One of the more popular things that I have written in recent times is a small Python tool that gets statistics from an Arris SB8200 DOCSIS cable modem and sends them to InfluxDB. I then visualize this data in Grafana to keep an eye on the physical status of my cable Internet connection. This setup has happily chugged along since sometime in 2019, but sadly its time to put it all to bed.
I'm a feckless curmudgeon, so of course I believe that software that provides security infrastructure -- especially physical security infrastructure shouldn't be trying to chase the upgrade dragon like a heroin addict, but I digress. My UniFi Video installation stopped working last night and I was a bit distressed. Yes I know it isn't supported anymore and Ubiquiti would REALLY LIKE ME TO UPGRADE TO PROTECT NOW PLEASE. But never the less. Turns out, dear lazyweb that a Java update screwed me.
I've always been fairly adamant that unless the built-in application for core mobile device functionality (things like contacts, calendar, phone dialer, SMS messenger, e-mail, camera, photos, music playback) is unfit for purpose that I would use it. A lot of it comes from a long history of third party applications just never being quite as well integrated as first party and my reliance on these functions. I have very few apps on my phone and other than SMS messaging the most often used is the Podcast app. Sadly iOS 14.5 seems to have opted to replace the podcast app with something no one bothered to use or test.
I like data. I've been spending some time cleaning up my monitoring and
visualization infrastructure, making sure everything is in Grafana and
available at a glance and I noticed that the one thing that I'm not doing
any collection on is my gaming PC. Now I don't spend as much time as I used
to playing video games but I still want information on how the system is
performing. Most of the tools to measure the performance of a Windows based
gaming system tend to cater towards traditional video gamers, providing
overlays or alerts on screen with the information. That is interesting to
me so I went looking for a way to send that information into my
monitoring platform.
Back in 2013 I was able to cram an Ivy Bridge i5 and 6 3TB hard drives into
a Mini-ITX Lian Li case. I called the system tardis as it was intended to be
both a NAS and a hypervisor and it has served me well since. The only drawback
with the system was the limited memory support. Intel's Ivy Bridge processors
support 32GB of RAM but the Intel H61 Express chipset used on the ECS H61H2-MV
motherboard I chose only supports 16GB and that turns out to have been the
main limiting factor as that was the first resource I ran out of.
It seems like top N lists are popular at the begining of the year so here are the 10 most visited posts as tracked by the metric collection system that I wrote in 2018.
It's been... quite a year. I've probably watched more hours of YouTube this year than any other year. I updated my original list about halfway through the year so I figured I'd do one last update as the year winds out (at least in the US/Eastern time zone).
So I may have fallen a bit into Minecraft, which I'm sure is not really out there in terms of abhorrent behavior given the game's popularity. The more interesting bit is that I decided to take my game world and stuff it into a server so I could play it on any of my computers (I have a MacBook Pro laptop and a Windows 10 PC, amongst others) without having to deal with wacky file sync (there is a HOW-TO on using something like Dropbox to share your world but that looks like an absolutely awful idea to me), locking and potential corruption issues.
Happy Saturnalia, Joyous Yule, and congratulations on surviving beyond the winter solstice of 2020. I hope you are all safe and healthy this holiday season as the Earth hurtles onward towards perihelion.
Now that iOS 14 is almost a month old, I can't help but feeling that the text messages that I sent to a friend at launch feels more like wishful thinking than tongue in cheek snark.
When I sat down and put together the requirements for my micro-blog thing that I've dubbed "Thoughts" I decided that I wanted to provide a simple and clean way to link to and embed individual Thoughts. I explain a bit in a previous post about how the embed works and the importance of keeping my infrastructure out of the critical display path. When you click the embed button on a thought you get a bunch of standard HTML that includes all of the Thought. The only thing the JavaScript does is to apply a custom stylesheet. It can be omitted (or blocked by something like CSP) and you will still get a decent looking representation of the Thought as you can see below.
The last few days have been notable largely thanks to the premature failure of a Samsung Evo 860 SSD which corrupted my Windows 10 install. A bunch of faffing about later (in spite of the fact that I have my PC backed up using the built-in Windows backup feature) I found myself having to setup up my user profile again. I should note that I stopped using Windows regularly in the XP time frame so I'm not particularly comfortable with it, but I keep this one system around to run games since gaming on macOS or Linux is for the youth who have not realized how precious their time is yet.
In a lot of places school has started back up and based on the amount of traffic I have seen people seem to think that things are returning to normal in spite of the fact that it absolutely has not. Record numbers of people are still out of work even if you ignore the number of people getting sick and dying from the pandemic.
There has been much written about the Epic / Apple / Google love triangle currently happening wherein Epic Games (a ~17.3 billion USD valued private company) has purposefully broken the terms of service of Apple (a 2.13 trillion USD valued public company) and Google (a subsidiary of a 1.07 trillion USD valued public company) to create cause to sue Apple and Google over the size of the cut they take under the guise of the app stores being anti-competitive.
I've had a UniFi USG-3 in the office for a while now, and I have had a few problems with it over the years. The most recent being a quirk of the configuration system that ham strings certificate authentication with intermediate CAs. You can read about my struggle a little bit in a previous post.