Kicking off a 100 Day Project focused on buiding a system for perserving data long-term. Daily blog will ber located in the Perserving Info Project Space. Overall kind of excited - and gives me a nice personal project to grind away at. Good to get back into writing. And this blog serves as a good basis for the project - a complete text representation existing within My Primary and Secondary archive locations, in pure text.
Samsung Dex is a Samsung solution to let one interact with your phone on a full size display, either with a dedicated dock or a software application. I’ve always though about getting one, but the use cases were pretty mimimal, thus making the $100 spend a little hard to stomach.
Last night I found myself in our office at home with no laptop. I almost went through with purchasing a dock, but then found a reseller that had a “Dex Compatible” dock that looked suspiciously like a plain USB-C hub.
Linux support for ChromeOS has been great. But the “Beta” moniker has always been a bit concerning. Google I/O this year claims that it was going to be out of beta soon. Although suppose to happen by may, I just noticed it with ChromeOS release 92 this month. Great news alongside my CKA accomplishment!
I encourage anyone who is even modestly technical to give the Linux ChromeOS experience a try The most important item is that, unlike the rest of the ChromeOS experience, anything done on the Linux layer and it’s apps are not automatically backed up.
I’ve passed the CKA certification! It’s been a while since I’ve obtained a certification. Reading about the CNCF’s Kubernetes certifications, I was quite excited that it’s a hands-on exam that required interactive with live clusters to demonstrate one’s knowledge. As part of Kubecon last year I purchased the exam at a discount. With the upcoming birth of my child, I wanted to make sure to have the certification done before my life is consumed by diapers and bottles.
Browsing the Internet at random, I came across a great Hugo theme based on PaperCSS. The human feel of the typeface and layout really pulled me in. My desire is to make my blog approachable. So I begin with the theme, but overall will aim to make sure my content itself is approachable and easy to consume.
With a recent update to 89.0.4389.82 of ChromeOS, there was also an update to the underlying container that hosts Linux. Normally if this happens it’s a relatively short process. However, a few days ago this took far longer, and ended up with a “Error starting penguin container: 58” message. Not helpful at all! Fortunately with some searching, I found the solution on Masaki Muranaka’s blog. The article is in Japanese, but fortunately Google translate was able to work well enough for me to get the steps necessary to fix the issue.
Happy 2021! And to get the year started, let’s look at some modern logging stacks!
I love modern application and stack observability. Anyone that remembers the old days of stringing together Nagios and Syslog into a cobbled-together stack can certainly sympathize. Now solutions exist that provide a more integrated experience across metrics, logs, and tracing. Today I’ll be concentrating on the logs component with Grafana’s Loki, and demonstrate that stack on a Civo k3s cluster.
My sister got me a Logitech K480 Bluetooth keyboard for Christmas! What makes me truly excited about this gift is the mental exercise of using my Android phone as a content creation device. It’s a bit of a stretch, but with this kind of powerful technology in our pockets, we should be able to leverage these devices more productively.
My writing workflow is focused around markdown stored in git (backed by Gitlab or Github), rendered using Hugo, and leveraging Netlify’s platform for integration and deployment.
Recently Dark Sky has announced it is being acquired by Apple. With that acquisition, the Android and Web app will be discontinued by July 2020, and the API by the end of 2021. I appreciate that they are giving some time for people to find alternatives, especially on the API side, where I know apps and sites have built heavy integrations with Dark Sky. I am disappointed that Apple is shutting down this innovative app for everyone except Apple customers.
Want to preserve your writing and code for future generations? Then check out the Github Archive Program at https://archiveprogram.github.com/. Github will archive all active public Github repos for storage in the arctic that is estimated to last 1,000 years. It’s a cool way to preserve the technology and culture around open source,and also a great way for you to be able to save your content off for the far future.
I don’t normally set myself new years resolutions, but with 2019 being a bit trying, I’m giving it a shot this year. Perhaps I’m just reaching a life stage of being a bit more reflective, and also wanting to be more purposeful in life.
Write More: Given the long-term trajectory I which my career to take, I need to make sure my writing skills are honed in. Practice is be best way to do, either in the form of this blog, social media posts, or personal journal writing.
This weekend I decided to rotate passwords for the sake of good account hygiene. What a pain! Fortunately, I had a password manager to help out, but that still did not reduce the 5-10 minutes per site to log in, find where to change the password, actually change the password, and verify the new password worked! It was a good exercise, but the idea of regularly rotating passwords for all of my accounts is pure lunacy.
Today I picked a new tagline for my site, referencing “an appreciation for simplicity”. I think one of my main attractions to the Unix philosophy is a fundamental simplicity…which may sound strange for those that are just coming into Unix/Linux for the first time, and perhaps have not had a lot of exposure to the command line. By providing a toolbox of single purpose commands that each to their singular tasks well, an administrator can put those together to fit the perfect solution.
My blog migration is finally complete! The technology stack I’m using is an exciting progression of the theme of the last few technology stacks I’ve used.
I’ve always attempted to stick with formats that would be good long-term archives of my data. The stack should be open, with the ability to easily move hosting providers or even core parts of the stack. The newest platform stack that I’m using:
The core of the site is kept as markdown, but I’m now using the Hugo static site generator.
As part of a recent vacation, I decided to finally go through my collection of embedded devices, and get them all up and running! I figure this will provide a nice repository of available devices for any upcoming electronics projects. With a new child on the way, I’ll certainly have less time to devote to these projects, but it still makes a great hobby. [Take a look at my embedded page]({{ “/info/embedded.
As a fan of the EFF, and security in general, I was pretty excited to hear about the Let’s Encrypt project. Let’s Encrypt is a project sponsored by EFF, University of Michigan, Mozilla, Cisco and Akamai to provide free, signed TLS certificates. While I’ve used StartSSL in the past for free certificates, I’ve found their process a bit cumbersome (although in all fairness, they have done a ton of redesign this year).
A few months ago I noticed a weird issue on the Chromebook where it would reboot hard if I performed a dd operation to write a Linux distro out to USB. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Browsing around the crouton source code for an unrelated project, I came across this section of code that explains the issue. The Chromebook OS has the hunk_task_panic timer set for 2 minutes.
I recently purchased a Spark Core development kit at Micro Center last week. The Spark Core is a cloud development board. Normally I try to avoid any cloud platform that may lock me into a vendor, but as Particle (the company) fully releases source code for the schematics, firmware on the device itself, and a node.js implementation of the server side, it seems like a very safe platform for development.
The ChromeOS has been a great experience so far. One problem, however, is that you generally need to purchase a Chromebook to use it, or go through compiling the ChromeOS from source. A few days ago I came across Neverware’s CloudReady, which provides an freely available (to individuals) ChromeOS experience on generic hardware.
Cloudready, however, does not support dual boot, so it will wipe away anything on the machine. Following some hints from this page I was able to get the CloudReady to install on a Virtualbox VM, without the need to create a USB bootable drive.
Recently a hard drive went out on my main home VM Server. It was in a RAID, so there was no data loss. But as I had to shut everything down to replace hardware (no hot swap…), it makes me think about also maintaining the software stack for the lab.
Currently I have two physical systems that are libvirt/KVM hosts for my virtual machines, including the main firewall and fileserver. I’ve had my eye on a few newer technologies, so the lab layout requires maximum flexibility.
I’m fairly fond of Ansible as a light-weight configuration management tool, but I am always on the lookout for additionally tooling that will make it a bit easier to manage centrally…well, without paying for Ansible tower. I came across Ansijet and was pretty exciting. It provides a REST API to Ansible itself, as well as storing results in MongoDB. I still need to try this out, but seems very promising.
During some spare train time, I decided to begin transitioning my blog over to Jeykll! Why? My original blog/wiki was build around Dokuwiki. I liked the idea of having the core data in text format, and not in a database that would be tied to a specific version of whatever blogging software I happened to be using. While dokuwiki has served it’s purpose, it’s not primarily a blogging platform, and I worry about the long-term maintenance of the Dokuwiki codebase.
I’m still compiling my large list of tasks, and hope to break them out blog posts/wiki documents. But the coolest thing I’ve come across so far is that the Chromebook can open up Rar files! Rar compressed files are not too common, but nice to know it’s one less item I’ll have to depend on another machine to perform.
Another vulnerability on the heels of Lenovo’s Superfish, there is a somewhat serious issue with Dell’s System Detect Utility reported by F-Secure (via Fierce IT Security). At least this wasn’t specifically a Malware-like application, but still makes one pause about the amount of pre-installed software on modern Windows PCs, and the difficulty of doing a clean OS install.
Due to the alignment of some stars financially, I went out and obtained a Chromebook for practically free! Specifically I am getting a Toshiba Chromebook 2. Although I tend to lean more toward open source OSes and non-cloud services, I want to explore the feasibility of actually using a lightweight laptop for regular purposes. Specifically I will be focusing around three use cases:
Normal End User Tasks. Sysadmin Tasks. Development Tasks.
A came across an article in Medium on the author’s move to avoid Apple, Google, and Microsoft products. It’s an interesting discussion on the power of these companies, and the compromises users submit to for the sake of convenience.
I myself can completely understand, using Google Apps for the email of this domain. Google has an easier time tracking me with the amount of services I use from them. However, I think the cultivation of serviceable options, as well as “…encouraging as many people as possible to find ways to take control for themselves…” is a good idea to keep in the forefront of the public mind.
Vagrant is one of the most useful tools for automating the build of Virtual environments for testing and development purposes. I’m usually a Linux/Unix type guy, but on occasion it would be nice to be able to test Windows. I just came across this post that indicates the modern.ie has provided a set of base boxes that are usable for Vagrant. I haven’t had a chance to test them yet, but plan to do so soon.
I really do like Google Apps overall. But when outages like this occur, it’s hard to stay optimistic. I know my personal Drive services are free, but my company, which pays for Google support, is also not operational. It only takes a few of these outages before people go back to local storage.
The idea of using Google+ as a blogging platform is tempting. Built-in user verification, an easy ability to export all posts if I wish, a built-in audience (of sorts…)
Why I Blog On Google
However, several others have made good points that essential you become a digital sharecropper, beholden to whatever policies Google puts into place.
Why You Shouldn’t Use Google+ For Blogging
8 Reasons You Should Never Give Up Your Own Blog for Google+
How did I not know this existed. I’ve always enjoyed the original essay, and this update was published in 2004. Should make for some good late-night reading, even if it is a little Mac-centric…
The Command Line in 2004
Springpad, an Evernote-like service for storing information in a distributed manner, announced it’s closure a few weeks ago. Storing important data in the cloud seems a bit risky. However, Springpad is doing an excellent job of providing ways to export your data. Evernote migration is even being supported, allowing a very easy migration path.
For now I’m moving all that data over to Evernote. I personally follow a rule that any cloud-provider needs to provide an easy way to export their data in the event that they do close down.
I left anonymous comments on when I updated dokuwiki, and got hit with comment spam! I disabled anonymous comments, so hopefully that will resolve the issue. Hopefully the bot’s don’t figure out how to register user accounts….
Welcome to the first post of my new…new…blog. I’m using a new hosting provider, Digital Ocean. I’m still using Dokuwiki as my blogging/content platform. The plan is to document my projects and research all on here. Let’s see how it goes!