If you've been kicking around on the Net for the past year or so, you've probably come across a thinkpiece or two about Mastodon, an open source social network that's kind of like Twitter, kind of like Facebook, and kind of like... well, nobody's really sure what else would fit there.  It's a bit of a wildcard.  That seems to throw a lot of people, and because this is the Internet we're talking about that means a lot of "this could never possibly work" posts, nevermind a busy network of several thousand instances and several hundred thousand users doing everything from venting their spleens to asking for (and surprisingly oftentimes receiving) assistance, collaborating on projects, goofing around, and mourning their fallen...

This ambiguity and confusion makes it hard to understand why you'd even want to consider joining yet another social network.  Let me see if I can help a little.

principle of definitional equivalence - noun phrase - Often shortened to the ≡ symbol.  A polite way of saying "Because fuck you, that's why."  See also judgemental equality, homotopy type theory.

I know this is kind of late, but I thought I'd put together a list of the podcasts I enjoyed listening to in 2018.ev, in the hope of introducing folks to the work of some really talented people:

Weird Things

Roleplaying Public Radio's Actual Plays

The Neo-Anarchist Podcast, an in-character ongoing series set in the world of Shadowrun.

On Her Majesty's Secret Podcast.  More about James Bond than you thought it was possible to know.

The Black Vault

The Secret Broadcast

Enjoy!

Happy New Year, everyone.

If you've been following the development activity of Systembot, the bot I wrote to monitor my machines (physical as well as virtual) you've probably noticed that I changed a number of things around pretty suddenly.  This is because the version of Systembot in question had some pretty incorrect assumptions about how things should work.  For starters, I thought I was being clever when I wrote the temperature monitoring code when I decided to use what the drivers thought were high or critical values for sending "something is wrong" alerts.  No math (aside from a Centigrade-to-Fahrenheit conversion), just a couple of values helpfully supplied by the drivers by way of psutil (which is a fantastic module, by the way; I don't play with it enough).  This was hunky-dory until Leandra started running a backup job and her CPU temperature spiked to 125 degrees Fahrenheit while encrypting the data.  125 degrees isn't terribly hot as servers go, but the lm_sensors drivers seem to disagree.  Additionally, my assumptions of how often to send the "high temperature" alerts (after every four cycles through the "do stuff" loop) were... naive? Optimistic?

Let's go with optimistic.

What it boiled down to was that I was getting hammered with "temperature is too high!" warning messages roughly six times a second.  Some experiments with changing the delay were equally optimistic and futile.  I bit the bullet and made the delay-between-alerts configurable.  What I have yet to do is make the frequency of different kinds of warning events configurable, because right now they all use the same delay (defined in time_between_alerts).  Setting this value to 0 disables sending warnings entirely.  This is less suboptimal at best but it's not waking me up every few seconds so I think it'll hold for a couple of days until I can break this logic out a little.

The second assumption that came back to bite me (hardcoding values until something like this happened aside) was that alerting on 80% of a disk being in use without any context isn't necessarily a good idea.  My media server at home was also chirping several times a second because one of the hard drives is currently at 85% of capacity.  This seems reasonable at first scratch but when you dig a little deeper it's not.  85% of capacity in this case means that there are "only" 411 gigabytes of space left on a 4 terabyte hard drive.  Stuff doesn't get added to that drive very often, so that 400+ gigs will last me another couple of months, at least.  There's no reason to alert on this, so making this value a parameter in the config file buys me some time before I have to buy another hard drive.

I've updated my .plan file yet again.  The usual warnings apply.

Q-hole - noun - A Nyquil hangover.

Here's the situation: You're using Ansible to configure a machine on your network, like a new Raspberry Pi.  Ansible has done a bunch of things to the machine and needs to reboot it - for example, when you grow a Raspbian disk image so that it takes up the entire device, it has to be rebooted to notice the change.  The question is, how do you reboot the machine, have Ansible pick up where it left off, and do it in one playbook only (instead of two or more)?

I spent the last couple of days searching for specifics and found a number of techniques that just don't work. After some experimentation, however, I pieced together a small snippet of Ansible playbook that does what I need.  Because it was such a pain to figure out I wanted to save other folks the same trouble.  Here's the code, suitable for copying and pasting into your playbook:

...the first part of your playbook goes here.
    - name: Reboot the system.
      shell: sleep 2 && shutdown -r now
      async: 1
      poll: 0
      ignore_errors: true
    - name: Reconnect and resume.
      local_action: wait_for
      args:
        host: bob-newhart
        port: 22
        state: started
        delay: 10
        timeout: 30
...the rest of your playbook goes here.

Specifics of proof of concept for later reference:

• Ansible v2.7.0
• Raspberry Pi 3
• Raspbian 2018-06-27

This took me a while to figure out, so here's a fix for an annoying problem:

Let's say that you have a media box running Kodi on your local area network.  You have uPNP turned on so you can stream videos from your media box across your LAN.  You want to use VLC to watch stuff across your LAN.

Problem: When you select your Kodi box in VLC and double-click on the server to open the directory of media to watch, VLC crashes with no error message (even in debug mode).

Explanation: VLC is configured to exit when the current playlist is over.  This includes downloading a playlist across the network, and is really irritating.

Solution: In VLC, go to Tools -> Preferences -> Show Settings: All.  Scroll down to Playlist.  Un-check Play and Exit.  Save.

Enjoy!