I have been in a mood lately. I've had a couple projects converge to come crashing down all at once. So while fighting the infrastructure changes needed to switch going-flying.com to LetsEncrypt, updating my own internal CA to support modern standards, remodeling a spare bedroom in the house, and trying to organize my password manager I found myself re-reading ancient blogs.
So over the last few days I've done a bunch of work on the software that generates the website. It has remained mostly the same since I originally wrote it with the exception of a small refactoring when I moved the publishing workflow over to Docker. After looking at the timing metrics I decided that the various index pages get too damn big even with only 15 articles per page. They often take several seconds to get to DOM Interactive, which... is stupid.
Late last May Ubiquiti released the v 4.4.41 update for their UniFi Security Gateways and it promptly broke my VPN tunnel. I didn't have time to dig into it at the time so I just rolled back to the previous 4.4.36 release which worked swimmingly. At the end of last month they released the 4.4.44 version with several security fixes so I decided to devote some time to it today.
I was cleaning out my workshop a while back and came across my stash of old
hardware. In the pile was a perfectly serviceable
iPad 2.
Now I say serviceable, but the reality is that while it powers on and works it
is stuck at iOS 9.3.5 (so good luck finding App Store apps that will work),
and is pretty slow (well, it's a dual core Cortex-A9 @ 1GHz but that is slow
these days). Thankfully XCode still supports targeting iOS 9.3 so I set about
writing an app to put this thing to use. About the only thing I could think
of that I would actually use this thing for is... a digital picture frame.
About 8 months ago I augmented the AWStats based
monitoring of my web sites with an InfluxDB, Grafana and JavaScript solution
to collect user agent metrics.
In looking at the data the thing that jumped out at me the most was the
rate of adoption of HTTP/2.0 versus IPv6.
Hooks are a great way to execute various tasks as part of your git(1)
workflow. Since I run my own repository server I have plugged a number of
different things into my repositories, both private and public. There are
several previous
posts where I
discuss some of them.
I am sure I am in the minority of mobile users (though probably not a small minority these days, especially among the technically apt) in that I try to only use mobile applications where they provide a large amount of concrete value over the mobile website. The inability to sanely audit applications in conjunction with their ability to exfiltrate way more data than a mobile website raises the bar I set to a much higher level.
Edited: October 19, 2021 @11:30
I have mentioned a few times that I rely on OpenBSD VPNs to ensure that clients outside of my home network get the same level of protection as they do inside. This means that I can use already existing DNS and proxy infrastructure to prevent various malvertizing, tracking, beacons, and poorly behaved applications and websites from leaking personal information, and I can prevent wifi hotspots from analyizing my traffic or injecting JavaScript. Creating the actual infrastructure is out of scope for this post, but I did previously post some information about what the DNS configuration looks like.
I really don't want to sound like the old man yelling at a cloud here; however, sometimes you need to. When DRM first appeared as a way to sell digital goods on the Internet and prevent the dreaded piracy and sharing that was certain to be the downfall of all capitalism and hurl us into the darkest night, the Internet was, as you might expect quite put out.
I'm trying to figure out a way to balance the lack of surprise and
schadenfreude I have at Tumblr/Verizon's
decision
to paint all sexual content with the regressive and transparent
'but think of the children' brush. Tumblr grew largely thanks to the
alternative and adult communities that found its permissive and accepting
nature welcoming. It became what it is today because of the LGBTQ+ and sex
worker communities, and now it has decided to break up. Their post paints
a pretty picture full of platitudes, inclusiveness, acceptance, and love of
community but it is obvious to the most casual of observer that it is
just a sham. Tumblr is breaking up with the people that helped it grow
because it is easier than trying to actually make the
service a better place.
While I was waiting for new tires to be put on my car today I was able to watch the landing of Mars InSight which was relayed via the MarCo A&B experimental interplanetary cube sats.
A little over six and a half years ago I left the Linux as a desktop community for the Mac community. I replaced a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 for an Apple refurbished late 2011 MacBook Pro and honestly have not regretted it.
It's probably too late to change anyone's mind, but I saw a particularly salient Twitter come across this morning.
I was making some firewall changes last weekend and while watching the logs I discovered that every now and then some host would try to connect to 169.254.169.254 on port 80. This was peculiar since I don't use the IPv4 link local addresses anywhere in my network. It seemed to be happening randomly from all of my Linux hosts, both physical and virtual.
I installed one of the Mojave public betas last week on the Mac Mini I have in the office. I used it as an excuse to finally tweak a script I wrote for customizing macOS out of the box.