The long holiday weekend didn’t end up yielding many spare hours for me so I switched back from one firefighting mode to the other with not a whole lot of that time awake and doing anything interesting. I did throw one pretty interesting link on my Pinboard for later reading though
A rundown of how each fast charging technology works doesn’t sound particularly interesting at first glance. I started reading mainly because I wanted to see how the Warp Charge I use on a daily basis (you really don’t want to know how many of these chargers I’ve purchased since I got my OnePlus 7 Pro) differed from the other fast charging specifications. The article is interesting since it also provides a bit of context in some cases for what the author thought was the thinking behind the differing specs. It’s far more entertaining and insightful than I assumed it would be when quickly scanning the opening paragraph and marking it for later consumption. I genuinely appreciate efforts like this that not only answer a question but are entertaining in the process.
Author: goneaway Page 6 of 8
I’ve tried to write out my thoughts about this a few times but I always end up being overwhelmed by the ever widening scope of related things that end up being pulled in. What I’m hoping to do, and this may never be read by another human and/or web robot, is use my cane to tap around the perimeter of this vexing problem that I’ve faced at nearly every place I’ve worked: Active Fucking Directory.
At the moment I’m completely mired in the weird middle space between wanting to switch completely over to something that functions less like a needlessly complicated wrapper around LDAP and more like a secure-ish authentication method that performs a bunch of single sign on functions. It would also be nice if maintaining this shiny new solution didn’t become my full time job as well. The short answer, in my situation at least, is that an answer that simple and comforting doesn’t exist at all.
Here are the problems:
1. This needs to meet all of the requirements of the eleventy billion master service agreements that we’re supposed to hit. These are constantly changing and some of them we just sign off and ignore until one of our customers proposes an audit. Some of these requirements would be better left to a capable MDM solution but …
2. My budget for such a solutions is, well, um, if you could just cut checks to my company for using your solution that is about the only that would make it through our finance department. The finance folks are not looking to invest money in anything ever so that becomes a rabbit hole I’m not going to willingly crawl into.
3. To make things absolutely and utterly disaster-tastic we also just hired a CTO who seems like a cool enough guy but wants to have more input into the infrastructure we’re implementing. The real rub here is that he really just wants to implement a SaaS solution that is the namesake of the company he just jumped ship from and I have heard nothing but gnashing teeth and the sound of hope anally escaping the human body from other folks I know that still do infrastructure work. So, I’m in a holding pattern right now while I fervently hope that one of the interviews I’ve had recently bears fruit and I can hit the ejector seat button thus escaping with a few tatters of my sanity intact. Maybe I’ll get budget approval for something more expensive than anything I’m proposing and doesn’t work either? Splendid.
4. Another thing that happened in the midst of all of this was an office move, a company rebrand, a phone system replacement, and a few other ball crushing tasks that I might be defensively forgetting. Just a few minor things that need to happen all at once and posthaste. Our IT department, at least for anything that doesn’t live in AWS or Salesforce, is poor old me and I report up through 2 levels of managers. The usual song and dance occurred after the move was sprung on us/me; we’ll just have an MSP come in and do some of that work for us because that is always painless. I got a few things out of that: some new networking hardware (Meraki because the techs were either morons or thought we/me were morons) and a new server to host the software used to manage badging and security cameras. Like most security and monitoring software it requires me to install components from Windows Server 2000 to get it successfully running so I’m completely okay with isolated that garbage onto its own server and away from any infrastructure that actually matters. It did not get me any new server hardware that I could because there’s much money to be made reselling software licensing, of course. The MSP folks built us a sort of functioning Active Directory server in AWS but didn’t do most of the grunt work before their contract budget was consumed. Thanks guys! I was hoping to spend a couple weeks running hastily written Powershell scripts on a production machine. This also sounds amazing!
5. Here’s the punchline to all this: The server that really, really needs to be replaced is a 7-8 year old Dell PowerEdge that has been outside of a service contract for several years and spent most of its life in a switch closet/sauna basically the size of a closet with no real cooling. It is obviously a ticking time bomb despite having a backup domain controller even older that takes more than 15 minutes to reboot when I do something terrifying like rebooting it. Oh, yeah, and this is hosted on a Windows Server 2008 SBS box. Yeah, it really is that grim. The message from on high is that I need to somehow keep this incredibly robust and reliable machine running for a unspecified period of time until there is a decision and budget available for a cloud solution that will likely do measurably worse job of handling authentication and won’t serve any policy at all. Maybe that means I’ll finally get some budget for MDM? Probably not.
We are an Office 365 shop (this is what that service is called no matter what stupid renaming convention they try to employ) so everyone in the company that has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about immediately tells me how we should just migrate on over to Azure Active Directory. This, of course, is more telling of how much coverage Microsoft pays for in trade magazines than anything else and has caused me to explain far too many times that (cue the theme music) Azure Active Directory is not fucking Active Directory in any meaningful sense.
At the end of this highly purgative post, I’m left with some questions that mostly should be posed at the huge corporations that create the software I’m supposed to keep things up and running with because cruel and unusual is industry standard. One very, very important question is: why the fuck isn’t Azure Active Directory analogous to Active Directory? That’s the most painful question. Look, I know it’s blindfolded brain surgery dangerous to expose an AD server to the internet, right? That’s been pounded into our heads since Active Directory was a relatively new thing. Don’t ever allow your AD server out into the world without galoshes and a rainsuit. That’s IT canon. BUUUUUT, the other Microsoft product that was absolutely, positively unsafe to expose to anything but a RADIUS-backed VPN was Exchange and now Exchange or at least a distant cousin of it is out there on the web eating apples full of razor blades and taking Tylenol from open packages all willy nilly. Obviously O365 isn’t the most secure platform in the world but it only seems to roll over dead a couple of times a week. Why can’t Microsoft spend a few cycles on that sort of work for AD? Oh, because all the data transmitted between a client and the AD server is full of delicious data that isn’t well protected. Extra fabulous!
The other non-option would be something like Direct Access which is already deprecated, requires the very most expensive edition of both the client and server pieces that it would run on, and only runs on Windows which is not real world useful unless you’ve landed a sweet gig at Contoso or Margie’s Travel. That leads me back, all the way back, to the always on/pre-logon VPN issue which means more expensive software seats and more moving parts that I can absolutely guarantee will break each and every time the wind picks up because I’ve foolishly made decisions like that in the past. In the end, I have no fucking answers and I’m feeling like one of those sad photo-op polar bears stranded on a melting mass of ice with nothing to do but wait until the sea eventually consumes me bringing on the sweet oblivion that erases all of this fuckery.
I don’t even remember how I’d heard about Serpent OS but I’ve been very sloppily following its development. Despite the fact that I wouldn’t be able to use it on a work machine because I work completely in a heterogeneous environment with a ton of Windows services that I need to meaningfully interact with and administer and I’d prefer to do that without the need for a bastion box sitting in between. But that’s me, at work.
I completely respect the design philosophy behind this distribution, from their About page:
We’re focused on building a Linux distribution that serves our own needs. Chiefly, a Linux distribution for people who want to use Linux, not a “Linux-based-OS” focusing on interoptability with macOS* + Windows*.
In a nut shell, this is not “Linux for the masses”. This is a project setting out to use Linux as Linux should be used. This will in turn help us to build a significantly advanced Linux distribution that is both modular and optimised for modern machines.
They’re also extending a raised middle finger to Nvidia and insistence on the use of mediocre binary blobs for Linux support which I also support. I’m writing this as a reminder to keep checking in with this distribution and eventually, when time is less pinched, doing a test install when they’re closer to a test release. I’m excited about this and look forward to how Serpent OS progresses and what optimizations they’re able to create by largely ignoring the non-Linux ecosystem most of us are soundly saddled with.
That title was supposed to evoke drama or intrigue but it’s also mostly true. The company I work for which, as always, shall remain nameless is bucking real hard for a sale. You can hear the potential of big dollars in every contrived story about how we desperately need to conserve cash despite allegedly sitting on huge piles of it. There’s a huge pile of shit in there somewhere and whether or not that bullshit is about the amount of money the company is setting aside for a rainy day despite being stretched beyond functionality or about how all this paper shuffling is actually in the name of dominating the market for whatever it is that our software is supposed to be really good at doing this quarter. We’ve basically thrown all of our resources at hiring impressive-sounding executives and haven’t backfilled any of the positions that do things other than attend meetings and affix their names to ghost written glad handing for the pages of some trade magazine.
The feeling that it was past time to chew my leg off and flee from the trap started during a meeting when I found out concretely that most of the projects, at least the ones that have real impact on my workload and sanity, have been shelved. To be fair, we did also hire a CTO and wanted their input on how to prioritize the work we need to do to stop drowning in tech debt and running all of our capex into the ground with hardware refreshes gradually making their way into the five year cycle. At the same time, I’ve been fucking over my fellow rank and file workers to handle a bunch of firefighting tasks to make the C level folks look good and being expected to handle all of the wrath from people who can’t have their issues addressed in a sane span of time any more. Any operations role contributes to feeling like a punching bag on the particularly bad days but I was losing my mind by 10:30 AM this morning. I also found out that some work I’d promised to finally complete for our support staff was going to be pushed aside so another C level Sales hire could have their laptop a full week before their start date because, reasons. Fuck every bit of that. I logged off early today after completely running out of fight. The worst part is that I’m stopped caring at all about the day to day because I can’t plan and can’t prioritize and feel like I’m working in a call center or something.
Anyway, so disasters in professional life and my horror about them aside, here are some things I thought were interesting today:
1. I had a great time working with a Raspberry Pi for the first time and have enjoyed how little advertising I see due to the deft hand of Pi Hole. The first hit is always free and I ended up buying another Pi and setting up openmediavault early this evening. I’d nearly forgotten how much fun setting up personal servers can be. Yes, it was a matter of snapping together some inexpensive pieces of hardware and attaching an unused 2TB external hard drive to that but it was more fun than I’ve had working with any other bit of technology in ages. It was also an expensive alternative to the pricey NAS hardware that I’ve been eyeballing lately especially while spending most of my life in my house. I guess it’s about time to find somewhere accessible to store the gigabytes of comics that I’ve been downloading. That way I’ll be able to not have time to read any of them from any device! It’s going to be like living in a dystopian Jetsons!
2. I’d be more intrigued about the story behind some guy flying with a jetpack near commercial airplanes in Los Angeles if it wasn’t so damn likely that this was result of a start up, flush with cash from a new round of funding, disrupting air traffic control or something equally inane and contrived. The headline from that story definitely grabbed my click but I was really hoping less for instant millionaire publically measuring dicks against all the other millionaires trying to be the first to endanger planes full of passengers and more for something like the hilarious (and also intensely sad) story of Larry Walters and his solo lawn chair flight into commercial air space.
3. If you needed more reasons to despise the way that Amazon treats its employees then here is a super gross story about buying their own Pinkertons to spy on employees organizing. That is blatantly disgusting and shameless. Imagine interviewing for that job. Is there a personality test? Do you enjoy helping drastically increase the fear and distrust at your workplace? We have the perfect job for you and your lack of human empathy.
I built my cute and tiny PiHole server today and that made me happy since I can preemptively clear garbage on my network and prevent some potential tragedies from happening to the clickier of the people who live with me. Since I am the IT person in the household I think of it as a time saving measure that will likely save me from having to have credit cards cancelled.
Some things I read today while waiting for progress bars to move:
This and the fact that the victim of this garbage has to publicly call out the non-anonymous harassers makes me fucking sick. The toxic and douchey tech bro stereotype exists for a very good reason; the tech bro is the absolute embodiment of entitlement and makes me fervently wish for another technology crash, despite the fact that it would hurt me in the worst ways possible, just to make these fuckers see that sometimes when you act like like a tantruming four year old there are potential consequences beyond being punished with diversity training purchased from a 3rd party that is likely a frat house for the types that would be actually need this sort of coaching to treat the people around them like fucking people. As the stereotypical white tech guy: I am so fucking sorry and wish that there was something more concrete that I could do apart from waxing poetic with my grab bag of four letter words. I wish I knew how to do more.
While I’m 100% in support with the ideas behind The Polite Type and wish wholeheartedly that the Covid-19 virus would be replaced with a virus that fixes whatever broken part of the human brain that allows people to demean other people, I’m not sure if this implementation is the best possible implementation. I’m not going to talk shit about this project because I respect the ideas and motivation behind it but I’m doubtful if any of the people that would normally type out the word ‘slut’ in reference to another person would actually have revelatory moment as result of their words being dynamically changed while they’re typing them. Maybe I’m far too cynical for efforts like this but I sincerely hope that the cynicism is entirely offbase and that at some undefinable point in the not so distant future that people can just start being decent to the other human beings that their words might reach. As always, there is hope behind the doubt.
You should check out this Noam Chomsky video where he runs down the every increasing potential for nuclear war which only compounds the hopelessnes we’re already feeling due to the pandemic, the endless killing of people of color by police, widespread unemployment of service workers with little hope of meaningful recovery or recompense before these issues escalate into hand-to-mouth problems when folks are worried about where money for food is going to come from, and the usual myriad of problems that come along with living in the United States in a time when we’re hovering over the precipice of utter collapse and the utter relinquishment of all of the qualities, expectations, and freedoms, for and from, that have distinguished this country thus far. It’s a debasing time to be an American and it doesn’t seem like there is going to be any reason to stop white knuckling until the clownish sociopath currently in charge of the country is (fingers double and triple crossed) is replaced with a different brand of sociopath that is better at approximating empathy for people outside their immediate socio-economic bubble. It’s all so fucking depressing.
There is no stable place to comment on this from but apparently Tim Tebow is a QAnon guy now. It is quite possible that we should just shut this planet down now and cut our losses. Every day just becomes that much more oppressively stupid.
If you knew me in real life you likely would be ashamed by proxy at how often I swap out my phone. It’s a bad habit that I’ve been trying to wean myself from for years especially in a world where you end up paying slightly more than the MSRP for a phone when you purchase from your carrier and just in time for that phone to be just slightly outmoded and seemingly useless. I dislike myself for that tendency since it’s essentially money frittered away for no good reason and probably ends up causing a lot more e-waste than I’ll ever be comfortable with.
Here are the phones I’ve used in the past 2.5 years or so:
1. Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
2. Samsung Note 8
3. iPhone X
3. Samsung Note 9
4. Google Pixel 3 XL
5. Google Pixel 3a XL
6. Oneplus 7 Pro 5G
In the best possible world, I’d be using something like the Fairphone if it were more practical outside of Europe and I could stop myself from relentless wanting the latest and greatest by owning a phone that was at least upgradeable. Unfortunately, this doesn’t look like a possibility in the near future. That would be a line in the sand of sorts to keep me from relentless upgrading.
Things I’ve enjoyed about my last few phones:
1. Samsung – battery life! My Notes would last for-fucking-ever on a single charge and it was my introduction to actual fast charging.
2. iPhone – Meh. Solidly mediocre but I fled back to Android land as soon as it was economically feasible.I hadn’t used an iPhone since the 4 was released. I did not miss much. Because I am not in high school or college, the blue bubble stigma means absolutely nothing to me.
3. Google Pixel – the 3a had great battery life and a camera comparable to the amazing one on the Pixel 3 XL. I miss taking photos that look that good. I loved my Pixel 3 XL but the mediocre battery life and the fact that I had to RMA that fucker once without any support from my carrier were both disappointing.
4. Oneplus – I love this phone for everything but the camera and the lack of wireless charging. The fast charging is completely amazing and I’ll admit that the numerous issues that I had with my Pixel 3 XL and the Pixel Stand made me leery of trusting my ass chip to wireless charging especially when you’re wireless charging your alarm clock. Given the direction that Oneplus seems to be moving, I’m not sure that any of the newer phones they’re bringing to the market, in the US at least, are necessarily what I’m looking for. I would love to have the 8 Pro as my next phone but that doesn’t seem likely in the US.
Sooooo, the phones that I’m eyeing:
1. Pixel 5: There is so much to love and hate about all of the hardware that Google makes. I’m hoping they find a reasonable compromise here and make something that’s more usable than the last Pixel that I skipped completely. Battery life is fucking important. Love the camera that is far too capable for a person that mainly takes pictures of my kid and random objects. Love the speed of updates. Love the sometimes stupid extra functionality that comes along with having a Pixel like having the ability for a robot to screen your calls. Hate the seemingly abyssmal hardware QA (I must say that my last RMA for my Pixel 3 was completely software though). Hate the fact that Pixel hardware is much more affordable if you don’t pre-order. Hate the fact that Google still doesn’t get that being able to use your phone through an entire workday is important to most folks.
2. Oneplus: I really would love to be able to purchase a Oneplus 8 Pro and have it function in the United States. That is apparently too much to ask. Sigh.
The weird need to buy is already messing with me. I’m trying to not do anything excessively stupid until the Pixel 5 is actually, you know, released and has actual hardware specifications and pricing. This review of the Pixel 4a does make some good points about features versus dollars which is cool with me for the most part since I’ve used a Oneplus 7 Pro 5G for months which has neither wireless charging nor rated water resistance. Still, how will the Pixel 5 line up?
If anyone is headed back here after seeing an error, I turned Hotlink Protection on for images. After noticing that I was serving up somewhere around 6G a month in images I decided that I wasn’t necessarily a stand in replacement for Google Images. I’d left that piece off for a few years but it is apparently time to turn it back on. Interestingly, some of those linked images are 5 years old or more.
One of the biggest problems that I have with new technology doodads is that I’m not very practical about acquiring them (see the small mountain of Wear OS watches I have in a box for a testimonial to that proclivity) and tend towards the stupid setting when it comes to acquisition lust. Strangely, despite this tendency, I avoid most Apple hardware entirely these days if only because I am freaked out by the walled garden approach so most of the super pricey and useless geegaws are off menu for me. The limited possibilities of the usefulness of any of their devices always leaves me cold.
I’m also no longer a tremendous fan of manually building too many components of functionally attractive gadgets. As I said yesterday, I’m just now purchasing my first Raspberry Pi ever. I also tend to avoid especially ambitious and gadgety Kickstarter campaigns because I know I’m going to be disappointed and/or frustrated by the results. This is largely due to being lazy.
That laziness, however, really, really makes me wish that things like the reMarkable 2 were a little
lot less expensive. I absolutely love the idea of having a large drawing surface with a paper analog feel. It sounds like the invention that I’ve been waiting for since my first computer (that was 1996, by the way, and I wasn’t already in the twenties) and having a glimpse of the possibilities that potentially lay ahead. The reviews from The Verge, Engadget, and a few others only increase my want for this incredibly limited but equally awesome device. There are a number of very appealing parts to this tablet: it’s running Linux, it has a textured screen to approximate the feeling of drawing on paper, and a few other factors but the price is what always empties my cart: $400 for E Ink is a tough sell for me. That said, I really enjoy all of the E Ink devices that I already have but I have a feeling that I’m going to wait for a (relatively) inexpensive, refurbished version of this or I’m eventually going to bite a bit harder on one of the Boox devices that I’ve been eying for a while. Some of those despite being Android devices have similar capabilities and, on the lower end of their product line, are sold at a price that doesn’t make me wince when I contemplate dropping that many dollars on what is really only going to be a drawing device for me. I do want but I know I can’t. That is not a pleasant place for me to linger.
Some things I had a few seconds to throw on my pinboard before the next steaming pile of crisis came squibbling down the pipe:
1. When Belarus shut down internet access, people actually noticed and fixed it. When what I’m totally comfortable calling a dictator decides that footage of its citizenry being brutalized for peaceful needs to be contained it’s a damned good thing that those protesters and their allies in outside countries prevented that bullshit from happening for more than an hour. People and information want to be free.
2. This afternoon I placed an order for my first ever Raspberry Pi with the intent of setting up a Pi Hole server to mitigate the flood of shit from hitting my network. I didn’t think that it was worthwhile when I first heard about this project but lately the amount of both visual crud and less visible adtech makes it seem like a good idea. I opted for the model 4 b since gigabit ethernet was available. The gear won’t be here for a few days so I’ve decided to try to notice the amount of ad related pollution that I’ve lived with for a while. Will I notice any real difference? My guess is no but I like the idea of opting out the most direct way and just not allowing any of that traffic at all.
3. After a few disasters (disaster meaning that I lost more than 10 minutes worth of work) I started relying heavily on Draft for writing posts. I’d forgotten how much I love this editor. When I was still using WordPress for this site I used to generate the entirety of my posts in Draft using some weird ass voodoo they make available. It’s the only web editor that I pay money for and it’s still worth it however many years later. No affiliate link bullshit and just something worth mentioning because, despite paying full price for it, it’s a goddamn pleasure to use and makes all of the half-baked ‘solutions’ I’ve used in the past (my completely lame combo of Tomboy Notes and Dropbox probably slots me into some eligibility for a Darwin award) look like the weak fuckery that they really were.
4. I’ve seen a bunch of coverage for the recent Bonobo WS release by System 76. I am a fan of of System 76 for a number of reasons not the least of which is they’re based out of the same city that I live in. I’ve actually purchased 2 Gazelles (one of which was left behind at an old job) and a Darter from them over the past 5-6 years and have liked all of the machines despite the branded Clevo-ness. I cannot for the life of me remember whether or not the Darter was actually called that when I purchased it but that was the only machine of the bunch that I wasn’t completely happy with which had more to do with the HiDPI display being impossible to use comfortably and the fact that running my external monitor from it (it is a 37″ display so that’s likely part of the problem) caused continuous flickering no matter what I did. I enjoy the fact that they’re releasing these ridiculously powerful desktop replacements. I also purchased a Serval for a developer once too. He loved how freakishly fast and powerful his machine was and I got to tease him about not being able to make it through a 45 minute meeting without running for the charger. I guess that’s the price you pay for a desktop processor in a laptop. I really do want one of their Oryx Pro machines but finances being what they are that is unlikely to happen any time soon.
An old friend asked me a few days ago about all of the posts from this site that disappeared. He also jokingly said that, given the wordiness, I should have published them in a book. I disagree with that completely and utterly because the editing alone would be more work than I’d ever find time for. I wiped out the old WordPress version of this site because after a few years of pointlessly posting still alive, maybe junk I decided to just scrape the domain and start over. I’d guess that the majority of what was posted there would not age particularly well either since the majority of that stuff was cranky reaction to whatever was going on in the Linux community. You know, back when it felt like there was some community organized around FOSS and less like the only thing that people know about Linux is that it’s available in AMIs from AWS. I miss having invested people yelling at me when I’m completely wrong.
Apart from the raw logistics of why I deleted a gigantic MySQL instance full of bile and garbage, my areas of interest and capacity for interest in more than anything that can get me through the next 24-48 hours without the world falling in on itself have changed a bit since then. I still love Linux and would do 100% of my computing in it if time and energy allowed but the honest fact is that I don’t really live in the 90% Linux world that I did for most of 20s and 30s. I’ve got a ridiculous Dell Precision with an i9 processor and an ocean of RAM installed in it that mostly sits idle because I don’t have nearly as much time for playing with cool things as I used to. I also have an Arch work laptop of fairly mediocre specifications that I work on whenever I can avoid being VPN connected (this normally would be the part where I complain for six paragraphs and a thousand words about how shitty it is that the Linux version of Forticlient doesn’t support multi-factor authentication and therefore is worse than useless to me) but because I’m incessantly dropping in and out of VPN-only environments I end up doing the most work on another mediocre-ly spec’d Windows 10 laptop the majority of the time. It’s kind of sad to think of how many utterly crazy work environments I’ve toughed it through by using the weirdest tools in the worst possible and unintended way to stick with my Linux machine. I feel like I’ve run out of steam temporarily or something. The truly sad part about all of this is that Windows 10, especially when compared to the sleek and shiny shit sandwich that Apple is masquerading as a cutting edge OS these days, is pretty stable and usable. Maybe that is the erosion of attention span and patience that comes with age showing but I don’t feel much of anything about it since, in the quarantined world we live in and will probably continue to live in for far longer than the most pessimistic of public agency estimates, I feel like I have any time to advocate for anything better than the bare minimum functional requirements for anything. It makes it considerably harder to put effort into working around the actual damage much less creating overhead of your own. That’s my excuse anyway.
The old Team Murder content is gone and I didn’t even consider backing any of it up before dropping the database. I don’t feel like I lost anything consequential in the purge. It felt more like clearing out old junk from a forgotten corner of an attic and was oddly cathartic.