1. Can you help an old friend?

    26 May 2017

    I haven't spent much time with forge and Nicole since their wedding many, many years ago.  Forge was in mine back in '08, but weddings being what they are, I wasn't able to really hang out.  I think they lived in the Bay Area for a while, but now they're living in Maryland under what seems like less-than-optimal conditions..

    Nicole recently announced that she's been suffering from polycistic kidney disease for much of her life; it is a disease in which cysts grow inside the kidney in the place of normal nephritic tissue.  If the cysts become too large or …

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  2. Getting stuck upgrading Bolt and what to do about it.

    08 May 2017

    UPDATE - 20170512 - More SQL surgery.

    So, as you've no doubt noticed I've been running the Bolt CMS to power my website for a while now.  I've also mentioned once or twice that I've found it to be something of a finicky beast and doing anything major to it can be something of an adventure.  I tried to upgrade my site last week (tonight, by the datestamp on this post) and had to restore from backup yet again because something went sideways.  That something was the upgrade process going wrong and throwing an exception because of something in the cache directory …

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  3. Spending quality time with the Pi-Top.

    05 May 2017

    A couple of months ago for my Lesser Feast I decided to treat myself to a toy that I've had my eye on for a couple of months: A Pi-Top laptop kit.  My fascination with the Raspberry Pi aside (which includes, to be honest, being able to run a rack full of servers in my office without needing to install a 40U rack and a new 220 power feed), it strikes me as being a very useful thing to have under one's desk as a backup deck or possibly a general purpose software development computer.  Most laptops have one unique …

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  4. Gargantuan file servers and tiny operating systems.

    02 May 2017

    We seem to have reached a unique point in history: Available to your average home user are gargantuan amounts of disk space (8 terabyte hard drives are a thing, and the prices are rapidly coming down to widespread affordability) and enough processing power is available for the palm of your hand that makes the computational power that put the human race on the moon compare in the same was that a grain of sand does to a beach.  For most people, it's the latest phone upgrade or more space for your media box.  For others, though, it poses an unusual …

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  5. OpenVPN, easy configuration, and that damned ta.key file.

    18 April 2017

    Now that ISPs not selling information about what you do and what you browse on the Net is pretty much gone, a lot of people are looking into using VPNs - virtual private networks - to add a layer of protection to their everyday activities.  Most of the time there are two big use cases for VPNs: Needing to use them for work, and using them to gain access to Netflix content that isn't licensed where you live.  Now they may as well be a part of everyday carry.

    So: Brass tacks.  Here's a quick way to set up your own VPN …

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  6. Setting up converse.js as a web-based chat client.

    14 April 2017

    As not bleeding edge, nifty-keen-like-wow the XMPP protocol is, Jabber (the colloquial name for XMPP I'll be using them interchangably in this article) has been my go-to means of person-to-person chat (as well as communication protocol with other parts of me) for a couple of years now.  There are a bunch of different servers out there on multiple platforms, they all support pretty much the same set of features (some have the experimental features, some don't), and the protocol is federated, which is to say that every server can talk to every other server out there (unless you turn that …

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  7. Neologism: Debuggery

    10 April 2017

    debuggery - noun - The unshakable feeling that your code is completely fucked when you spend multiple all nighters in a row tracking down a single annoying bug that winds up not being in your core code, nor any modules you've written, nor any of the libraries you're using, but in a different part of the system entirely.  In other words, your code is so poorly architected that you can't tell when problems aren't actually in your code.

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  8. Ghost In the Shell: A disappointing hack.

    10 April 2017

    Last Thursday I made the probably unwise decision to see the live-action interpretation of Ghost In the Shell starring Scarlet Johannson at the local movie theater.  The terrible weather in the Bay Area aside (continual rain, Washington DC-like cold, gusts of wind up to 50 miles per hour), it's just not a good movie.  I was expecting a half-assed retelling of the original movie's story with additional Hollywood elements, and I wasn't disappointed in that respect.

    tl;dr - Don't bother.  ScarJo's new movie is a bad cosplay that'll leave you feeling like you just took some pills a random person …

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