So it is always DNS

other techies I’ve worked with had humanities degrees

My sister, who’s been an occupational therapist, personal assistant and on other ‘soft’ jobs recently got hired as a helpdesk employee just for that reason. Apparently it’s easier to teach a humanist to reset M365 passwords and do simple troubleshooting than teach a techie on how to deal with humans (which is a major part of being an on-call support for anything).

Based on the title alone I thought that she was a barista who poured hundreds of liters of coffee down the drain or something which might make sense. But no, just the last sip on her cup in order to prevent it from spilling in the bus or causing problems in the trash bin. Do they fine people if they accidentally drop their full cup too?

I actually did something for quite a while. Finished long overdue wiring for outdoor access point and one more camera, replaced a main switch since the old one started to behave unreliably, installed frigate (which still needs some work), cleaned up some wiring while messing around, updated a bunch of firmwares, replaced switch in garage to managed one and made some changes on my workstation and some other minor stuff.

Next would be to move cameras into their own VLAN and harden that setup a bit. And I really should get around on better backups for my VPS. But it’s a new week coming up, if the work isn’t too busy I might get something more done.

When I watch Iron Man or Batman talking to a computer, I don’t see some pinnacle of efficiency, I see inefficiency.

Things like Jarvis from Iron Man are far beyond of just translating speech to computer commands. Like in the first Iron Man where Jarvis pretty much manages the whole process on manufacturing the suit and can autonomically manage a fleet of them. I could see benefit if some kind of AI could just listen on a engineers discussion and update CAD models based on that, taking care of that the assemblies work as they should, keeping everything in spec and managing all the documents accordingly. But that’s pretty much human-level AI at that point and specially the current LLM hype is fundamentally very different from it.

You could try to ping your machine from another device and see if it responds. I had issues with older nvidia card on a old system where it would lock up keyboard/mouse and video but the underlying system was still running and I could ssh into the machine and debug the problem that way. Another computer is obviously preferred but in a pinch a cellphone is better than nothing.

And then you buy the storage from Dell or some other big player and the disk array with controllers, warranties and the kitchen sink costs 100k€. Which is still almost a rounding error on that scale.

Snap Controversy

Just today at work other team wrote a bunch of ready-made images on their SBCs. In about 10% of them snap shat the bed by corrupting one json file which rendered their environment unusable. They did it in a pretty stupid way by writing an sd card, inserting it into SBC, booting up and disconnecting power after very short visual confirmation that system gave some signs of life. And snap was doing whatever it’s doing in the background. So I had the pleasure of removing said json-file and reinstalling all their crap manually on those failed units.

So, maybe not strictly speaking fault of snapd, but yet another problem it caused for me without any practical reason other than the environment they chose just uses snap instead of something more robust.

In here it’s mostly not, but it’s currently +5 degrees celsius outside so I’m keeping my clothes. And whatever little is left of my privacy too, thank you.

7 digits, on a very blue state, in a major city, all expenses covered and only a few months. Basically enough money for me for the rest of my life and then some to leave for my kids. Then I’ll consider being their as-white-as-we’re-made poster boy in some social media for a while.

Our team has office days once or twice per month and fuck all gets done on those days. Time is spent on social chitchat, longer coffee breaks and lunch with more small talk, discussing random ideas and almost anything else than actual work. And those are really nice to have, when we’re mostly scattered across few cities and limited to text chat or calls they tend to be strictly about the task at hand. The office days give a sort of a break on normal schedule and while very little gets actually done the discussions often include planning future stuff, going trough previous changes, current situation and workload more broadly and so on. After those days, even if nothing got done, we’re all a bit more on board on almost everything and it’s nice to actually meet the people we interact with every day.

But for actual work, for the stuff we do, the office doesn’t offer anything we couldn’t do remotely. I have more comfortable setup at home than at my cubicle at office, I can listen to whatever I want at how loud I want without disturbing others, no hassle with commute (even if mine is pretty much as short as it can be) and so on.

I can wait until someone else than Zuck® offers something better.

The wristband is what he called a “neural interface” – in a genuinely remarkable feat of technology, it allows you to type through minimal hand gestures, picking up on the electrical signals going through your muscles.

That would be genuinely a piece of hardware I might adopt if it’s actually working as well as normal keyboard with touch typing. And obviously it has to work locally like any HID without sending everything I type to Zuck or someone else.

Another happy Hetzner customer here. ~10 years so far, both for business and for personal use. 1€/month won’t happen, but they’re not that expensive either.

They are ‘customers’ not ‘civilians’. Totally different thing, pinky swear.

Unfortunately that’s not valid.

$ tar -h
tar: You must specify one of the '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' options
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.

From man-page:

-h, --dereference follow symlinks; archive and dump the files they point to

DNS PTR records belong to the entity who owns the IP addresses, you can’t make reverse records for arbitary addresses like you can with forward zones. I haven’t heard about any residential ISP which would give access to PTR records and even on business lines that’s usually a premium.

What you could do is to get a VPN service which gives you these options, if there is one, I don’t know. Most likely you’re looking for a VPS for that and tunnel traffic with some kind of VPN-setup to your local instance. And at that point you might as well run the whole thing on VPS unless you happen to need a ton of storage or some other reason makes pure VPS server too expensive.

Depends heavily on what you need/want. My current installation doesn’t have anything extra, mail and calendar with “standard” file storage (with sync agents on desktop/laptop) is well enough on what I use it for as my photos are in Immich instance.

Nextcloud offers practically everything you ask for besides the family tree and even that might be available as a plugin (or “App” as Nextcloud calls tem). Or if you’re willing to split photos in a different app, Immich works great.

One option is to pull the keycap off and paint over it. If you feel really crafty you can sand off the coating to make whole keycap translucent and use a stencil. Personally I don’t look my keyboard that much that it’d bother me and it’s made by microsoft anyways, their ergonomic keyboard is the best one I’ve used so far.