UPDATED: 18 March 2019 - External display adapters that actually work with this model (and Arch Linux) added.
For various reasons, I found that I had a need to upgrade Windbringer's hardware very recently. This might be the first time that a catastrophic failure of some kind was not involved, so it's kind of a weird feeling to have two laptops side by side, one in process and one to do research as snags cropped up. This time around I bought a Dell XPS 15 Touch (9570) - I was expecting things to be substantially the same, but this did not seem …
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 …
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 …
If you've had your ear to the ground lately, you might have heard that the NIST timekeeping radio station used by devices all over the world as a time reference for Coordinated Universal Time as well as some experiments in signal propagation and geophysical event noticesmight be on the chopping block in 2019, leaving the HF bands quieter and, let's face it, we can't have nice things. Clocks that rely on this time source signal won't have any way to stay in sync and the inevitable drift due to the imperfections in everything will cause fractions of second to …
On Windbringer, I habitually run LXDE as my desktop environment because it's lightweight and does what I need: It manages windows, gives me a menu, and stays out of my way so I can do interesting things. For years I've been using a utility called GKrellm to implement not only system monitoring on my desktop (because I like to know what's going on), but to set and change my desktop background every 24 hours. However, GKrellm has gotten somewhat long in the tooth and I've started using something different for realtime monitoring (but that's not the …
GSCA - acronym, verb - Using grep, sed, cut, and awk on a Linux or UNIX box to chop up, mangle, or otherwise process data on the command line prior to doing anything serious with it. This is not to preclude the use of additional tools (such as sort).
UPDATE: 20191229 - Added how to rotate out the oldest backups.
As frequent readers may or may not remember, I rebuilt my primary server last year, and in the process set up a fairly hefty RAID-5 array (24 terabytes) to store data. As one might reasonably expect, backing all of that stuff up is fairly difficult. I'd need to buy enough external hard drives to fit a copy of everything on there, plus extra space to store [incremental backups]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_backup) for some length of time. Another problem is that both Leandra and the backup drives would …
Let's say there's a website that you want to make a local mirror of. This means that you can refer to it offline, and you can make offline backups of it for archival. Let's further state that you have access to some server someplace with enough disk space to hold the copy, and that you can start a task, disconnect, and let it run to completion some time later, with GNU screen for example. Let's further state that you want the local copy of the site to not be broken when you load it in a browser; all the links …
A couple of weeks back, somebody I know asked me how I went about deploying SSL certificates from the Let's Encrypt project across all of my stuff. Without going into too much detail about what SSL and TLS are (but here's a good introduction to them), the Let's Encrypt project will issue SSL certificates to anyone who wants one, provided that they can prove somehow that they control what they're cutting a certificate for. You can't use Let's Encrypt to generate a certificate for google.com because they'd try to communicate with the server (there isn't any such thing but …
Longtime readers have probably seen the odd post about my getting fed up with Firefox and migrating my workflow (and much of my online data archive) to Chromium, which has been significantly faster if nothing else than Firefox lately. Of course, due to Windbringer's screen resolution I immediately ran into problems with just about every font size being too small, including the text in the URL bar, the menus, and the add-ons that I use. On a lark I went back to my font sizes in Keybase article and give it a try. Lo and behold, when I used --force-device-scale-factor …
