Errata

Tech Notes And Miscellaneous Thoughts
 

Fuck Grey Text

fuck grey text on white backgrounds fuck grey text on black backgrounds fuck thin, spindly fonts fuck 10px text fuck any size of anything in px fuck font-weight 300 fuck unreadable web pages fuck themes that implement this unreadable idiocy fuck sites that don’t work without javascript fuck reactjs and everything like it thank fuck for Stylus. and uBlock Origin. and uMatrix.

brawndo-installer

Tired of being oppressed by the slack-arse distro package maintainers who waste time testing that new versions don’t break anything and then waste even more time integrating software into the system? Well, so am I. So I’ve fixed it, and it was easy to do. Here’s the ultimate installation tool for any program: brawndo() { curl $1 | sudo /usr/bin/env bash – } I’ve never written a shell script before in my entire life, I spend all my time writing …

New D&D Cantrip

Name: Alternative Fact Level: 0 School: EN Time: 1 action Range: global, contagious Components: V, S, M (one racial, cultural or religious minority to blame) Duration: Permanent (irrevocable) Classes: Cleric, (Grand) Wizard, Con-man Politician The caster can tell any lie, no matter how absurd or outrageous (in fact, the more outrageous the better), and anyone hearing it (or hearing about it later) with an INT of 10 or less will believe it instantly, with no saving throw. They will defend …

Converting to a ZFS rootfs

My main desktop/server machine (running Debian sid) at home has been running XFS on mdadm raid-1 on a pair of SSDs for the last few years. A few days ago, one of the SSDs died. I’ve been planning to switch to ZFS as the root filesystem for a while now, so instead of just replacing the failed drive, I took the opportunity to convert it. NOTE: at this point in time, ZFS On Linux does NOT support TRIM for either …

Frankenwheezy! Keeping wheezy alive on a container host running libc6 2.24

It’s Alive! The day before yesterday (at Infoxchange, a non-profit whose mission is “Technology for Social Justice”, where I do a few days/week of volunteer systems & dev work), I had to build a docker container based on an ancient wheezy image. It built fine, and I got on with working with it. Yesterday, I tried to get it built on my docker machine here at home so I could keep working on it, but the damn thing just wouldn’t …

fakecloud

I wrote my first Mojolicious web app yesterday, a cloud-init meta-data server to enable running pre-built VM images (e.g. as provided by debian, ubuntu, etc) without having to install and manage a complete, full-featured cloud environment like openstack. I hacked up something similar several years ago when I was regularly building VM images at home for openstack at work, with just plain-text files served by apache, but that had pretty-much everything hard-coded. fakecloud does a lot more and allows per-VM …

Book Review: Trader’s World by Charles Sheffield

One line review: Boys Own Dale Carnegie Post-Apocalyptic Adventures with casual racism and misogyny. That tells you everything you need to know about this book. I wasn’t expecting much from it, but it was much worse than I anticipated. I’m about half-way through it at the moment, and can’t decide whether to just give up in disgust or keep reading in horrified fascination to see if it gets even worse (which is all that’s kept me going with it so …

lm-sensors configs for Asus Sabertooth 990FX and M5A97 R2.0

I had to replace a motherboard and CPU a few days ago (bought an Asus M5A97 R2.0), and wanted to get lm-sensors working properly on it. Got it working eventually, which was harder than it should have been because the lm-sensors site is MIA, seems to have been rm -rf -ed. For anyone else with this motherboard, the config is included below. This inspired me to fix the config for my Asus Sabertooth 990FX motherboard. Also included below. To install, …

shopping online – whinge of the day

There are numerous benefits to shopping online – you can order stuff and pay for it from the comfort of your own home and it’ll arrive on your doorstep in just a few days. wonderful, and so many words have been written about the benefits over the years that there’s no need to belabour the point, But there are some things about it that really suck and make me NOT want to order stuff online – most of the time …

backup-mysql.sh

A bash script to backup mysql databases, with separate schema and plain-text dump files (INSERT commands) for each database. Makes it easy to restore individual databases or copy them into dev/test servers. Keeps 30 days worth of backups in separate YYYY-MM-DD directories.