Thought Bricks

I’ve usually had good luck with the books from the best books list on The Economist. This year is no exception. I’ve recently read two of the books on the list: Playing with Reality and Slow Productivity and have started another, Co-Intelligence. So far, I’ve not been disappointed. I’ll start with Slow Productivity by Cal Newport and cover the others in future posts. I found it to be quite interesting. I see so much silly faux productivity out there; meetings just for sake of meetings, people answering IMs and emails at all hours but adding little clarity or insight to the discussion at hand, lack of time and space for focused effort, etc.

It had been a while since I did a fresh install of Ubuntu on my main desktop. I started on that one with 16.04 Xenial and had upgraded to each new LTS since then. Over time, things had gotten very crufty. Many installed programs that I wasn’t using. Sort of a messy configuration all around. After eight years, it seemed like time for a new start. I did a couple of backups of my /home partition to the cloud and to a local drive that I had around.

This was a great outline of how to work with OCI containers on FreeBSD 14.2. I mentioned this the other day as an interesting new feature and this write-up covers how it all works. Podman has to run as root which seems risky, but FreeBSD takes security seriously and I’m sure that will change over time. I’ve not used Podman and want to give this a shot on BSD. I’ve used Docker quite a bit, but Podman seems to have some architectural differences that make it interesting.

FreeBSD 14.2 is out. The Register has a overview of the release. It’s very interesting that FreeBSD has adopted OCI containers. It’s a nice addition to jails and will be great for people (like me) coming from Linux. Since I don’t use a laptop, I haven’t had the upgrade troubles described in the article, but they sound quite annoying. I’ll update my BSD server as soon as I figure out some weird power issues that are occurring in my office.

Based on some solid reviews and excellent word of mouth, I bought a set of Industry Nine Hydra Enduro S wheels. I got the black spokes which were on a nice sale for a little less than $800 all in. I’ve put maybe 60 miles on them so far and they are excellent. I’d heard that the near zero freehub engagement makes a difference and it really does feel much better when you are trying to keep from striking pedals on a technical climb.

I’ve had problems with the security practices (or lack thereof) by T-Mobile in the past. They might have learned something from the ridiculous hack that happened to them a few years ago. They seem to be the only major carrier in our mobile oligopoly that apparently wasn’t compromised by China in their recent assault on US telecoms infrastructure. They had to be forced by court order to improve their security so I’m not going to give T-Mobile too much credit but at least the money seems to have been well spent.

I knew the background of macOS coming with the acquisition of NeXT and I understood NeXT to have roots in BSD, but the verification of macOS 15 as UNIX was a little surprising. While the back story is interesting, I’m not quite sure why Apple would bother with this at all? I suppose it’s nice to have a listing alongside of AIX and UnixWare. This claims it was done to avoid a lawsuit filed when Apple made claims about UNIX in advertising.

I’m in my second uke class at Front Porch. It’s been a great experience. I’m much better than I was when I started earlier this year. I’m not good, but that’s sort of besides the point. Uke really is about the journey for me. I don’t even know what the destination is. I don’t have ambitions to be like this guy, not that it would even be possible. It’s been a great distraction as well.

I’ve recently volunteered to help with a website for a local organization that I participate in. The website (which is quite good and serves the organization well) is created in WordPress and hosted on WP Engine. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked with WordPress. My old website was on WordPress for while, but I discontinued that in about 2011. I’ve been doing some background reading on it and associated technology (e.

Jack Cook has a great post about a side-channel attack on web browsers. He explains the attack very well and illustrates it with some nice hands-on examples that run the browser. What I like most is that he outlines how he developed the attack by simplifying a more complex approach and applying AI to the results. It’s quite sobering in its simplicity and power. Really well done. If you have any interest at all in this sort of thing, give it a read.