Lowe's rant

Tim Chase

2024-07-14

Sigh. Lowe's doesn't seem to be able to competently ship a part that still shows as in-stock on their site. Rant documenting the drama follows.

tl;dr order online, they cancel. order online again, they cancel. Call support, get told to place the order with the local store. Call local store, get told they can't. Call support, get told to physically go into the store to order. Order gets placed. Order arrives, installer notes it's missing parts. Call support, get told they'll rush out a replacement. Replacement arrives. Check box, still missing same parts. Call support, rush delivery of another replacement with notes for the shipper to check the contents. Third order arrives with the same contents as the previous two. To be continued…

The Longevity of Old School tooling

Tim Chase

2024-06-20

The future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Lindy's Law

In praise of the old stuff

I've watched a lot of tech come and go over the years. People jump on the bandwagon of the next, new hot thing. Then it fizzles out. If lucky, they can swing like Tarzan from vine to vine, from one technology to the next technology, carrying forward their data.

Me? I'm boring. Lazy. I don't want to port my data with every new trend.

Exploring ActivityPub/ActivityStreams

Tim Chase

2024-02-01

Overview

Wanting to dig into ActivityPub / ActivityStreams for a while I figured I'd read the specs and dive in. Having read plenty of RFC specs before, I figured this wouldn't take too long. Boy was I wrong.

This article is currently a WIP so it may get updated multiple times as I learn more and read deeper into the various specs/RFCs and their sub-dependencies.

Planning the day on the CLI with tsort

Tim Chase

2023-07-31

I had a bunch of items on the todo list for the day and wanted to arrange them in order, but I needed to certain items before others:

Drop donations off at the resale store, but can't do that before 10:00 when they open
Get the daughter ready for soccer camp before dropping her off
Drop the daughter off at camp before taking paperwork up to her school
cut the son's hair before he takes a shower and cleans his bathroom
pick up daughter at camp after she's started camp (duh) and before 10:45
take the kids to the library after picking up daughter at camp
for obvious reasons, 8:30 → 8:45 → 9:00 → 10:00 → 10:30 → 10:45

So I expressed this in a file where each row contains "X needs to come before Y":

$ cat todo.txt
10:00 resale
resale 10:30
sunblock take_to_camp
pack_snack take_to_camp
pack_water take_to_camp
pack_towel take_to_camp
take_to_camp 8:30
8:30 soccer_camp
soccer_camp 8:45 
soccer_camp paperwork
8:45 home
home 9:00
paperwork home
home cut_hair
home clean_bathroom
home shower
cut_hair shower
cut_hair pick_up
shower pick_up
clean_bathroom pick_up
cut_hair clean_bathroom
clean_bathroom 10:00
10:45 pick_up
8:30 8:45 
8:45 9:00 
9:00 10:00 
10:00 10:30 
10:30 10:45 
pick_up library

Now it just became a matter of passing these requirements to tsort

$ tsort todo.txt
pack_towel
pack_water
pack_snack
sunblock
take_to_camp
8:30
soccer_camp
paperwork
8:45
home
cut_hair
9:00
shower
clean_bathroom
10:00
resale
10:30
10:45
pick_up
library

to sift them into the required order of my todo list for the day.

Old Computer Challenge

Tim Chase

2023-07-10

History

This is the third year in which Solene has run the Old Computer Challenge and I've tried to participate in each of them.

Participating in these requires a little flexibility since I work remotely for $DAYJOB. The low-end computer challenges posed less issue since neither the VPN nor rdesktop required much in the way of resources. Using the smaller screen-dimensions on the older laptops made it a bit more challenging, but I made it work.

None of these challenges shifted any usage to my phone. I prefer not to use my phone for anything beyond the barest of essentials: phone-calls, texting, podcasts, timers, lists, and weather.

First year (2021)

The first year and third year both focused on limited hardware,

I chose a Gateway Solo 1200 as my primary machine for the first year. Boasting an 800MHz Celeron processor, a 120GB spinning-rust HDD, a 10mbit wired LAN connection (it also had an internal wi0 wireless card and a PCMCIA Intel wifi option, but both only supported WEP rather than WPA2 so I stuck with the wired option), and upgraded to its maximum of 320MB of RAM. This machine infamously arrived on 9/11 with the UPS driver delivering it as I watched the twin towers fall on TV.

The machine ran the latest release of OpenBSD without issue. The limited CPU & RAM limited my choice of software notably. Fortunately, other than web-browsing, much of what I do happens at the command-line.

Email: I had used Claws Mail (a GUI mail program) for many years but it started using more and more system resources. So I had aspired to switch to mutt or neomutt. The Old Computer Challenge gave me the kick I needed. Dealing with multiple accounts and catch-all mailboxes posed the worst pain-points. Otherwise, it ran fine within the limited system resources. And they provide a lot of power to mow through piles of email.
Music: I've long used cmus for playing my music collection, and pianobar for streaming. Both ran fine even on this ancient hardware.
Calendar: I've moved my calendaring to remind and it runs fine at the CLI. It did have a noticeable lag on startup but I suspect that my 3000+ reminders/events cause that. When I winnow it down to a much more sensible volume of reminders, it runs in a blink.
Coding: All my coding happens at the CLI using a mix of vi, vim, and ed for editing, and doing version-control with git or rcs so not much changed here. I did find notable startup lag both in starting vim and executing Python code. It made me appreciate the fast startup times for utilities that compiled down to native code. I also found myself using awk in a lot of places since it had a faster startup time than Python.
RSS: I've long used rss2email to gather my RSS feeds and deliver them to my inbox, reducing the RSS-reader issue to a mail issue. I experienced no disruption here, since mutt let me keep reading my feeds just as I had done in Claws.
Social media: I accessed Twitter with Rainbowstream, Mastodon with Tootstream, and rtv (now obsolete) for Reddit. For text posts and commenting, I loved them all. But for image/video posts, they fell short. I wish I had a quality CLI interface for Facebook to keep in touch with friends & family who only share things there.
Office stuff: Thankfully, I don't have to deal with Office documents often. And almost never outside of $DAYJOB so I could use Word or Excel remotely. I did install Abiword for the occasional MS-Word document and Gnumeric for the occasional spreadsheet. Both provided reasonable fidelity and speed while running within the confines of the limited hardware.
Gaming
: I don't game much, so this didn't impact me much. I think I played a couple rounds of cribbage(6) and atc(6) as a proof-of-concept, but certainly no high-end FPS games here.

Web browsing hurt the most. Firefox & Chromium? Completely unusable without gobs of RAM. For some basic browsing, lynx and dillo provided lightweight options, while Epiphany clocked in at barely-usable (but still better than Firefox & Chromium) for sites requiring JavaScript.

Second year (2022)

The second year focused more on limiting network usage (both total-time and bandwidth).

I had to segregate life here since $DAYJOB requires remoting into my work machine so I didn't count that time against my allotted 1hr.

I didn't know how to count my cron job that downloads my podcasts nightly since I don't have much control over how long they run or how much data they download. I decided that, since the challenge only ran for a week, and I batch podcasts roughly every three weeks, I could load a fresh batch to my player before the challenge, disable the cron job for the week, and then re-enable the cron job after completing the challenge. Not quite the spirit of the challenge, but also a lot like how I would download things in high-school, where I would walk to the local campus library to download large files and bring them home.

Email didn't pose a great concern, since OfflineIMAP let me batch download my emails from the server, and my local MTA would batch up outbound emails until I reconnected, sending them all to my smart-host mail-server in one go.

However, the second year really cut into social-media usage. Its model simply doesn't accommodate offline use well.

Third year (2023)

Similar to the first year the tools remained largely the same. However this year I did the challenge while on vacation. Cheating? Maybe. But also enforcing since I didn't take any other laptop. This time I took a Dell Mini10 netbook with me. This hand-me-down came to me with 2GB of RAM, but I'd made a few upgrades:

replaced the 120MB HDD with a 60GB SSD giving a bit of extra pep
replaced the rubbish Broadcom wireless half-height PCI card with an Atheros chipset
installed OpenBSD 7.3 in place of Windows Vista

The netbook has no fan, relying on passive cooling instead. This meant that using apm -L kept the system running cool. I could manually apm -H to get the full 1.x GHz but it came with a warm price, discouraging me from doing so.

The tiny 1024×600 screen resolution gave even greater constraints when remoting into $DAYJOB but, that helped me stay in vacation-mode rather than try to sneak in hours. Additionally, X seemed to think the display offered 1024×768 resolution, so everything rendered with a squishing/scaling that ruined friends' pictures. And equally bad, the Poulsbo chipset lacked support in X, so it rendered very slowly using VESA. But I had times where I could watch text render character-by-character, and could type full paragraphs of text before the first couple words appeared on the screen. With better graphics-support, I suspect it would have felt notably snappier.

Future challenges

After returning from that vacation, I purchased a new laptop for travel, and got rid of four of my old junker laptops (my beloved rejoices at fewer laptops on my desk). I still have the Mini10 and a PPC iBook G4 running OpenBSD, so I can participate in future challenges.

Closing out the books in ledger(1)

Tim Chase

2023-01-11

I put this here mostly because I forget how to do it and have to make multiple starts to get it right.

$ ledger -f ledger.txt  print \
>   -e 2022-1-1 > 2021.txt

$ ledger -f ledger.txt equity
>   -e 2022-1-1 > tempfile.txt

$  echo >> tempfile.txt

$ ledger -f ledger.txt print \
>   -b 2022-1-1 >> tempfile.txt

$ mv tempfile.txt ledger.txt

Closing out the books for 2021

Using mail(1)

Tim Chase

2022-12-14

Intro

CONGRATULATIONS! Your OpenBSD install has been successfully completed!

When you login to your new system the first time, please read your mail
using the 'mail' command.

OpenBSD's post-install message

Oh, no! You have a fresh install and the only way to read your welcome message from Theo requires using mail.

chrooted SFTP

Tim Chase

2021-08-30

Creating `chroot` SFTP accounts

For $DAYJOB I had to create user accounts for customers and give them access to SFTP files to/from secured areas of our server. We wanted to use chroot functionality to ensure that no customer could see other customers' data, and prevent them from poking around potentially sensitive areas of the server. After a bit of trial-and-error, I've listed the lessons-learned here in a cook-book fashion so that in case I ever have to do it again, I have the steps documented.

This post was spurred to exist thanks to this Reddit post asking about creating an encrypted FTP server on OpenBSD so my reply there became the basis for this post.

CLI Tricks: Spongebob Sarcasm in awk

Tim Chase

2021-02-28

Sometimes you want to turn some text into "sarcastic Spongebob" text so this little fragment of awk will make that transformation for you:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN { srand() }
{
    n = split($0, a, //)
    for (i=1; i<=n; i++) {
        c=a[i]
        printf("%c", rand() < 0.5 ? toupper(c) : tolower(c))
    }
    print ""
}

sarcasm.awk

CLI Tricks: Full justify text with awk

Tim Chase

2021-02-27

I wanted to do some full-justification of text. So a little awk later, I could set the desired width and pipe to justify it.

#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN {c = "COLUMNS" in ENVIRON ? ENVIRON["COLUMNS"] : 80}
{
    if (NF > 1) {
        s = $0
        wc = split(s, a)
        gsub(FS, "", s)
        totalfill = c - length(s)
        fill = totalfill / (wc - 1)
        intfill = int(fill)
        errdelta = fill - intfill
        err = 0.5
        printf("%s", a[1])
        for (i=2; i<=length(a); i++) {
            width = intfill
            err += errdelta
            if (err >= 1) {
                ++width
                err -= 1
            }
            printf("%*s%s", width, " ", a[i])
        }
        printf("\n")
    } else print
}

full-justify.awk

In praise of the old stuff

Overview

History

First year (2021)

Second year (2022)

Third year (2023)

Future challenges

Intro

Creating chroot SFTP accounts

Creating `chroot` SFTP accounts