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Apparently I have limits

After the Big Outage, the EdgerouterX remains out of commission. I think now that I've sort of recovered from the whole ordeal of living off a hotspot for a week, I might be ready to zee it out and give things another shot from scratch, because I've got a few self-hosted things sitting on my Synology I wouldn't mind using again, like Linkding, and I had a pretty nice reverse proxy thing set up to give them all tidy, memorable hostnames.   Sadly, the CenturyLink router is bad in a number of ways. Fortunately, speed isn't one of them. But it...
April 3rd, 2025 Tools

Dusting off the Fedora box

I've got a System76 tower that I put away for a while to do some work on the house. It had sat unused for a while.  Tonight I got the proverbial wild hair and decided to cable it back up in my office. It's in the middle of getting through 2387+ package updates, and I eagerly await whatever hell will break loose after that.  (Update: Actually, none. It just took forever to reboot and then it was fine.) I've got a Dell monitor with built-in kvm and enough ports that the Mac Studio can connect via USB-C, the tower can connect...
April 3rd, 2025 Tools

Supernote has made the right tradeoffs

I like writing notes by hand. It's not a "distraction-free" thing, it's not an aesthetics thing, and it's not an old-school affect thing.  Years ago, when I decided to try to improve my handwriting, I discovered that writing things by hand had a great effect on my focus. By concentrating on making better characters with deliberation — grasp the instrument lightly, slow down, close every character — I gained a feeling of calm and focus, and I learned to listen for what matters instead of trying to match my typing speed with the rate of talking around me. I am happiest and...
April 3rd, 2025 Tools

Tailscale, Blink, Files.app

Not sure when it happened, but Blink Shell—the iPad mosh/ssh client—added support for Files on iOS/iPadOS. So if you've taken the time to set up hosts in there, you can add file locations on those hosts and they show up in the Files app and make themselves available as a provider over an sftp connection to whatever can talk to Files . Combined with Tailscale, it's all very simple and handy and spares me a lot of configuration work to keep it all secure.  My current proof of concept involves a handful of org-mode todo files that I'd like to be...
April 2nd, 2025 Tools

OM: Advaitic Songs

Part of my deep dive on metal has taken me into the stoner subgenre (think Kyuss, Red Fang, Sleep, The Sword, or Black Mountain). Though it's not stoner metal, OM surfaced in my poking around thanks to its connection to Sleep via Al Cisneros.  There's no real emphasis on riffs—it's built up from bass and drums—but it shares metal's often impressionistic approach to lyrics. Unlike metal's preoccupations with chaos, externalized forces, and evil, it's more of a hodge podge of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu mysticism. A visit to Genius is often helpful when I feel like paying attention to the lyrics...
March 31st, 2025 Music

Overnight in Eugene

Ben's ride back down to Eugene decided to wait a bit longer before returning, so we took him down last night.   I'm still getting used to the OM-3, but continue to appreciate the in-camera controls on OM System cameras. The in-camera color control is a little more detailed than I can get on a Fujifilm system. Mainly, though, I like the versatility/size trade-off. It's nice walking around with a relatively compact 40mm (equiv) lens and having a decent zoom in my sling if I want it. "Pro" and "chunky" on an M43 lens runs pretty close to "inexpensive kit lens"...
March 30th, 2025 Photography

Internet Connection Sharing with macOS and a Monitor

I get bored. The day before the CenturyLink connection keeled over and died I got a Raspberry Pi for messing around. I hadn't even formed a thought about what to do with it, so I started with "make it work," and then "move my Emacs config over to it," and I was rounding the corner on "get a few mount points from the Synology" when everything went to hell and I started living off of iOS/iPadOS hotspots. With a relatively stable "iPad as jumpbox" config going on, the Mac Studio has a consistent connection. The Pi has been sitting on the...
March 27th, 2025 Tools

A few thoughts as I wind down an AI governance group

It's not that we've decided not to govern AI, it's that we spent a solid six or eight months asking people to please run their requests for AI-powered applications or features in applications we already had in the portfolio past us, and it's time to treat "AI" (by which we mean things backed by an LLM) as an everyday consideration for our security, compliance, legal, and IT teams. It'll be a small relief. Small, pre-IPO businesses are not fun places to have a review committee. Nobody is  really there temperamentally. In this case, I kind of liked this group because nobody...
March 27th, 2025 Work

Our High on Fire Trip

High on Fire played in Bremerton, WA over the weekend as part of a little tour of the PNW. We drove up the day before the show to poke around Bremerton and visit a work friend. I wasn't sure what to expect. In the world of people who care about acts like High on Fire, they're a big deal. Grammy winners, face-meltingly hard, but definitely an acquired taste. If you get past their sound, there's the whole matter of their lyrics, which are like an old Frank Frazetta painting come to life and dropped into an H.P. Lovecraft diorama. My own...
March 27th, 2025 Life

The trouble with the Oregonian

I used to be in web publishing, did it for a while, and know a thing or two about the kind of pressure website producers are under. I used to be in journalism, did it for a little less time, and also know a thing or two about the pressures news organizations are under. So when the editor of the local paper wrote a plea for people to please buy her damn paper because local news is worth supporting, I was probably one of the more sympathetic readers in her audience.  So I wrote her and enumerated a few issues I've...
March 27th, 2025 Life

Wired iPad mini hotspot

We're having our first major CenturyLink outage in a few years of service. I blamed the EdgerouterX for it until sitting through a troubleshoot with their L1 support and learning that they can't see the ONT. We're dead in the water until Monday, provided all goes well with the tech appointment then. Meanwhile, hotspots for everybody. I was reminded today, after a bunch of mystery failures trying to connect the Mac Studio to my phone, that you can do a cabled hotspot, too. You just have to plug in, accept the usual "do you trust this device" nagging, and then set...
March 26th, 2025 Tools

Your friends on Substack are not okay

By bolting on an algorithmic feed, Substack is trying to make a vertical.  There was a brief window where the Notes feed felt sort of like if Mastodon might if your instance was taken over by people with a weird kink for FRED graphs and lefties who are too retiring to go Full Piker, but those kinds of temperaments aren't going to be heard in an environment with algorithmically driven incentives.  Anyhow, one less thing to not graze in the mornings. 
March 26th, 2025 Life
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