought to be able to shove all your fancy new bling in yesterday's case.
I don't recall where it was, perhaps at the recent WWHF webcast about hiring cybersecurity talent, but a speaker was discussing reputation. The type of talent you want to hire is concerned about their own reputation, as well as yours. The point is well taken, and obviously carries beyond the hiring process. Your team has an effect on your reputation, just as you have an effect on theirs.
I used to have a manager who was big on the idea that we "rise and fall as a team". That's a nice idea, and is more frequently true than not in healthy organizations. The organization we were in at the time, not so much. I bring this all up because over the next few days we'll see what kind of organization my employer is. There's an opportunity to scapegoat a couple of members of my team for a failure that, in fairness, several of us share. Do we rise and fall as a team? Does the manager take the full burden of the failure? Will one person be blamed because it's convenient? We'll find out, but my suspicion is that it'll be OK.
Do you know what's almost as bad as going to interviews in an attempt to get hired? Being the one giving the interview. I'm interviewing for a junior security person to be under me and take some of the daily admin work from me, and these interviews are just painful. Two of the three candidates so far haven't spoken adequate English, and the one that did sounded like he was about to cry every time he got a serious question. I'm a nice guy, not intimidating, and do everything I can to encourage them to relax.
Really don't feel like working today, but on the bright side we start interviewing for an assistant for me this afternoon. In spite of living my formative years in the UK, I'm somewhat concerned about cultural differences between me and my new reportee, who will be hired in the UK. The last several IT people we've hired there have been somewhat less than stellar.
I'd been running the test instance via the shell, which for obvious reasons was non-ideal and shutdown when the session timed out over the weekend. Converted to a service as described in the JetForce documentation.
https://github.com/michael-lazar/jetforce#deployment
I've started this simple gemlog for the same reason many others have: I enjoy playing with alt tech and am old enough to bemoan the loss of quality content on the Internet.
Why Green Leader? I'm a huge fan of the Rhodesian struggle for independence. During one particularly daring operation, Green Leader became the voice of the Rhodesians as they routed the terrs from their stronghold in neighboring Zambia.