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I recently had to make a drive from Oklahoma to Oregon and back. We rented one of the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrids. What a joke. The gas version we rented last year got about 26MPG. The hybrid got around 22.
"But GLFC," you say, "at least you can plug it in and get some free travel!" On our entire trip, we saw a single charger. We plugged into a charger at the mall, and three hours later we were 60% charged and had a 26 mile range. What a freaking joke.
In other news, I'm moving into a newly vacated space in my house. The current economy is hindering the outfit, though. I need bookcases, but there aren't many used ones in the usual places, Ikea in Dallas didn't have any of the ones I wanted, and plywood is still too high to build. I did score a desk that I like for about $40 that needed some repair. Some screws, woodglue, and a scrap of plywood later and it's solid.
I'm also playing with Dasharo's open source firmware for the Optiplex 9010, but that deserves a post on its own once I get everything dialed in.
Found a link to this over a Cobradile's gopherhole, which I linked to from Roman's, both guys I know passingly from the BBS scene.
Hey, at least we're talking about something other than Gemini itself, right?
1. If you had to live in an inner-city area for the next 10 years - where would that be, and in what type of domicile.
Oklahoma City. It's close to where I live now and doesn't have anywhere near the crime and drug problems of most cities. Inner city implies that single-family dwellings are out, so I'd probably go for the highest apartment floor I could get.
2. Have you lived in many places, or few? What was your favourite?
Many; two different countries (US and UK), and many different states on both sides of the US. Oklahoma is currently my favorite, with the only drawback being the lack of trees. I miss trees and mountains, but everything else makes up for it.
3. What do you love about where you live now?
Big skies, fun weather, central location in the country, safety and freedom.
4. Circumstances force you to move to a place in a historical time for the remainder of your life. Where and when is this?
Assuming we're talking about somewhere other than now, and that we're only talking about the starting point, I'd probably hit the 1950s, Western Washington state.
5. Describe your dream-home. What is your favourite thing about it? Where is it?
Lakefront cabin in the foothills of some mountains, fireplace, big library.
1. What year will mankind next set (human) foot on the moon, and who (nation state, corporate entity, etc) will it be?
I'm not overly confident that we will touch down again. Modern humanity doesn't have the risk tolerance; we'll always find an excuse to not go.
2. Stephenson's "Diamond Age" or Doctorow's "Walkaway"?
"Diamond Age" all day long. "Walkaway" had an interesting concept or two, but glossed over the many, many, problems with Doctrow's desired outcomes. His lack of understanding of human nature screamed out in every chapter. It was mental masturbation at best, belonging in the same category as My Little Pony fanfic.
3. Will artificial general intelligence be achieved, and if so, when is that likely to be? What will it change about our lives?
I doubt it.
4. (When/ will) the COVID-19 pandemic be declared over - ie "endemic", seasonal and no longer an emergency situation?
By the time I'm answering this it's over, just in time for the mid term elections!
5. What does the year 2072 look like in your mind's eye?
If nothing changes, I'm thinking we'll see a cyberpunk-style dystoptian hellscape without any of the upsides of advanced technologies.
Well that was fun. Thanks for the idea Bronzie!
The Librem 14 fell over again, waiting for it to come back from RMA. Still cleaning up post-breach. Weather in OK is finally pleasant, hopefully it'll stick around for a while before it gets cold.
Apologies for not posting more. Lots going on: breach at work, teenager dealing with teenage stuff, my Librem laptop crapping the bed... It's been a heck of a month.
It's hot here in Oklahoma right now. The locals say this is abnormally high by ~10 degrees Fahrenheit. It's put a kink in my bike riding, though. Need to get a rear rack.
I recently finished one of Gibson's newer books, "Peripheral". It definitely took a few chapters to get into it, and while there were some interesting twists it was definitely pretty weak. Maybe I'm just sick of multiverse stories; they're really played out these days.
Starting on Michael Bazzell's newest OSINT book. I've been meaning to read the previous versions for a long time but never carved out the time. This thing is thick and small print. Should be a good ride. I need to dive headfirst back into security learning again; I've been coasting for quite a while and I'm feeling some of the technical aspects start to slip.
Those of us in the privacy and security space tend not to be seriously concerned around convenience. Segmenting parts of your life, choosing not to use certain apps or services, and so on are all places where you prioritize something else over convenience.
However, some things shouldn't be a convenience issue. For example, docking stations. For years, from the late 90s through the early 2010s, business class laptops were equipped with proprietary docking connectors that would allow you to walk to your desk, drop your laptop down, and everything magically worked. It uses gross motor control, nothing fiddly, and you're in business.
Unfortunately today, most systems of the Ultrabook class require external docking stations via Thunderbolt, USB-C, or USB-A. Invariably these have issues with being disconnected, weird driver issues, or they just don't work right in *nix operating systems. Or, frankly, they're just kind of fussy when you go to plug them in. For my Librem, I don't have a compatible dock (I've tried a few), so I've got a USB-C -> 4x USB-A hub, HDMI, power, audio, and a USB-C -> HDMI adapter all plugged in so I can work at my desk.
Unfortunately this makes me lazy. I'd love to go out and work on my back porch, but I don't want to screw around with unplugging and replugging everything for a 30 minute break. I would love to see laptop vendors go back to a traditional dock design, even if it's just USB-C broken out to another form factor.
We've been home a week and I still haven't gotten back into a routine. Staying up too late, getting up too late, bored. It's hot. I'm also feeling the pressure of wanting to get some food in the ground, but A) I suck at gardening and B) I'm kinda limited in what can be planted this late in the season.
I'm falling behind. I can't keep up with everything that I need to do.
Grabbed coffee and headed east. We had a little time today, so we found a quilt shop and antique mall in Kansas to stretch our legs. Wife got lots of fabric, of course. Then the long drive home.
We got home early enough to unload and return the van before going to the worst Chili's I've ever been to... Headed home, thus ending the 2022 Western States road trip.
I said this on Mastodon, but it's crazy how much the Seattle area no longer feels like home. It feels now the way NYC used to feel to me; we share a language and currency, but otherwise it feels very much like a different country. These are a people that generally don't share the same values or see things through the same lens. I'm glad to be an Okie now.
After a quick stop for snacks at Wallyworld we hit the road. It was a long day, and I particularly disliked the beginning which was mostly two-lane highway where I had to do a lot of passing to keep it above 80.
Made it to Limon, CO, which was our very first stop on Day 1. Hit the local IHOP for dinner and enjoyed some great wind and lightning.
We lit out early this morning to get to Yellowstone National Park. It was a dreary, rainy day, and poor sleep left us cranky with each other. We got to the park, paid our $35, and went to hit the sights we went there for: the Grand Prismatic Spring and Old Faithful.
Unfortunately, with it being cold and miserable, and the attractions being hot springs, we couldn't see anything through the fog! Well, we saw some, but it wasn't the same as a nice clear day.
We skipped lunch at West Yellowstone, having read that the Old Faithful Village had restaurants and stuff... unfortunately the grill closed three minutes before we got there and the restaurant had a 90 minute wait. We ended up cooking soup over my little butane stove that I brought "just in case".
Leaving the park via the east gate took a few hours. The temperature dropped and the roads were wet, so it was a little nail biting. We cleared the park and made it to Cody, WY. If we'd managed to be an hour earlier we could've made the rodeo, as it was we found a restaurant and a hotel, and went to sleep.
This ended up being a lazier day than expected. Went to the local farmer's market, came back, and binged the first season and a half of Yellowstone. I get the appeal.
My gunsmith friend took a look at my AR pistol that's been giving me fits and found a couple of assembly errors on the complete upper I bought from PSA. Hopefully that'll be fixed now.
This is the last friends/family visit before turning back south.
This was a fairly lazy day. We got up and headed to Frank's Diner, which is in a repurposed dining car. Food was good as always, and for the first time ever it wasn't busy; I guess 0700 on a Friday is a good time to visit.
As always when heading this way we stopped at the St. Regis Travel Center for a little shopping and a milkshake, and then hit a few stores in Missoula before turning south.
Dinner was an amazing steak at a local steakhouse, cooked perfectly. The huckleberry mule was a hard pass after the wife pointed out that it tasted like cough syrup. I sipped at my "purple drank" for the rest of the night.
Another night in a camper; any port in a storm.
Departed our friends' house. Cost to fill the rental car was almost $100. Headed for Spokane, with a stop at the Fruit Stand / Antique Mall in Thorpe (on I-90), and in George, WA for our favorite little taco stand.
Spokane is... well, it's Spokane. The name rhymes with "trash can" for a reason. We went for a walk on the river, which had surprisingly few homeless. Oddly, all of the statues had roses placed on them; not sure what was going on there. We tried to ride some of those goofy Lime scooters, but none of them worked.
Early morning today as my daughter had the first flight back to Dallas. Currently pretending to work until I head out to get a massage. Going to see Smokey and the Bandit in the theater tonight, which will hopefully be a treat.
Headed East tomorrow. Ready to be home, but we've got a couple more stops to make.
Work day, nothing to report.
My bestie (no homo) picked me up and we drove to the Canadian border to spend some time with our mentor. Got caught up, had some delicious food, then headed back to home base for dinner with different friends.
Last day in Portland. Sat through a disappointingly woke sermon (God's there because we're broken and messy... preacher soft-sold sin. Plus, the church is having "racial reconcilliation" classes. Barf.
Made the drive to friends outside of Seattle. It's all downhill from here.
Had a bonfire with friends. It was nice to catch up.
Rain, rain, rain. It came down hard all day, but that's OK. We were there for traditions. The arcade was a huge disappointment; half of the machines (including the Coke machines!) were down, and because of the weather and the holiday weekend, folks were all jammed inside.
Shopping was OK, elephant ears were amazing as always. I was also surprised to find that Fultano's isn't lying about how hot their wings are. Yum!
Another work day, family stuff at night. Headed to the shore tomorrow.
One of the (very) few benefits to being in the suburbs of a place like Portland is the food options. I had some food delivery gift cards to burn, so I ordered some vindaloo for lunch. So good. Apologies to the family for the downstream results later.
Another work day, family stuff at night. Nothing to report.
A work day. Had some odd issues in Qubes that were fixed by throwing resources at it.
The old Obi-wan quote, "You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy," becomes less impactful every year as each city attempts to one-up each other on that count. It's amazing how much things hit you after you've detoxed by living in freedom for even a few months.
We got up late, cleared the Airbnb we were staying in, ran a few errands, and went to my niece's softball game. She's gotten tall in just the past few months. Headed back to my sister-in-law's house and helped her husband replace an old shower cartridge. Another late night.
Today was a work day. Wife ran out to do some shopping, I'm beating on an SCCM issue.
We got up early and headed south past Salem to attend church with a different part of the family. They'd experienced some loss (the only two people I personally knew who died of complications from the 'rona). It was a great day reconnecting and reestablishing some relationships that have gone stale.
We headed out from Twin Falls early and rolled into Meridian in time for brunch at one of our favorite stops, Moe Joe's. Good stuff, and also met with some family there for a few hours before heading to the Portland suburbs for dinner with my eldest.
Because we'd made such good time we were actually ahead of schedule, so chose to stay the night with them. Some day I'll remember that I can't sleep on low quality air mattresses anymore.
I hate when your memory plays tricks on you. There's a really cool military surplus place out in Idaho Falls. Unfortunately I thought it was in Twin Falls and Idaho Falls was in the wrong direction.
We managed to dodge the worst of the weather. There was some snow and tough vision, but we were mostly able to maintain 70-80, so I'll take it. At a rest stop in Utah there was a bunch of chipmunks guarding the restrooms, looking for handouts. Since they're cuter than the bums in Portland, we hooked them up. They eat right out of your hand.
When we finally rolled into Twin Falls, we decided to roll the dice and see if Red Robin has gotten any better since we stopped eating there a decade or so ago. On the plus side, they finally added a spicy sandwich back to the menu. On the minus side, the customer service is still in the crapper.
We're headed to Oregon and Washington to visit some family for the first time since we left in August of 2021. We don't fly anymore, so road trip it is. I'm doing the "remote worker can work from anywhere" bit to stretch my vacation days.
We rented a car for the trip since my truck only gets around 15MPG and the missus' small SUV needs a little work. By the time you factor in the fuel savings, it's only a difference of around $300 over the course of three weeks. I've been renting from National ever since I used to travel for a living, and as a member of their "Emerald Aisle" program you can take any available car on the lot for the same price as a mid-size. This usually works out well since you can grab an SUV or minivan. Unfortunately, all they had was a Nissan Rogue. It ended up being miserable, so after we left I made a bunch of calls to National and they agreed to let me swap it out for a minivan in Wichita.
We made it to about an hour east of Denver that night to the news that a winter storm was moving in the next day. At the end of May. C'mon, man!
Great essay from 1436.ninja:
gemini://1436.ninja/Phlog/gmi/20210807.post.gmi
Alright, this one sucks. After spending more time on this since yesterday, I'm just not seeing any way to make it work.
Looks like I'm going to be keeping another machine running just for doing meetings and just try being strategic with my webcam usage when on the road.
After the initial setup (see Tech Notes), things have gone fairly smoothly, except:
Work's been crazy lately, including a fair bit of busywork since the execs can't crap or get off the pot on a number of our initiatives. Nothing is more frustrating than doing a bunch of work only to have the leash pulled back because it's "not pretty enough," or "too 'disruptive'". When you need it, a root canal is disruptive, but it's better than the alternative.
I've been enjoying atyh's capsule. I ran into atyh on Mastodon. He lives near my old stomping grounds and seems to share a lot of the same interests.
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.