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.
Category: Linux
One of the internal dev servers at work got bitten by this old Jenkins bug that I noticed a month or so because it popped up in the firewall logs. Because this isn’t a production machine and is mainly used as an internal testing server (it’s also running a pmta server which is pretty scary), we just shut it down and disconnected it from the network. I assumed the developers would probably torch the entire machine and start over. They didn’t and I had to find the offending lurkers and rescue this box. I’ll admit that I did it the laziest way: I just installed Sophos and waited for the client to either confirm that I had an admittedly tentative false positive or start crap bombing the cloud console with notifications. The crap bombing commenced about 75 seconds after the client piece was finished installing. It managed to open about 12 cases in our ticketing system before I could even disconnect the network.
Once the AV picked up on it I at least knew which file was being obnoxious and could go clobber it and make sure it hadn’t set up any cron jobs to reestablish itself afterwards. The path was something like /tmp/.jenkins/jenkins/-bash. Yup: -bash. It was the end of a pretty long day and it took forever for me to remember how delete a file like this in bash. I hadn’t actually considered that when I first started sawing on it. The remember this idiot from this particular situation is that bash assumed everything that begins with a hyphen is going to be an argument. I futzed around with quotation marks and backticks for a while and got nowhere but frustrated. The oddly easy answer was this: rm -v — -bash. That didn’t come from memory or anything like that but a frustrating round of trying to google up a solution with every query I could think of that didn’t actually use a hyphen which becomes an exclusion argument for that search. So, the short story is that everything after the double hyphen becomes a filename that bash no longer cares about evaluating. In retrospect, I probably should have renamed it and taken a look at what it was actually doing. It was the end of a long day though so I just nuked it from ssh. It was the only way to be sure. Actually, I wasn’t ever sure so I yanked the network again and kicked off an AV scan before I left. A learning experience, yet again, that wasn’t a whole lotta fun especially when my load average is above 4 on an already aging server that I apparently need to preserve.