Last weekend I was running short of stuff to hack around on and lamented this fact on the Fediverse. I was summarily challenged to find a way to archive posts to the Fediverse in an open, easy to understand data format that was easy to index, and did not use any third party services (like IFTTT or Zapier). I thought about it a bit and came up with a reasonably simple solution that uses three Huginn agents to collect, process, and write out posts as individual JSON documents to the same box I run that part of my exocortex on …
entropic debugging - noun phrase - The phenomenon in which one can spend weeks on end debugging something using a multitude of techniques, give up in frustration and/or disgust for a couple of days, come back to the project and discover that somehow the bugs have magickally fixed themselves (as verified by diffs and file hashes if one cares to check). The phenomenon is so named due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can never decrease, only increase in an isolated system. In other words, as entropy increases overall in the universe it somehow wiped out the …
EDIT - 20241008 - Fixed a bug where I talk about btrfs scrub.
EDIT - 20230422 - Fixed the command to increase the amount of space used on a new and bigger drive. Also updated some of the links because the official btrfs page has changed.
EDIT - 20230129 - Changed the btrfs replacement command a bit. Added a command block to force the SATA controller to rescan the devices available to it.
EDIT - 20211120 - Edited the page so that it makes more sense. The last couple of edits were out of sequence. Cleaned up a few things, too.
(Note: This post is well beyond the seven year limit for spoilers. If you haven't seen 2001 or 2010 by now, I can't help you.)
Many years ago, as a loomling, one of my very first memories was of seeing the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact on cable. That the first 'real' record I ever listened to was the soundtrack to that movie should come as no surprise, but that's not really relevant. I was quite young so I didn't get most of it, but I remembered enough about it that it gave me some interesting questions (so …
A couple of weeks back while traveling I had an opportunity to spend some time with an old colleague from my penetration testing days. Once upon a time we used to spend much of our time on the road, living out of suitcases, probably giving the TSA fits and generally living la vida Sneakers. I'm out of that particular game these days because it's just not my bag anymore. The colleague in question is more or less on the management side of things at that particular company. Contrary to what one might reasonably assume, however, we didn't spend a whole …
The Paperless Office - proper noun phrase - When the only reason your workplace seems to use no actual paper on a day to day basis is because the printer is always inoperable when someone needs to use it the most. This leads to everyone giving up on the printer entirely.
In September of 2019 a conference called Please Try This At Home was held in Pittsburgh, PA. One of the talks was given by Dr. Mixael Laufer on the topic of how to acquire pharmaceuticals such as mifepristone (local mirror) and misoprostol (local mirror) for emergency personal use. I spoke with Dr. Laufer and the person who made this recording, and they both agreed to let me post it for download and archival as long as I sent them the links to it. So, here it is.
basketball mode - noun phrase - When a service or application crashes and restarts itself over and over, i.e., bouncing like a basketball every few seconds. Considered an outage.
