Joe @mindofjoe@fosstodon.org

Wondering how well spamassassin might be trained if fed gmail-detected spam... 🤔

Olde ham radio youtuber mid-stream turned apologist for the companies selling eternally high priced ham radio hf transceivers. To make his understanding more relatable to his listeners, he asserted that Apple is selling their iPhones at a loss as they cost far more than $1k each to produce.

🤦

tl;dr 🤦

In the middle of the night, when the room was largely inactive, I set myself up to watch network traffic and logs, and I pushed the join button.

The barrage of network traffic was absolutely astounding -- and since no one was saying anything, not one bit of it had anything to do with new messages coming in. The dns queries in particular were wild -- the instance seemed to be gathering information from anyone who ever participated in the room. Not all of them were still there ~ lots of dns fails, timeouts, failed connections, etc.

To my ISP, it must have looked as if my network was wildly infected.

Meanwhile, on another box, an IRC session connected to a pair of servers, different rooms quietly ticked away.

2am. Moving in slow-motion all day. Little spurts of effort here and there ~ now have a matrix-synpase service running on the freebsd box alongside pleroma and a few other things. Successfully "talked to myself" between test accounts on the private instance and one on matrix.org. freebsd pkg had some config issues, but worked them out. At least it's running minimally in a jail & using a shared postgresql service in another jail ~ packing in the services.

Not bad... but not all to sure how it fits in with self-hosted pleroma & irc & jitsi & freepbx & wordpress & email & ... Hell, there's even a ham radio transceiver on my desk ~ microphone, morse key, & digital. There is no shortage of self-hosted ways to communicate, it seems.

Absolutely amazed that, after all that compile time, I'm sitting here with firefox running on gnome. Two-fingered trackpad scrolling is working. Function keys are mapped right. Weird...

The real shock of the morning? ssh with kerberos/gssapi failed ~ option not supported. Huh... That's not happened in a few years... what's up? Option not supported. Had to find the appropriate compile (err, USE) flags and rebuild openssh... and that TOTALLY made sense to me. Why indeed would ssh have kerberos support on by default?

Next, a 7min +/- build of keepassxc. Mild irk that I had to wait, but kind of a cool reminder that it's being built from FOSS right before my eyes. Quiet nod.

Definitely not for the "I need this to work right now" ordinary case, but also throwing me back to the days I was working through building kernel module exercises.

Starting to grok the gentoo way...

# time emerge -1 -a firefox

real 292m56.282s
user 1091m49.450s
sys 32m59.881s

I "grew up" in an R&D environment where I had to make do with sometimes extremely constrained resources / environments. I still bristle when I hear devops folk say "Yeah, every so often that server acts up, so we just 'shoot it' and let the system recreate it." I get it ~ a Level ♾ troubleshooter diagnosing the problem at $♾/hour with uncertain outcome vs 💻🔫🤷 ? Makes business sense.

Gentoo, packing raspberry pis with services, reducing bloat, optimizing, etc., spark a weird kind of joy, but ~ damn! ~ could've stood up an entire organization with ubuntu during some of these gentoo compiles with questionable outcomes.

emerge --ask --verbose --keep-going gnome-base/gnome

real 953m1.915s
user 2395m27.725s
sys 298m8.111s

Whoa... and there was still work to do afterward.

Could definitely use a big "status monitor" or two around the house ~ screens cycling through console windows from different machines, event detections, message alerts, etc. ~ although I suspect that the project would ultimately be a bit more interesting than anything it would be monitoring 😛

Brief recap, starting Friday:

Working on a wordpress plugin downstairs on an ubuntu laptop.

Later upstairs with the arch laptop, hey, let's continue on this box... Going to need git, vscode, docker, ...

Installing docker/snap/build-tools made a mess of things ~ so much so I decided an arch one-off wasn't worth the tinkering. At a minimum I'd want a clean install.

The cure? See if it'll gentoo! 🤪

Weekends are for weekending, I suppose. Maybe get back to that plugin tonight.

Very cool that duckduckgo.com will switch over to a light presentation when you hit it with lynx (or presumably any non-javascript browser, I'd guess). ✅

Considering building a little interactive website up to shame the local Village Center. Here's to another day where the garden is behind a padlocked fence. Here's to another day with no place to sit. Sure is beautiful...

The one (arguably still not) valuable aspect of this gentoo folly of mine? Going branch-by-branch through the kernel configuration tree. It's been (🤔) years since I went in there with a critical eye.

So, the wifi was initially correctly configured to load as kernel modules (as the modules will read some userspace files ~ go figure), but the actual drivers ~ contained in microcode ~ I had not installed. A couple of kernel tinkers & flag double-checks later, that was good to go.

As for GNOME, ... In spite of the 8h of general compiling everything specified by the desktop/gnome gentoo profile, I went to startx and ... where's startx?

Seems I still need some x stuff. So, you know, lunch, coffee, evening tv, etc., while all *that* builds X-)

Received a "coverage report" from google regarding one of my blogs. Their warning:

"Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt"

I *presume* this means that google went ahead and indexed my (grandfathered blogger, owned by google) blog in spite of the robots.txt...

Waiting for the instruction, "To avoid messages such as these, you must prefix the name of your blog with "Hey_Google_Do_Not_Index_This_" ...

time emerge --ask --verbose --update --deep --newuse @world

#gentoo

Checking in on that #gentoo build...

Have to say, there's something nice about seeing the cpus pegged.

As for waiting hours to know if it's going to work, ... 🤷

"The updates to the Microsoft Services Agreement will take effect on Ju‍ne 15, 20‍21. If you continue to use our products and services on or after Ju‍ne 15, 20‍21, you are agreeing to the updated Microsoft Services Agreement.
If you do not agree, you can choose to discontinue using the products and services, and close your Microsoft account before these terms become effective."

In what world is stuff like this even possible, let alone acceptable or ordinary?

A friend of a friend is in his nineties and has decades of journal docs in WPS format that he can’t open any more now that he’s using Google Docs on a Chromebook. I converted them to HTML using libwpstools, then to doc files using a headless LibreOffice command. Bash enabled me to covert hundreds of files at once. Uploading now. He’s gonna be so happy. And I downloaded all the tools for free. I love the command line and this community. I’m feeling very accomplished this morning.

Meanwhile, that dirty arch laptop? Today's question: "Will it gentoo?" Got the build started in a tmux session, disconnected, and walked away. Will check on that later.

I was running gnome/arch on one box and gnome/ubuntu on another. They looked and mostly behaved the same day-to-day, but arch seemed a bit faster -- definitely so at startup. Recreating the ubuntu box backend functions on arch was somewhat more tedious (where I managed to succeed).

Really wishing linux could get a little more onboard with root-on-zfs. Last night's fiasco could easily have been fixed with a zfs rollback... :-/