Thought Bricks

It was time to upgrade to the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on my desktop. I had thought about doing it six months ago, but I don’t need the leading edge functionality and there is always a chance something goes awry. The upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS from 20.04 was quick and uneventful. I haven’t fully tested everything, but the apps I consistently use (Firefox, Evolution and Joplin) were fine after re-entering my credentials.

As someone who takes the train to DC from time to time, the construction of a new rail bridge across the Potomac River is great news. Amtrak is a fairly convenient way to get to DC but it is not reliable. Last time I took the train, I had a 7 hour delay on the way back. That was due to equipment problems, not the bridge, but it is typically a slow go once you get up to the Potomac and anything that will make the trip quicker and more reliable is welcome.

As part of the project to install BSD on a server, I’ve been using the iDRAC 7 command line in my Dell 620 server to manage it via the Raspberry Pi I set up to the other day as plugging in a monitor and keyboard is not that convenient. However, since I hadn’t touched it in a very long time, the SSL certificate for the iDRAC had expired. /admin1-> racadm sslcertview -t 1 -A 01 US Texas Round Rock Dell Inc.

The Economist has a Special Report on the US economy titled “The envy of the world” (subscription required). It makes a very compelling case that, although things aren’t perfect, the US economy is doing much better than rich world peers and mostly better than emerging economies like China and India. The first piece of the puzzle is productivity. Overall labor productivity in the US is much higher than in Europe and increasing at a faster rate even adjusted for the greater number of hours US workers tend to put in over their peers.

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.