Pete's Log: Clearing out the Queue

Entry #2160, (Random Crap)
(posted when I was 44 years old.)

Every so often, I have to clear out the queue of postponed entries. I've decided the time has come again—we're currently at 19 postponed entries. My brain has felt full of late and maybe this will help.

But before we get started, perhaps a warning that more mastodon content may be coming soon. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. And I might be in the process of creating an instance. It feels very zeitgeisty right now. Watch this space.

Anyway, I'm optimistically going to leave three of the postponed entries postponed, so this isn't a complete purge. Also, I discovered several of the postponed entries actually had been posted, so I think I might have a bug that posting a postponed entry doesn't delete the postponed item. Which must be a recent bug. Anyway, some of these postponed entries are more complete than others. In the interest of making this as painless as possible for me, I'm just going to dump them with no further commentary. In terms of time frame, I don't think any of these are more than five years old.

little old generic me

(Warning: I've become a bit TypeScript-obsessed lately)

I'm probably over-complicating my life a little bit, but I was searching for the TypeScript generic equivalent of a closure and having a real hard time finding the right search terms.

So instead of a closure where I say something like

function f(x: number): (y: number) => number { return class One<S> { private s: S; public constructor(s: S) { this.s = s; } public Two<T>(t: T): { x: S; y: T } { return { x: this.s, y: t }; } } function four<S>(s: S): <T>(t: T) => { x: S; y: T; } { function five<T>(t: T): { x: S; y: T } { return { x: s, y: t }; } return five; }

full moon

entry 1239 - "always take the time to enjoy a full moon when you have the chance"

Learning Kubernetes

Half my life and a couple extra years ago, at the start of my sophomore year, I got a job at the CCMB computer cluster at Notre Dame. This was a massive improvement from my freshman year dining hall job.

I'm pretty sure CCMB stood for Computer Center/Math Building. At this time, the math department shared a building with the Office of Information Technology (OIT). And in that building, there was a student computer lab. It had 10 Sun SPARCstations and 25 Macs. I actually managed to find in my AFS archive this ASCII map of the lab layout:

.-----. |Mac 1| | | .-------------. |-----| |* * * | |Mac 2| | * T H E * | | | | * * * | |-----| | K I O S K | |Mac 3| | * * | | | | * * | |-----| |* * | |Mac 4| `-------------' | | `-----'------------------------------. .-----. | Sun 1 | Sun 2 | Sun 3 | Sun 4 | |Mac25| | X | | X | X | | | `-------`-------`-------`-------' |-----| | |Mac24| .-------.-------.-------.-------.-------.-------| | | | Sun10 | Sun 9 | Sun 8 | Sun 7 | Sun 6 | Sun 5 | |-----| | | X | X | X | X | X | |Mac23| .-----------------------------------------------| | | |Mac 5|Mac 6|Mac 7|Mac 8|Mac 9|Mac10|Mac11|Mac12| |-----| | | | X | X | X | | | | |Mac22| `-----`-----`-----`-----`-----`-----`-----`-----' | | | |-----| .-----.-----.-----.-----.-----.-----.-----.-----. |Mac21| |Mac20|Mac19|Mac18|Mac17|Mac16|Mac15|Mac14|Mac13| | | | X |DEAD | | X | | | | X | `-----'_____'-----------------------------------------------'

The lab was located on the second floor and didn't see much traffic. A number of memories stand out when I think of this lab:

  • Following online (1990s style) as the Broncos won Super Bowl XXXII (I was scheduled to work during that time, I don't remember if anyone actually came into the lab)
  • Playing Doom with Kevin and Chris after finishing an all-nighter for CSE 233 (Functional Programming)
  • Playing some variant of Civ at the Kiosk
  • Meeting Sasha (which I later discovered was not his real name)
  • Designing an NDLUG poster to print to the fancy colors printers the OIT had in that building

But on top of those memories, the thing that stands out the most is really learning UNIX for the first time. I had learned a little in high school and during my freshman year, but my time at the CCMB cluster was at the incredibly fortunate intersection of:

  • Having free time because this particular lab wasn't very busy
  • Needing to explain UNIX to math grad students who were both very smart and not very knowledgeable of UNIX
  • Being in the early days of my CS degree at ND

What this added up to was me dedicating a lot of time to actually understanding the UNIX environment at ND. As it became increasingly clear over my time there, there were many magical incantations that just got copied from AFS space to AFS space. I remember a strong sense of pride at that time of actually learning the plumbing behind those incantations instead of just becoming another link in the chain of copying files. I even created a UNIX page I could point to to help people get started. Looking back at it now, it seems pretty quaint, but my (probably biased) memory is that it did help a number of people.

The time frame we are talking about is the fall of 1997 and spring of 1998. This predates Stack Overflow by a decade and coincides roughly with the founding of Google (which wouldn't become properly popular for a couple more years).

What brings me to this topic? Kuber-freaking-netes.

Desk Power Audit

esgerbeastie: 600 mA - 1.2 A (normal usage), 100 mA (sleep)
Work phone: 140 mA
SmartMatrix: 30 mA (minimal use)
Work docking station: 300-350 mA
zwave sensor: 0mA detected at 120V - 30mA at 5V DC (140mW)
iPhone (charging): 175 mA
monitor: 320 mA
switch: 63 mA
kvm: 81 mA
desk lights: 10 mA off 55 mA on

shredder: 1.4 A - not usually plugged in

smoke extractor - 19W - 160 mA?
Soldering iron - 70W - 580 mA?
heat gun - 1500 W - 12.5 A

Solar library: winter is rough edition

After nine days of being out in the library with the new battery and solar panel, the battery has died. We only had two sunny days during that span and I discovered that circumstances are worse than I assumed: between roughly 10:30 and 11:30 am, the library is in the shade of a tree a few houses down and by 2:30 pm the library is in shade for the rest of daylight hours. And the sun is so far to the South that the panel is probably not delivering a whole lot of power.

On the second of the two sunny days, I propped the panel up for a better angle and it did some decent charging, but only enough to cover about a day and a half of use.

I could probably spend some serious time figuring out how to optimize the solar power production, but I need to be able to collect more data to do that, and my current setup just doesn't allow that. Someday I'll upgrade things to allow that, but for now I will focus on the other side of things: reducing power consumption. Before I do that, I should figure out what's important.

So let's get back to basics and list out the actual requirements:

  • Functional
    • If it's dark out and the door is opened, the lights should turn on (and turn off again when the door is closed)
  • Technical
    • It should be solar powered

That's it, really. That's all this thing has to do. But there are of course a few additional features that would be nice to have:

  • Count number of visitors
  • Monitor battery level and temperature

Dabei

Wordle 438 2/6 🔥39

🟨🟨🟨🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

wordle.at

97 tabs

Sometimes I think keeping a tab open on my phone will help me go back and revisit something. Unfortunately, that doesn't really happen much. So every so often I declare tab bankruptcy and close them all out.

As I close in on 100 open tabs, I decided it was time to do so again, but maybe this time I'd document what tabs I'd amassed. The oldest of these tabs is from roughly September 25, 2021, so we're right at the one year mark since my last tab bankruptcy. It's pretty safe to assume that lobste.rs and Hacker News tabs were opened right around the date those links were submitted, so I've included the dates of those to help track the progression of the year.

  1. The Silmarillion is a wild ride… (reddit)
    No idea why I kept this open
  2. How to Block FLoC
    This appears obsolete anyway, since Google has apparently moved on from FLoC
  3. Phrack Issue 0x46
    Released last October, I guess I was thinking of reading it
  4. Our Algorithm Problem Solving Club Is Beginning This Week (lobste.rs)
    Oct 17, 2021
  5. 3832 Grove Ave, Brookfield (zillow)
    There are a number of clones of our house around Brookfield and I like to take note of them when I find them
  6. Habits I've Developed for Fast + Efficient Programming (lobste.rs)
    Oct 24, 2021
  7. Git adapters
    I can't even begin to guess why I was looking at this
  8. Hide your homelab IP with a VPS, WireGuard and iptables
  9. We memo all the things
    Oct 25, 2021
  10. FIfFKon 2021
    Again, no memories of this page or why I kept it open
  11. Noise
  12. CppCon 2021
  13. LOW TECH WEBRING DIRECTORY
  14. A guide to designing accessible, WCAG-compliant focus indicators
  15. We need more boutique search engines
    Nov 6, 2021
  16. Pete's Log: no man's timezone
  17. Easily build NodeJS projects inside a docker container
    Nov 13, 2021
  18. Getting started with Neovim
  19. The Hardware Hacking Handbook
  20. Our Christmas card address list
  21. Mastodon local timeline
    If you leave a tab open long enough, the browser discards what you were looking at and just remembers the URL. I don't remember if Mastodon tabs got left open accidentally or with the hope to take a closer look at something. But there were a number of Mastodon tabs with no context.
  22. Create a Vim alias for saving your file when you forget to open it with sudo
  23. Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
  24. The Internet Is Dead: What's That Mean?
  25. LUFTDATEN SELBER MESSEN
  26. The Great Offline
  27. Roll Your Own Network - Keys
  28. Blogroll - Kev Quirk
  29. Mastodon local timeline
  30. Ryan Moore
  31. How To Use OpenSSL s_client To Check and Verify SSL/TLS Of HTTPS Webserver
  32. Neeva Review
  33. Weather Meter Hookup Guide
  34. But Here's What REALLY Happened: The History of Clue (youtube)
    I do love the movie Clue and I don't remember where the link to this review came from. In any event, I watched it today (pretty sure I had not watched it previously) and don't actually recommend taking the time to watch it.
  35. Rex Parker - Friday, January 14, 2022
  36. Mastodon home
  37. Tooltips for mobile browsers (stackoverflow)
  38. Search results for Stemma qt cable (adafruit)
  39. Pete's Log: Your Mom's a Shibboleth!
  40. How to Learn Nix, Part 3: What we talk about when we talk about Nix
  41. The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back
    Jan 25, 2022
  42. Does anyone have a working Wallabag docker-compose yml? (reddit)
  43. remi wolf anthony kiedis (google search)
    There's a different Remi Wolf song (Monte Carlo) that was popping up on Jamie's playlists for a while. I just now listened to this song and don't think I've ever heard it before, so I have no idea why I googled it.
  44. Syncthing Relay Server
  45. How to write idempotent Bash scripts
  46. dive
    A tool for exploring a docker image, layer contents, and discovering ways to shrink the size of your Docker/OCI image
  47. Mastodon home
  48. Mastodon local timeline
  49. sudo - remove "This incident will be reported." from user warnings
  50. How to Harden Your PHP for Better Security
  51. Top 10 security best practices for PHP
  52. Mastodon home
  53. Secure Content Sniffing for Web Browsers, or How to Stop Papers from Reviewing Themselves
  54. Session Management Cheat Sheet
  55. How to Sign Users In with IndieAuth
  56. PHP: Implement Azure AD login to your site
  57. Frugal Computing
    Feb 21, 2022
  58. PHP LOGIN AND AUTHENTICATION: The Complete Tutorial
  59. How to make a small tweak to free software
  60. Drop-in Minimal CSS
  61. What’s your favorite vim shortcut/hack (lobste.rs)
    Mar 2, 2022
  62. PHPUnit unit testing: Handling session_start() in a method (stackoverflow)
  63. PHP The Right Way
  64. How can I check my code/website against vulnerabilities? (reddit)
  65. A look at search engines with their own indexes (lobste.rs)
    Mar 18, 2022
  66. My new favorite thing is asking the men in my life who their female role models are. (reddit)
    Mar 31, 2022
  67. Security Analysis in Psalm
  68. Purrfectplay dog products
  69. Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs
  70. Checklist - The A11Y Project
  71. Date Calculator - Days since Jan 1, 2000
    I realized that I was somewhere close to the point where half my life had been lived in the 21st century.
  72. Toastmasters International -West Suburban Club
  73. RFC 3161 - Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Time-Stamp Protocol (TSP)
  74. Search results for Diastatic
    I'd love to find somewhere local to buy diastatic malt for baking, but haven't yet.
  75. Cloudflare has a wall full of lava lamps they feed into a camera as a way to generate randomness to create cryptographic keys (reddit)
    Jun 21, 2022
  76. Mastodon home
  77. Flantaart recipe
    A recipe for a type of pie we used to eat at my Belgian grandmother's house. She bought it from the bakery, but there's a lack of Belgian bakeries around here, so I want to try making it myself. I did already run this recipe past my dad and he approves of it.
  78. Use Wood Chips to Make a Chicken Scratch & Snack Bar
  79. Use Wood Chips to Make a Chicken Scratch & Snack Bar
    Yes, I had this page open twice. And I already linked to it previously.
  80. Taqueria La Penca Mexican Restaurant
    A Mexican place recommended by Pete. Jamie and I tried it a month or so ago. It's pretty good.
  81. Pierogi Fest Schedule
  82. emilysoddities
  83. 20 x 20 campaign - HOMEGROWN NATIONAL PARK
  84. Possibility Place Nursery
  85. Quantified Self (wikipedia)
  86. Pete's Log: iTunes Top 25 (2007)
    I think this tab and the quantified self one above might be related.
  87. To Become Wise, Do Less!
  88. If you have a blog, reply with a link so I can check it out.
    The only Mastodon tab that actually had a specific toot in it!
  89. Matt Keeter // projects
  90. Mastodon local timeline
  91. Garden for Wildlife
  92. I Ran Down Every Dream by Tommy McLain
  93. Can I Stream? — Bear and Breakfast
  94. Someone’s Been Messing With My Subnormals (lobste.rs discussion)
    Sep 6, 2022
  95. Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs
  96. Grokking systemd for Fun and Profit
  97. Self-hosted software I'm thankful for (lobste.rs discussion)
    Sep 26, 2022