Tag: Site News

I’ll Be Off For A Few Days

Grandma Burg passed away at 8:45 on Christmas Day. She made it 90 years on this rock and although it is certainly hard on those of us still cruising on this spaceship her final years weren’t easy ones and it’s comforting knowing her suffering is over. And a more appropriate day than Christmas could not be had for a person as dedicated to Christ as herself.

In her 90 years she managed to raise five kids and keep my grandfather in line (no easy feat). Not only that but she managed those accomplishments while maintaining the most positive attitude I’ve every witnessed. She was a great person and this spaceship is diminished by her loss.

I’ll be away from this blog for a few days. Between the funeral and other matters that must be attended to my focus will be very much elsewhere.

I Void Warranties Upon Request

No new content again? I’m afraid so. Why? Because I was voiding a warranty:

i-void-warranties

Somebody needed the power button in their iPhone 4S replaced and figured I was the man for the job. They were right. I replaced the button and the phone powered up again. Of course it doesn’t boot up, but that part wasn’t my fault as it wasn’t actually booting up beforehand (and since the power button stayed in the stuck down position the thinking was that it was just turning off, due to the power button being held in, immediately after boot).

I will say that working on the iPhone 4S is pretty easy.

Setting Up An XMPP Server, Check Back Later

Between recovering from the plague, some server issues on the old server, and setting up an XMPP server I didn’t have time to get posts up.

Setting up XMPP is interesting. The first task is finding a server of which there are surprisingly few good ones to choose from. Originally I was going to use ejabberd as I’ve used it long ago. But I saw the developers have split it into “community” and “business” editions with the former lacking a lot of features (such as compatibility with other instant messenger services). My second choice was Openfire, which I settled on. The downside of Openfire is that it’s written in Java and I’m not of fan of installing Java on systems anymore (because I hate Oracle). Java aside, Openfire is pretty solid. The initial setup is a bit of a pain because it’s not available in any CentOS repositories and you have to do a little manual setup for the MariaDB database. After that you gain access to a web interface that makes everything else simple.

Because the universe likes to make my life stressful the virtual machine I initially setup became corrupted when VMWare fucked up a snapshot operation. So I had to redo all of the work mentioned above again.

Right now I’m doing a beta test with friends. Once I’m satisfied it’s solid I might make it available for others.

Nothing To See Here

Instead of writing new articles I was working on a project:

dissected-mac-mini

That’s my old server (see, I wasn’t shitting you guys about using a Mac Mini). Unfortunately one of the drives died so I need to dissect it and put new drives in it. It wasn’t actually that bad of a project but the start of a cold or allergies (I’m not sure which) didn’t help matters any. Anyways, check back tomorrow.

This Lack Of Content Provided By A New Server

The new server I ordered last week arrived yesterday. I spent most of the evening configuring the server and encrypting the drive. Needless to say the lack of content today is directly related to me fucking around with the server last night. Now that it’s mostly setup I’ll be moving a few virtual machines over to it so you may notice some interruption in this site tonight for a short while (it shouldn’t be long, I should only have to copy the virtual machine over and power it up).

If anybody is interesting in the super awesome server I ordered prepare for disappointment. It’s a new Mac Mini with a 2.6GHz i5 processor and 16GB of RAM. Why a Mac Mini? Because they’re very power efficient. My servers are rarely under heavy load and I’m paying to run them out of my own pocket so I might as well save money on electricity. Also, when it’s not longer a viable server, I can convert it to a client machine (probably a media server).

I’m Officially A Published Author

AgoraFest, Minnesotas little liberty event, has concluded. I’ll probably be writing about the event itself throughout the week but right now I’m really fucking tired and need to take a day or two off from thinking about the event. As with anything worth doing, AgoraFest was a lot of work and I only had to build and maintain the mesh.

But I wanted to share some good news right away. I’m officially a published author. Last year at AgoraFest a group of individuals, some of them actual published authors, came up with an idea for a short story compilation of speculative anarchist fiction. That is how Anarchy Rising: The Clarion Call, Vol 1 came into being and my story, the Peacekeepers, made the cut.

I’m not going to claim this is a great anthology because that wouldn’t be honest. It is, in fact, the greatest anthology. Seriously though, there are a lot of good short stories written by some phenomenal writers. It’s well worth the $3.99 asking price for the Kindle version and $9.95 asking price for the dead tree version.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the local coffee shops and rub this into the faces of those hipsters that have been “working” on their novels for the last decade.

I’m Off To AgoraFest

You’ve probably noticed this week has already been slow. That’s because I’ve been busy finalizing things for AgoraFest. In addition to the talk I’m giving on cryptography as it relates to agorism, I’m also the head of the mesh networking team so I’ve been flashing a lot of access points with Commotion Wireless firmware.

Anyways, I’m out for the rest of the week. New content will return next week.

Nothing To See Here

Instead of typing posts for your reading pleasure I spent last night replacing networking equipment. For the last several years my network has been running off of a Netgear router. Last week I could hear the bearing in the router’s fan starting to go to Hell so I started looking for a replacement (admittedly I could have replaced the fan but that device is so old it doesn’t even have IPv6 support so it was a good excuse to upgrade).

For AgoraFest we’ve been using Ubiquiti access points to build our mesh network. I’ve really enjoyed working with the hardware so I decided to look into Ubiquiti’s wired options. As it turns out their wired networking equipment is pretty nice so I ordered an EdgeRouter Lite and EdgeSwitch Lite (the Lite versions lack Power over Ethernet, which I didn’t need). They’re now up and running. I still have to fine tune the configurations but you can see this site so the important work is done.