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.
Month: August 2020
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.
During this worldwide and deadly pandemic a fair amount of ink was spilled about how difficult it was to stop working when the normal hours of business operation were finished. I find this kind of hilarious because it’s nearly impossible for me to get anything at all accomplished that takes more than 10 minutes because I absolutely know I will be disturbed at least once during that increment. I spend more time talking people thorough problems they’re trying to solve in completely inane ways during the day than I do working on things that would potentially solve some of those problems ahead of them being dragged to my (virtual or otherwise) desk like the corpse of a murder victim.
That person is dead. You should really be thinking more about burying them before they start to stink than how we could potentially jolt them back to life with a sufficient charge of electricity.
I’m an operations guy at heart despite what my job title may say about being senior guy who cleans up terrible messes or whatever. I wouldn’t say that I run towards the sound of a car accident necessarily but I do chase ambulances just to see what broke and who might be responsible. It’s a terrible habit that I’ve never successfully broken myself of. The one aspect of those situations that I’ve handled better as the years progress is waiting until everyone clears out of the office or until the Slack DMs slow down to 3 per second or so. I’m not going to get anything accomplished while the people who are right up against a hard deadline (sorry!) or the gawkers who read trade magazines are peppering me with (dumb) questions and (well intentioned) ineffectual offers to help out if they can.
Anyway, obvious mockery of self improvement listicle sites aside, I think this guide, which ironically was published before Covid-19 was a virus we are all too familiar with, has a solid list of strategies to avoid feeling like you can never mentally leave work. It was what instigated all of the venting at the beginning of this post in large part because I wish I was better at incorporating straightforward measures towards making work a lesser part of my life. It’s a short and pointed list that avoids all of fellow pandemic kids tactics that more irksome sites lean on especially hard and we could all use a 1100 word break from that.
This bit about Google Cloud Platform’s habit of killing everything useful in it has been all over all of the places I look at during lunch and it, despite being hosted on the most noxious platform for putting words out onto the internet: Medium, is worth reading if you have any opinions at all about the methodology that Google uses to poop what they’re not interested in any more out of their software stack (that’s deprecation for those of you who capitalize the word ‘engineer’) and not just because it’s funny. It’s also worth reading if only because it’s written from the perspective of someone who has actually used the things he’s talking about in a production capacity. Typically everything that I read critical of GCP falls broadly under the umbrella of tried this once and I didn’t understand some part of it so it sucks think-piecing. I’d love to think that the idea of building things with an eye toward them being useful for more than 3 months might make a comeback in the not so distant future. People do love to say the word ‘deprecating’ during meetings though.
All of the above said, I’ve never once wanted to invest any effort into getting my head around Google Cloud Platform. As Steve Yegge said in his post, the documentation is godawful and mostly non-existent and I don’t enjoy needing to mess with things when I don’t have to. The decades of IT work have made risk adverse even when I’m just messing around with conceptually. The odds of me learning much about something I know will break and will break by design are next to zero. God forbid I built something useful to a handful of people and then have to keep revising it just to make sure the framework keeping all of that shit together doesn’t silently decide that I’m doing it the wrong way and subsequently requiring me to rewrite something I no longer care about. I have the option of taking that posture because 1) I don’t write any code that any one else should ever read much less use and 2) because I’m not selling people services that may or may not work tomorrow due to engineering whimsy or boredom with something that doesn’t disrupt the paradigm, bro. No thanks and next contestant. I get to be that petty and arbitrary because no one is paying me (well, except my work and I do nothing but manage tools that manage other tools there these days) for things that started out fun and then got tedious quickly. I completely get it. It is fun and rewarding in a punitive way to work on things that sort of work well enough and then move onto another more novel and interesting problem. That is great method of creating things for a hobbyist. No one expects to pay a hobbyist (against a running meter much less) for their sorta working and might not see much new work in the future projects. The evidence for that is everywhere. I think Source Forge is basically a monument these days to projects that started strong and sunk silently into obscurity and obsolescence. The operative difference with Source Forge is that if something there is something people find useful and necessary then after the original author has moved on to other things there is opportunity for other people to pick up where the first person left off. Google has an utterly hobbyist attitude towards the majority of their products and no tangible accountability other than lighting the occasional stick of incense on the altar of Our Lady of The Perpetual Beta to atone for their indifference to any user of their software that doesn’t also work for Google. I guess if you sell enough advertising then you buy the right to just mess around on every front.
Ironically, after all of the Google bashing, I realize that I’m typing all of this up on Pixelbook which is my favorite in an increasingly gigantic stack of powerful and portable machines. The reason I love it so much is because it’s absurdly overpowered for what it needs to do, still has great battery life, and stays the fuck out of my way for the most part. I even get to choose which branch of Chrome OS you want to run on it and even if you make the wrong choice (p.s. the correct choice is the Beta branch) you can just power wash the machine back to newness and start the mucking up all over again in a matter of minutes. I’m acutely aware that they’ll probably never build a machine as cool as this again but I’ll be using this machine until it either rattles apart or isn’t eligible for OS releases any more. I’m betting the latter will likely be the end instead of the former.
Speaking of companies who have have incomprehensible piles of money to burn and utter disdain towards all but the smallest fraction of their users and the vast majority of people writing software for their platform, I also enjoyed this post about the pain of installing software that didn’t surrender 30% of its purchase price for the right to inclusion in App Store. I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to create anything intended to run on macOS. It makes me wonder if any of the developers that were around for the old days of being a tiny percentage of the marketplace and making cool things for the people who haloed themselves in an aura of rugged and tasteful individualism by buying from the scrappier millionaires are adapting well to the utter irony of those artisanal mass market computer manufacturers dominating the market and using that dominance to make everyone resent their presence in it. While they’re likely making a better living (minus that 30% obviously) these days it’s undoubtedly a much more expensive and bureaucracy-laden process to even get to the point where someone without a Developer license would even be able to install something they’ve written.
Over the years, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time coaching people through the maze of workarounds needed to accomplish seemingly basic maintenance tasks on their ‘just works’ computers so I feel this pain in a palpable way. My frustration towards the design decisions Apple has made over the past handful of years mirrors the way that I feel towards the way the Gnome project veered much to the dismay of folks who appreciated Gnome 2 for its measured simplicity. I’ll be the first to admit that the Apple demographic may be the worst group to try to explain things to since the idea of a mod-click of any kind seems alien to them, thus the Can’t you just right click title of the article I’m talking about.
While this whole plague that’s killing people while they ignore it thing is going on, I’ve been working completely from home since March so the functionality holes in user controlled security has been the most persistent pain point for me in administering my shrinking fleet of Apple hardware. Every user in my organization now has the local admin account password because I need to give to them so that I can walk them painfully through the process of enabling screen recording and accessibility functions in System Preferences. Super duper cool, Apple. The most frustrating part about all of this is that Apple has yet to create any tools for managing their machines in what should be a managed environment. I know Microsoft has rolled out some paid solutions equal in vexation to the 3rd party JAMF suite that is supposed to allow me to have some degree of control over these precious slabs of silicon individuality but there’s always a way to work around that damage on the Windows side of the house. Again, backwards fucking compatibility motherfuckers!
The list of things that Apple keeps me from being able to do easily and cheaply continually grows. Wanna reimage any machines that thankfully don’t have T2 chips and are running Catalina? Prepare to fuck around with DeployStudio forever just to route around that damage. Need to install or update anti-virus? Get ready to become bffs with csrutil because you’re going to be hanging out a lot. Super cool to decide that monolithic imaging is dead without providing any method for replacing it. Oh yeah, keep your finger on that csrutil button if you want to do something crazy like removing FaceTime or any of the other included software that isn’t necessary for most business cases. In short, it’s awful and again it’s a case of being forced to cater to the whims of their innate need to control all aspects of their machines. Locking down common functionality and intimidating users by popping up warnings about malware and potential harm to their computers is really, really user friendly as is non-standard deinstallation of most software: it’s super easy! You just drag the Application to the trash and later go and find all of the plists it left behind that are breaking other things! It just works (for us)!
Automattic ended up in a battle of wills with Apple wherein Apple wanted them to build in purchasing capability (for domain purchases and non-free hosted WordPress plans) so it could collect its 30%. Luckily, they yielded in the face of angry users and relented. Apple isn’t a company that I’d ever choose to work with but until they make enough decisions that piss off a huge majority of mobile phone buyers most companies are forced to donate a third of their application revenue to the scrappy little computer company worth more than a trillion dollars. My interpretation of their position is that your product should already be worth millions of dollars before you even attempt to besot their App Store with your feeble stab at relevance otherwise they’ll relegate you to working in the gift shop on a commission basis. I liked it much better when the reality distortion field was smaller and didn’t infect and destroy more interesting things. I liked it better when Apple wasn’t so fucking huge and equipped with an infinite supply of blank checks for belligerently hostile behavior under the guise of aesthetic purity. Crazily, I liked it better when pre-SP2 Windows XP was the most pressing issue that I had and that is saying a lot.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here (insert no one being surprised about anything here) and the world has completely and utterly fallen apart over the past six months. My kid and I were talking about how odd it was to think about just walking into a restaurant, without any planning or forethought, to pick up something to eat. It seems like years have passed over this handful of months and I can still remember the conversation I had with my manager at work a few days before Denver basically shut all the way down for a few months. Both of us were a bit skeptical about how severe the impact of Covid-19 would actually be and verbally walked through a few different possibilities that largely ended up with everyone rolling back into the office in a month’s time. Sometimes I’m really, really wrong. As I go from the realm of ironically referring to myself as an old man to teetering on the precipice of actually being that point of reference, I’m more comfortable with admissions of ineptitude than I’ve ever been. It’s hardly upsetting any more.
If you are one of the zero or less people who actually read the old Team Murder that was active between 2002-2010 then you might detect a slight change in my perspective. This is not just years at work but over the past 2-3 years I’ve moved through a towering pile of changes and things are vastly improved and more stable these days, plague times withstanding and all. Since the last time I wrote anything on this domain with any earnest a healthy number of things that I felt were foundationally defining in my life sprouted legs (or wrote themselves a blank check with ‘Midlife crisis’ on the memo line) and Riverdanced the fuck off the map on into the great hereafter. While the majority of the more jarring changes were happening, I tried to make myself feel better by doing stupid yet outwardly invisible things that mostly didn’t stay with me. I used to try to ingest some variety of hallucinogen every few years because it would give my increasingly fixed perspective a necessary slap upside its metaphorical head and jolt me into cognizance of the narrowing circles I was pacing around in. I haven’t felt that need recently perhaps because it’s legal(-ish) in this state now and doesn’t have the urban legends of potentially losing your mind or whatever. The appeal is missing now, I think, because I was unstable for a couple of years. Of course, my idea of instability is pretty pedestrian and points to how much of a privileged wuss I am: I had a semi-amiable divorce, I moved into a very nice if depressing apartment, I discovered that being a part time parent makes me a much better and more engaged parent, I got married again and now I’m a step parent, and I bought yet another overly large house in the suburbs without feeling the slightest twinge of ex-urban angst while I post this over a 1G/1G fiber internet connection that costs less a month that the PPPoE aDSL internet connection that I had when I first started posting things on this domain.
What’s new with you?