On 22 June 2019, The Ferrett paid Borderlands Books another visit during the book tour for his latest novel, The Sol Majestic. From my vantage point in the audience, I took a couple of pictures.
Quite late, I know. It's been a busy year.
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Let's say that you have a bunch of servers that you admin en masse using Ansible. You have all of them listed and organized in your /etc/ansible/hosts file. Let's say that each server is running a system service (like my Systembot) running under systemd in --user mode. (Yes, I'm going to use my exocortex-halo/ repository for this, because I just worked out a good way to keep everything up to date and want to share the technique for everyone new to Ansible. Pay it forward, you know?) You want to use Ansible to update your copy of Systembot …
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Remember when I got an authentication chip implanted last summer? Here are the pictures I took before and after the procedure, and in case you're feeling brave here's the video footage.
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This is the initial announcement of a new project pwnagotchi-bt-power (mirrored at Gitlab), a short utility written in Python which will cleanly shut down a Pwnagotchi from an Android phone over Bluetooth using the Bluedot app.
License: GPLv3
Share and enjoy!
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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 …
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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 …
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wires - noun - Person to person backchannels.
"I had to pull some wires to get that expense report fixed before the boss saw it."
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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.
EDIT - 20211107 @ 1324 UTC-7 - Added how to …
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(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 …
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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 …
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