Shortnotes
Shortnotes! Posts that are short enough to not need to be their own post.
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I've been rebuilding my homelab using Fedora Rawhide + Ansible. It's a nice mix of the kind of stuff I use at work and the bleeding-edge updates I prefer for home use. The goal is to have something that can be rebuilt 100% from Ansible.
Of course, I'm making it harder on myself by aiming for an OKD setup...
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There's the famous saying: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". It's meant to imply that when your skills or tools are limited, you think it can be applied to anything and everything (and that this is a bad thing).
But what if you get your new hammer and want to learn to use it as fast and effectively as possible? It may be useful to learn to use it to solve problems it wasn't designed for. Examples:
- You're learning Ansible and create playbooks to run on localhost instead of a bash script.
- You're learning to draw and use a brush pen for sketching instead of a pencil.
- You try containerizing an app that you'd have traditionally installed bare-metal.
This isn't something you should do in production - but I think it has its merits.
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Over 40 years after the initial release of
sudofor UNIX, Microsoft is adding sudo to windows. Thank you, Microsoft. -
I tried the Ruff linter for Python today. It's pretty snazzy. I think it'll become part of my standard toolset for Python stuff.
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I came across this while reading my RSS feeds this morning: there's a new ad fraud campaign that is using insecure domains from big names like VMware and Marvel. But the interesting thing for me isn't the names attached, but that it seems so simple of an attack: look for outdated and unregistered domains, and use their existing presence in other companies mail records to bypass spam filters.
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Quality-of-life suggestion for the day: turn off the annoying bell in Windows terminal by going to a profile -> Advanced -> Bell notification style and turning off "audible"
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Lately, I've felt like I need to be more conscious about my "free" time. There are many reasons for it (work schedule, the rise of generative AI, ...) but I'm mildly happy with the results thus far?
I'd like to make a dedicated post of it, but I'm having trouble putting my feelings into words.
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I've been trying FSRS for about a month now. Here's my thoughts on it so far:
- I feel like I have a more manageable workload. However, part of me wonders if this is because I'm not putting all of my effort into studying a cert or a language.
- I don't think about how my choices are affecting the ease factor anymore.
- The 3-component model is a lot easier to understand than SM-2's ease.
- I wish I had been studying more during the Fall. My stats page isn't reliable because my Anki usage was very sparse for most of 2023.
- Some of the intervals for relatively new cards feel very long. I'm not sure what to make of this. I'll probably need to reflect on this again in a few months
- Even with the helper add-on to auto-reschedule cards on sync on desktop, I still feel disincentivized to use Ankidroid due to lack of native support.
- It has been a very positive experience overall.
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One annoying problem I have with learning something new programming-wise: I'm so familiar with the Discord.py API library that any real UI library feels like it has too much friction to be worth it for any of my projects. It's even cross-platform!
I'm torn between freshening up my PyQt, learning Kotlin + Android dev, or looking into something else for Linux/Windows dev...
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Signal boosting this in case someone hasn't seen it: there's a new flat in glibc (one of, if not the, most common library on Linux) that allows local privilege escalation. The latest versions of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu are all affected so update if you can.
Relevant links:
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In the interest of keeping things easier to read, I've migrated all of my "shortnotes" posts to a separate page.
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Do you ever work on something at work and wish you had a use for it in your homelab? I'm feeling like that right now with Ceph. Data storage is such a fun topic, but I can't justify buying all of the network and storage hardware needed to make a decent cluster instead of just buying more storage for my Synology NAS.
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I'm trying out the new FSRS scheduling algorithm for Anki. I was hesitant to use it when it was first announced because it seemed to be undergoing a lot of fast changes and required a fair amount of manual setup. But now it's in the main Anki code (though not in AnkiDroid, yet) and it seems like a poor idea to not use it.
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Happy New Year to those who celebrate using a solar calendar! Only another 24 until we hit a nice, round-number milestone.
2024
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- Podman does not require a user to have unique permissions to use it.
- Any user on a docker-enabled system that also is in the docker group can become root with one command
- The "ADD" directive in a Containerfile or Dockerfile is considered more insecure than "COPY" because it can pull remote directories.
- Podman was made with Docker command compatability in mind because the devs knew they'd never get market share otherwise.
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This post is a test of how easy it is to post from a mobile device using the Jenkins auto-deploy system I set up the other week. I'm currently sitting in a restaurant waiting for a friend to finish their food. GitNex's editor isn't the most impressive, but it isn't bad either.
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I decided that I was done with Gitea's weird port mapping, so I tried to fix it. Several hours of head-bashing later, I was left with a corrupted database and no Gitea instance.
I'm now writing this several hours after that. I've learned a surprising amount about Podman (compared to Docker), Kubernetes, pods, and several other things that I'll probably end up using at work some day.
Expect a post some time this week about deploying a Zola static site with Jenkins. And maybe some notes on why I switched from Wordpress to Zola.
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I didn’t really agree with statements about Google’s search getting worse until today.
Using search would usually give me what I wanted within the first few results. All I’d need to do was skip past the inevitable Amazon link that would show up.
But for the past few days, I feel like I’ve had more and more “junk” in it.
- Links that look like they are for a specific post on a forum, but take me to the main page instead.
- Links for blogs that look like they were written by an AI.
- Links that go to entirely different websites than those they appear to be for.
It’s admittedly tiring and makes me want to restart my habit of bookmarking more sites.
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I found a blog by someone who works at a polar research station. Their post on nights there is surreal. It reminds me of Signalis.
EDIT: I realized while porting this post to Zola that I posted this on Halloween. It wasn't my intention to match that with a horror game reference, but it fits! :D
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Late night thought before work maintenance: I don’t particularly enjoy WordPress’ writing interface. It doesn’t feel suitable for quick or technical writing. Customizing the site feels like fighting against the tool.
Pelican (the static site generator) felt a lot nicer. Writing in markdown feels much nicer than using Gutenberg or the Classic Editor (plus I can do version control with Git!) and .html.j2 files for customization is easier than WordPress’ syntax. I’m hardly a Python dev – I don’t wanna be a web dev too.
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Finally doing something that I should have done a long time ago – adding a second (and in some places, first) backup to my systems. BorgBase won over rsync.net for price, and over Backblaze B2 for ease of use with Borg. Bonus points for also making my GUI of choice – Vorta.
Additionally, I’m automating as much as possible with Ansible. I still loathe YAML for configuring anything, but Ansible nearly makes that worth it. ;p
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Another useful tip for Linux users and admins: you can search your command history in bash with
Ctrl+r. Typing something and hitting it again will search backward through commands that match that pattern. It saves a lot of time compared to pressing up repeatedly. -
Did you know that you can use the “or” keyword in python to set a “default” for a variable?
variable_name = value_or_none() or "default value!"Over five years since I started using Python, and I’m only learning this now. I wish I knew about it sooner.
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I'm finally giving Vi[m] a try. It's hard to get used to it after using
nanofor so long. Surprisingly, it's not the:wqor insert mode stuff that is catching me, but the fact taht I can't go to the previous/next ling by pressing left/right at the line ends.(Yes, I realize I can modify this in the .vimrc file but I'm attempting to keep it as close to default as possible since I work on so many different systems.)
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A small realization just came to me: there’s a certain irony to “prompt engineering” being something that people try to teach as if it’s a programming discipline. Wasn’t the goal of the natural language models to make it so that people can speak normally and get the output they want? Shouldn’t that mean that “prompt engineering” should be the same as a communications or writing class?
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A funny thing I’ve noticed about YouTube Music: it doesn’t seem to take your recently-listened-to music into account when showing quick recommendations if you have YouTube history turned off. I can listen to as much blues or j-rock as I want, but it doesn’t start showing those as quick recommends until I hit the like button on a track. Unfortunately, this also means that things I liked a while ago don’t appear anymore.
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I think I added an extra 80 or so cards today just for encryption algorithms’ key lengths, block sizes, etc… I don’t expect they will be used in a lot of CISSP questions, but I’ll ace whatever questions involve them.
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I’m reviewing security models in preparation for taking the CISSP exam. It’s something I haven’t had a lot of reason to think about since I took a class on it in college. Bell-LaPadula, Biba, Clark-Wilson, etc…. I’m glad I know what Anki is now.