Thought Bricks

I wrote about WireGuard last year. It’s a simple and secure VPN solution that works very well. Since it’s part of the Linux kernel now, settting it up is a breeze. I’m a fan and if I need to deploy a VPN, this is the first solution I would look at. The Register has an article about WireGuard that describes how it got into the kernel. It’s an interesting yarn. Long story short, Linus loves it so it’s in.

I’m a fan of cool maps. For years, I had the famous map of Napolean’s March to Moscow by Minard on my wall (what happened to that?). We’ve also got a few historical maps framed in our house. It’s always interesting to see how maps created before arial and satellite photography depict a coastline. This is an interesting animated map that shows all of the ships at sea. It was produced by Kiln.

I’ve recently subscribed to an email newsletter by Matthew Levine that I’m really enjoying. It’s mostly inside baseball stuff about finance which is tedious at times but the writing is very good. I love this quote from a recent article: One rough model that you could have for modern corporate finance is that most senior corporate executives are mostly in the business of maximizing cash flows for shareholders, because that is what they were trained to do, but lots of shareholders are actually interested in something else.

I passed my certification test on Design Thinking and got a nifty badge. Although it is subject to the same hype as agile practices in general, I like the general approach of Design Thinking and believe it can play a role in building innovative solutions. The key point is that anyone can be creative about desigining a solution. Creativity is a human process that isn’t limited to those who have designer or architect or creative(shudder) on their business card.

Serverless computing is one of the new hot things so I wanted to check out OpenFaas. It worked as advertised during some experimentation on MicroK8s. The Kubernetes requirement makes sense for scalability and robustness, but adds a lot of overhead and complexity. It’s overkill if you just want to do some simple some simple experiments. Enter faasd. Faasd is “git push” for functions and is much simpler to run than the full OpenFaas.

I tried to follow the documentation to run MicroK8s on LXD. However, it didn’t work because the microk8s nodes (really node since I was just trying on one system) wouldn’t start. I’m not sure of the root cause of that but it was vexing. After a little bit of searching, I found an article on the Ubuntu blog that described running Apache Spark on MicroK8s on Ubuntu Core in the cloud.

The Steam Survey found that Linux is a 1% share of the market. A rare breed. According to NetMarketShare the overall Linux desktop and laptop adoption is 1.79%. With a share that is a bit more than half of all users, I guess gamers aren’t as geeky as I thought. Or Windows just has a stranglehold on the gaming market. I’m not a huge gamer but I’ve got a few favorites that I play from time to time and they work great on Ubuntu 20.

I did a Green Web Check on my blog. Unfortunately, it’s not on a green hosting site. I host with Netlify and have been very happy with it but this is a bit of a negative. I use the free starter so I don’t have any money in the game, but I’ll send them a note asking about their hosting policy. It’s not that hard to source green energy for web hosting and they should try to do it.

I use LXD to create virtual servers on my main system to experiment around with stuff I might not want to install directly. It’s simple, fast and works well. I was curious if I could use it to do the same thing on a cloud server at Hetzner. The only problem was how to access the LXD container from outside. They are assigned IP4 addresses but those aren’t routable. However, the IPv6 address are routable.

T-Mobile US had 100 million user accounts compromised. I think this is about the millionth time I’ve heard of a major company getting personal data about customers (you know, the little people) stolen. I’ve got some personal skin in the game on this one as I’m a T-Mobile customer. I’m not to pleased that I’ve read about this in many places online but have yet to be contacted directly by T-Mobile telling me what is going on.