Thought Bricks

I used to complain about cable TV. Mostly because it was obscenely expensive to get the channels that I might want to watch from my local cable monopoly. But it mostly worked and didn’t change much. At this point, I just want that simplicity to come back. There are never ending problems and channel churn with the Internet based TV providers. Last year, I switched from YouTubeTV to fuboTV because that latter had both MASN for Orioles games and Monumental sports for Capitals games.

I had a few problems on my quest to install FreeBSD. There are technical solutions that would involve a bit of monkeying around with iptables and the like. The simplest way to solve them is to throw a little money at it. I found a used eero on eBay for $15 and will use that as a bridge on my existing network so that all of my computers can see each other whether they are on WiFi or Ethernet.

I wrote about wood buildings last year. It’s a trend that seems to be on the upswing. An article in Knowable Magazine outlines the methods and benefits of using mass timber construction. I love the aesthetics of these buildings. They just feel warmer than the more typical concrete and steel construction. An interesting bit is how the mass timber is made in the same way as plywood. That is it’s a bunch of smaller pieces of wood glued together under pressure.

I pulled the server out of storage, put it in my office, plugged it in and connected a network cable to the iDRAC port. Based on the work yesterday, I was able to get connected and was able to start the server up. It’s running Ubuntu 20.04 now and i ran apt update && apt upgrade to patch it and make sure the network connection is stable to the Internet. The throughput isn’t great, but it worked.

My principal browser is still Firefox. In some ways, it’s just because it’s different but it also seems to have fewer security and privacy issues than the Chromium Industrial Complex. It’s far from perfect though and a nasty use after free bug was found and fixed this week. It’s somewhat amazing that bugs like this are still found in mature pieces of software, but that is par for the course. It’s easy to forget to set a pointer to NULL after you are done with it and, in a huge codebase, easy to overlook.

As I wrote yesterday, I want to install BSD on a unused Dell server that I’ve got. Before I could get started with that, I had a problem. That problem was getting the server onto my network. It doesn’t have a WiFi card and I’m not sure how well BSD would work with a USB network interface. Since the eero is upstairs, that meant setting up a WiFi to Ethernet bridge.

An article about the boring reliability of BSD in The Register has me intrigued. I don’t have experience working with BSD but I like the concept of an operating system that limits the drama. A quiet backwater where things actually work sounds great. This is not a knock on Linux. Linux is popular for good reason and there are flavors of Linux that appeal to the “move slowly and don’t break things” philosophy in BSD with other distros aiming towards the bleeding edge.

I’ve continued to work on my create server script from time to time. The latest update was checking that we could connect to the Hetzner API using the key that is given and bailing out if we cannot. curl is a interesting and useful tool. curl has been around since 1996 and it is ubiquitous. curl is simple to use: curl https://l10systems will download this website. It’s also very powerful with many, many options.

I got an email from a service that I used to use on a daily basis but had completely forgotten about: OBItalk. This hardware device allowed free use of Google Voice from a homephone. I think we got it about ten years ago and used it as our primary home voice number for at least five or six years. After that, our home line fell into disuse. I think the service still worked until we sold our house and moved a few years ago, but nobody was using it.

I’ve recently read and thought about The Brutalist Programming Manifesto. I love the directness: Keep it simple. Solve problems. Nobody is smarter. Do everything yourself. Strive for robustness. Security is an illusion. Use input devices sensibly. Avoid eye-candy. Don’t depend on tools. Be humble. Don’t work for free unless you like it. Don’t listen to others. Some of it is unrealistic in a professional environment where you have to go along to get along sometimes.