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Nerd Babble, the good

git is a source code control system. It is the most powerful or one of the most powerful SCS’s I’ve used.

Like all powerful things, you can break it in hundreds of different ways.

One of its most powerful features is the concept of a remote repository. While other SCS were able to have remote repositories, git takes it a step further. A remote repository is just the bare part of a normal git repository.

This meant that if you had access to a remote server, you could have a remote repository on that server. The issue came when you wanted to restrict what a user could do on that remote server.

The answer came in the form of small applications that allowed you to configure remote access via a git repo. That access, in turn, allowed users to access other repos. By combining SSH keys with this simple software package, you could have multiple users accessing the remote repositories through a single “user” on the remote server.

This simple tool grew into a monstrosity called gitlab. If you purchase a GitLab seat, you get all the tools and do not have to worry about the resources used. Unfortunately, this can be expensive if you have more than a few members of on your team.

There was an option to self-host, but the self-hosted version was missing some very useful features as compared to the paid version. And the thing is a resource hog.

GitHub went a slightly different route. It offers almost all the features of GitLab, maybe more. It has a free tier. But if you want private repos, again, you have to pay per seat.

Enter gitea, as they say, “Git, with a cup of tea.” This thing is fast enough in a low resource environment. It has the remote repos. It allows forking and pull requests.

It has organizations and teams, allow easy control of collaborations. It has everything we need for remote git repos.

And then the extras. First, it has a good issue tracking system. It is not jira but it is good enough. It has projects with Kanban capabilities. It has a wiki.

And it looks like all the “extras” are handled as repos. I’m very impressed.

I feel like we won this round.

Nerd Babble, the bad

Computer motherboards are supposed to be standardized. Yes, some manufacturers make custom boards for their custom cases, but in general, standard is better.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve discovered a small form factor motherboard that is small enough and light enough to attach to the back of a monitor. We have three of these at the house. Thank you to my son for discovering these.

When looking for NAS enclosures, I discovered 4 bay NAS enclosures that were designed to hold a Mini-ITX motherboard.

A Mini-ITX motherboard is 170×170 mm.

This size allows for exactly one expansion slot to the right of the back i/o ports.

Unfortunately, there is another motherboard that isn’t a Mini-ITX which gets sold as a Mini-ITX. It is 170x190mm. This gives enough space for 2 expansion slots.

The NAS enclosures only accept the 170×170 motherboards.

I now have a 170×190 MB that I will have to home.

Snope and Ocean State Tactile

My frustration with the Snope case knows no bounds. This case is old.

It started as a challenge to Kolbe. Kolbe was a challenge to Maryland’s assault weapon ban. It went before the Fourth Circuit court where they assumed that assault weapons were arms under the Second Amendment, and then proceeded to say that they were not protected arms because of “interest balancing”.

This was appealed and cert was denied.

A few years later, Bianchi v. Frosh was started. This was a challenge to Kolbe. The district court followed the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in Kolbe and found for the state. The case was appealed. The three judge merits panel found for the state because they could not override an enbanc panel. A motion was made to have the case heard enbanc.

Regardless, the Fourth found for the state and Bianchi filed a petition for writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court.

Somewhere around that time, Frosh was replaced with Brown. Thus, the case became known as Bianchi v. Brown.

The Supreme Court sat on the case until after Bruen.

After Bruen the Supreme Court granted certiorari, vacated the Fourth Circuit’s finding, and remanded the case back down for a do-over. This is a GVR.

The Fourth Circuit then had the case briefed in light of Bruen and then heard oral arguments before a three judge merits panel. They were the first circuit to hear a Second Amendment case after Bruen.

The merits panel split 2-1 in favor of Bianchi. The sore loser refused to write and submit his dissent on the case. This kept the case in limbo for almost a year. At the end of the year, it looked like the merits panel was going to publish their pro-Second Amendment opinion without the dissent.

At which point the Fourth Circuit decided to take the case enbanc. They required the parties to submit another set of briefs. They then held oral arguments again.

Around this time, Mr. Bianchi left the state of Maryland. This would have mooted the case, but David Snope was also a plaintiff and thus the case was renamed Snope v. Brown. The Fourth circuit then found for the state, again.

This case is now before the Supreme Court seeking certiorari, again.

The court has discussed this case in conference six times. It was distributed for conference seven times, with the first conference being rescheduled.

Which takes us to Ocean State Tactical. This is a magazine ban out of Rhode Island. It is in the same posture as Snope

And now we have Antonyuk v. James. This is a sensitive places case. This case has been to the Supreme Court multiple times. Has been GVRed once. It was denied certiorari once, but with a statement by Thomas telling the inferior courts to do it right.

With all three of these cases before the Supreme Court, seeking certiorari, we might get a trifecta. Here’s hoping.

The Continuing Lawfare against Trump

It is difficult to express just how fast these cases are moving. It is my opinion that the people engaging in lawfare had an expectation of stopping this administration dead in its tracks.

Even when the administration appears to have lost, they are winning. The only case that I’ve noticed that is moving at “regular” speeds is the DoJ v. State of New York. Note, that is not the actual case name.

We’ve had cases move from district court through the circuit courts to the Supreme Court and back down in a weeks time.

In the case of Mahmoud, the administration moved so fast that the lawyers filed in the wrong court. Now they are arguing that it was the right court because at that instant of time, M.K. was in a particular location. This does not seem to be the case.

The left is claiming that Trump is being forced to pay $2 billion dollars. He’s not. The new order says that they have to pay what is actually owed. Not “all billed”. This is another win. That judge was slapped down hard.

Question of the Week

Which of the lawfare cases is most concerning to you?

What’s a few electrons between friends?

We had a power hit Thursday morning. Almost everything recovered fine. Two machines needed to be kicked in the pants and one needed a BIOS configuration change.

All in all, a good test of stability and reliability.

Just how slow is that box?

I’m embarrassed to say.

I’ve been using AMD chipsets since the days of the Pentium. When they found the divide error and Intel refused to acknowledge the bug, requiring OS modifications to resolve, I switched to AMD.

I do not regret it.

I recently moved into the Intel chipsets and bluntly, I didn’t get it.

What is Core-i3? How is that different from Core-i5 and Core-i7? Which of the Core families is older?

Well, it turns out that i3 means “small”, i5 is “medium” and i7 is “large.” They just took a lesson from Starbucks, just how big is a vente?

Instead, they have “generations. The higher the generation, the higher the speed. A 4th gen i7 will be slower than a 12th gen i3. Nice to know.

They also have CPU sockets that have different names, but I’m not sure if they are compatible. An LGA1150, LGA1151, and an LGA1155 all seem to be compatible. So far, I’ve been lucky.

There is one server that is older than the rest. I benchmarked it. There is a 25x difference between it and my workhorses. It was already slated to be retired. It is just happening sooner.

I actually have 2 machines that must be retired and one machine that should be retired. 2 more machines that can be upgraded.

The world moves forward.

Networks

Well, I finally found the small switch I was looking for. 4 10Gbit SFP+ ports and less than $60. I’m waiting for it to arrive from China.

Constitutional Crisis!

I’ve looked at a number of the cases filed to stop Trump’s policies. So far, Trump is winning.

In the case of “You can’t fire me!” the circuit court said, “Well, for the moment you are fired.” and the plaintiff folded. Win for The People.

In the case of the inferior district court ordering the government to payout nearly $2billion, The People won again.

The Supreme Court stayed the TRO. The TRO expired. The Supreme Court said, “Well, it is moot now. Inferior court, don’t do dumb things.”

The DoJ is suing New York. Nothing is going to happen there because they are slow walking it.

The State of New York is suing President Trump.

The big takeaway from these cases is that this is not going well for the enemy. These are not cases that are being tied up in court for months and months. These things are moving rapidly.

In the normal course of a court case, I can check on the case once or twice a week and see nothing happening. In these cases, once or twice an hour might not be often enough.

Is that a Mermaid you have?

xychart-beta
    title "Sales Revenue"
    x-axis [jan, feb, mar, apr, may, jun, jul, aug, sep, oct, nov, dec]
    y-axis "Revenue (in $)" 4000 --> 11000
    bar [5000, 6000, 7500, 8200, 9500, 10500, 11000, 10200, 9200, 8500, 7000, 6000]
    line [5000, 6000, 7500, 8200, 9500, 10500, 11000, 10200, 9200, 8500, 7000, 6000]

This is a five line Mermaid diagram. For me, it is more useful for things like state diagrams and other computer stuff. But it is neat to have graph capabilities here and in my git documentation.

Why is it so big? It doesn’t fit!

Most people use GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab for hosting their projects. These are nice, but some features require monthly payments. GitLab has a community version that can be self-hosted. It is a monster. It is a massive resource hog. I hated using it, but it gave me what I needed. With all of its features, it felt bloated. On the new infrastructure, it just would not run. This was causing significant stress. I tried using Emacs org-mode for tracking bugs, but that wasn’t working. So I installed Bugzilla. Nice, free, Perl. And it was too big for what I required, and I still required my “GitHub” like tool. Enter Gitea, “Git with a cup of tea.” It is lightweight, comes with issue tracking. Simplified port access. All in all, a good replacement.

Teaching Classes

I have been having fun teaching English as a second language. I wrote a program that integrates a text reader with a dictionary and the ability to play pronunciations. It has been fun. What has been more fun is teaching Use Cases. With some of my students we’ve moved from reading books to having developer conversations or having them do presentations. With one of them, we’ve been discussing Use Cases. I’ve never forgotten how useful they are. They are so useful I’ve started using them for own projects.

Question of the Week

For you, what was the best part of Trump’s address to congress?

That would be me.

Everything finally came together with the new system. Then I went and messed it all up.

The motherboard has a weak Ethernet. It is a 10/100 Ethernet, which is NOT a problem for a management interface. When I upgrade the box to have full redundancy, it will get a dual port fiber card.

What it does mean is that my Wi-Fi to it via a USB dongle is faster than if I were to plug it in.

Once the box was in position, I connected via Wi-Fi and finished configuration. I tested all the connectivity, and it all just worked.

At that point, I told it to join the cluster. It did with pleasure, and brought the cluster to a stop.

Did you catch my mistake? Yeah, I left that dongle in.

At the bottom of the barrel, we have 10base-T. I have some old switches in boxes that might support that. Above that is 100base-T, which is a good management speed. We can move data for upgrades and restores, but not the fastest. Some of my switches and routers do not support 100baseT.

Above that is where we start to get into “real” speeds. Gigabit Ethernet, or GigE. I’ve now moved to the next step, which is ports supporting 10G over fiber or cable, depending on the module I use. The next step-up would be 25Gbit. I’m not ready for that leap of cost.

Wi-Fi sits at around 200Mbit/s. Faster than “fast Ethernet” also known as 100base-T, but not at “real” speeds. Additionally, Wi-Fi is shared space, which means that it doesn’t always give that much.

So what happened? The Ceph(NAS) cluster is configured over an OVN logical network on 10.1.0.0/24. All Ceph nodes live on this network. Clients that consume Ceph services will also attach to this network. No issues.

When you configure an OVN node, you tell the cluster what IP address to use for tunnels back to the new node. All well and good.

The 10G network connection goes to the primary router and from there to the rest of the ceph nodes. One of the subnets holds my work server. My work server provides 20Tb to the ceph cluster.

On that subnet are also the wireless access points.

So the new node correctly sent packets to all the ceph nodes via the 10G interface, EXCEPT for traffic to my work server. Why? Because the 10G had a 1 hop cost, while the Wi-Fi had a 0 hop cost. By routing standards, the 200Mbit Wi-Fi was the closer, faster, connection than the 1 hop 10G connections.

When I found the connection problem and recognized the issue, I unplugged the Wi-Fi dongle from the new node and all my issues cleaned up, almost instantly.

Four Steps Forward

Yesterday was supposed to be the end of a long battle with hardware. I had used the tools at hand to modify the case to hold the motherboard correctly. All that remained was to plug it in.

Yeah, not so much.

Access to the lower basement is via bulkhead doors. In case you didn’t know, we had about a foot of snow with ice over the top. When I went to access the basement, it was obvious I would have to dig it out first. No big deal.

Except the snow shovels are plastic, and they don’t bite into the ice covered snow. Plus it was freezing.

On Thursday, I remembered I had an entrenching tool which would be perfect. Thursday, I also learned that I had a cheap knock-off of an entrenching tool. You are supposed to be able to use an entrenching tool as a pick or hoe. The metal of the pivot plates deformed under pressure.

I got everything open. I pulled cable, ran the cable to the primary router, hooked up everything. All good.

Having done that, it was just a question of configuring the router and turning on the new box.

Which failed to bring up the fiber connection.

After three hours of work, it finally came down to a bad network card. Today I’ll be putting in a new card, and we’ll see if everything “just works”.

Kash is King

That is one of the headlines I just read. I am extremely interested in what happens today.

Judges Over Stepping

There are now judges threatening the President of the United States with contempt if he doesn’t bend to their unelected will. It appears that they feel that, as a district judge, they have the authority to usurp the powers of the President.

But Congress!

So here’s the low down. Congress can pass whatever bills they want. The President can sign or veto those bills, creating laws.

Those laws are in effect until they are repealed or stopped by court order.

Consider Congress passing a bill making it illegal to misgender mentally ill people. The previous puppet signed that bill into law.

This makes it the law of the land that you cannot say what you wish to in regard to that class of mentally ill people.

Is this law constitutional? No, it is not. Yet, that law can be enforced until it is enjoined. There is another legal term which might be “vacator”.

The process to remove an unconstitutional law starts with finding somebody with standing to challenge the law. From there, the case works its way through the legal system until someone wins.

The law in question violates the First Amendment. It will be struck down. How long it takes, what the inferior courts decided, and what games the state plays are all delaying tactics. The law would be struck down.

Now consider a different bill. One that requires the President to get congressional approval to fire someone in the executive branch. The bill sounds good. It passes both houses and is signed into law by an idiot.

You and I look at each other and yell, “That’s unconstitutional! Article II! The investment clause!”

You rush over to the courthouse to file a suit challenging the new law. I don’t because I’m broke. You just committed to a multi-year lawyer bill.

Once the court takes up the case, the state will step in to defend the law. The very first thing that will happen is that they will point out that you have no standing. The only person who would have standing is the President of the United States.

This is what was done. Congress has passed several laws infringing on the authority of the President to fire people in the executive branch. Every one of those infringements is unconstitutional.

Until Trump 1.0, this wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t an issue because the courtesy of the appointed heads of the different departments within the Executive branch submit their resignations to the new president before he takes office.

In 2017, there were many people that should have been fired who were not. And some fought back against being fired. It made a considerable splash in the media.

This time, Trump’s team was ready. They are fighting back. These cases are going to the Supreme Court. The only question is when the Court will rule.

Question of the Week

Two, actually.

The first is what types of articles make you click off the site?

The second is what types of articles make you want to read more or want more of?

At the speed of light?

The State of New York files a suit to stop DOGE from doing its job at 2100 on a Friday night. By 0100 Saturday, a judge has issued a TRO stopping the President from performing his duties as defined by the Constitution.

The DoJ files suit in New York to stop the state from tipping off illegal aliens when their DMV records are accessed. The court schedules the initial conference for May 14th, 90 days.

NY v. Trump

The state is now claiming that the state’s bank account numbers and other sensitive financial information was disclosed to members of DOGE in violation of numerous laws and regulations

Never mind that “members of DOGE” are employees of the United States of America. Just like any other government agency.

The state claims this these DOGE members are “unauthorized”.

There is no proof that they are “unauthorized.” They are just outsiders.

Why Do You Make It So Hard? Qt ORM

The current magic term for designing applications is Model/View/Control, or MVC. With an MVC design, you have three different aspects to any object. The model of the data. The view of the data. And how the data should be manipulated.

Consider an order for an item. The order has header information, line information, and meta information. The header information is in the “order” table. Each line is in the “order_line” table. The order_line table contains a unique id, the order_id, the product_id, the number of items, and the cost per item.

The View of the order would show the line number, the product name, the SKU for the product, the count, the cost per, and the extended cost.

The logic would make sure that we don’t attempt to send out more items than we have, and other things of that sort.

The control works on the data, it doesn’t worry about how to display it.

So what is an ORM? An ORM is an object relation model. It is how you describe the database, how you access the database, how you relate different parts of the database.

Qt doesn’t have an ORM. Instead, it has a database API. All table creation. All data access is done by constructing and executing SQL queries. Not difficult, but not an ORM.

And for goodness sake, please give me a method of defining tables such that when I alter that table definition, it alters the database to match. GRRR, I want my Django ORM.

Why do they make it so difficult? Link’s in views

I have a simple need. When the user clicks on a link in the text display, a signal is emitted with the href. What do I have now? I can’t even get the dang widget to size itself properly. And my events are limited to “Cell x, y was clicked.”

This frustration has existed for a bit.

Tick Tock, it keeps running

Pretty graphs aside, it is fun to see “accurate” times showing.

I have two issues. The first is that I do not know how accurate the PPS is, and the second is I don’t know what the fudge fact for the KPPS processing should be. I can get the delay from the chip to the GPIO pin. What I do not know is how long it takes from the pin being activated and the interrupt being processed.

This would require me to spend more time than I want to get the hardware specifications for interrupt processing. Then I would need to figure out the time it takes to process the interrupt. My mind keeps going in circles over this.

The biggest issue I have is that I want it to be more accurate. I’m not sure if I can do that with this equipment.

SCOTUS

The Court is still granting cert. Our cases have been silent. We aren’t going to have an opinion before 2026.

Question of the Week

What do you think the NPCs will pivot to after “constitutional crisis?” We had “destroying democracy” and now “constitutional crisis.” What is next?

Snow Blowers

I’ve moved away from having any 2-Stroke gas-oil mixtures in gas cans. I don’t use enough of it. I purchase it in one gallon tins. This means there is never a question as to the right gas can to use to feed a motor.

We have a few gas cans around. Unfortunately, the one with gas for the mower and snow blower lost its spout cap.

This means that dirt got into the spout. When we filled the mower and snow blower, the dirt got into the machines, which required a carburetor cleaning.

They also replaced a cable and such. In their nice warm workshop. Then the blower got wet. Water got into the cable housing. The temperature drops. Water in cable housing freezes.

Now I have a running blower, but I can’t engage the augers.

Thank goodness for propane torches. It only took a few moments to get it defrosted enough to move. I’ve poured oil into the cable housing in hopes of displacing the water. I’ll find out later.

Wicks Burn Too

The last time I went to use the kerosene heater, it wouldn’t work. I need to replace the wick. If you run the heater until it is out of fuel, it consumes almost no wick. But if you extinguish it by dropping the wick, it will smolder and consume the end of the wick.

I have spare wicks, but it is a messy, smelly task to replace. Fun for tomorrow.

Unelected

It is astonishing to me to hear Democrats screaming that Elon is unelected. Yes, he is unelected. And he is doing this president’s bidding.

Just like your unelected bureaucrats do your bidding.

He might not be on the government payroll, but he has just as much right to do the bidding of the President as any other unelected bureaucrat.

He’s looking at classified data!

So what? If that data is classified, then the people who are looking at it have the proper clearances and the need to know.

Tough.

The issues they keep raising, “we don’t know what he’s doing!”, and “He’s going to use YOUR sensitive data!” are non-starters.

Look, this guy is the wealthiest person in the world. If he were to “steal” every penny I have, it wouldn’t make a noticeable change in his wealth.

I trust him a hell of a lot more than I trust an unelected bureaucrat.

Clocks

You can’t make a stratum 1 NTP server for less than $75. The board, the GPS, the antenna, the case, and the power supply all add up.

I believe I can make and sell a clock for around $150.

Reporting On Trump

It really isn’t going to happen here. Something happens at noon. I write about it at 2100. It is published at 0630 the next day.

And there is an entirely new thing Trump has done.

SCOTUS Watch

The Court is still doing work. They are still issuing orders. An interesting set of Orders came out Thursday night.

The Acting Solicitor General (Trump person) asked for the briefing schedule in some cases to be held in abeyance. In all five cases, the Court said, “No.” This means the cases will proceed as originally scheduled.

We still have not heard anything on Snope or Ocean State Tactical.

I expect to have the cases denied with one or more statements. The other possibility is that the Court might decide to issue an opinion without briefings or oral arguments.

They do this when they GVR a case. Normally, they tell the inferior court to do the case over in light of some recent opinion.

What if, and this is just hopeful wishing, the Court decides they don’t need to hear the cases? What if they feel they can write an order?

We know that the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated. The two cases got here by the inferior courts twisting words to say that “assault weapons” and “magazines” are not arms under the protection of the Second Amendment.

The Court has the power to vacate the inferior opinions and order a new opinion.

We live in interesting times.

Question of the week

If you could afford it, would you book a state in Trump Tower, Gaza?

Banana Pi, Stay Away

The board I purchased was a BPI-M2U or M2 Ultra. Nice little Pi-3 or pi-4 clone. It has BT, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 2 USB ports, onboard eMMC flash, microSD, SATA, audio, two power modes, serial header, HDMI (full size). Just a nice little board.

After a week, I finally managed to get ONE of a dozen images to boot. Raspbian doesn’t work. The best general version is Armbian. Regardless, only one would boot.

That one is running Ubuntu 16.04. I’m still trying to upgrade it to 18.04.

The board is unstable. It will run fine for a while, then power itself off. Or it will randomly reboot.

Unless you are willing to face significant headaches, buy the real thing.

Serial GPS NTP

I have one of my serial GPS’s hooked to the BPI-M2U. The PPS is getting to the GPIO. The serial data is arriving on UART 2. All wonderful.

Nice and stable. The jitter is way down.

But because it is a banana and not a raspberry, I can’t get the PPS driver installed. I’m still hoping.

Plane Crash and Trump 1.0

It appears that Trump stuck his foot in his mouth during a press conference about the crash over the Potomac.

It appears that he claimed that some air traffic controllers are DEI hires that are mentally challenged.

For a president who is attacked every day for being a liar and for being stupid, it is not a good look when he says things like this.

I listened to the ATC audio. My opinion is that the ATC messed up. He did not abort the landing clearance for the passenger jet. This is a no big issue event, if he had told the plane to go around.

SCOTUS

I am frustrated with SCOTUS. I’m afraid that we are going to get a denial of cert. We just have to keep waiting.

Question of the Week

What has been your favorite confirmation hearing moment?

SCOTUS watch

There are two important Second Amendment cases being discussed by the Supreme Court today. Snope and Ocean State Tactical

The questions presented are assault weapon bans and large capacity magazine bans. Both made up terms.

This is not the limit of what the opinion might cover.

This evening I’ll be checking for miscellaneous orders by the Supreme Court. I don’t expect anything. Later tonight or early tomorrow, I’ll see a video by Mark Smith telling me why I should panic.

Monday morning I’ll see the orders list issued by the Supreme Court. I expect to see the these cases granted cert. If not, I’ll find an update that evening on the dockets telling me they have been relisted.

My match suggests we have until about February 15 to have the grant in hand before I start to worry.

Trump is the President⁣

It is a joyous week. The wins keep happening. The left is melting down in so many ways.

The Games Democrats Play

The Democrats are delaying the confirmation of some of Trump’s cabinet picks. Just game playing. It means we are delayed a week before Pam Bondi(sp?) is confirmed.

They Want Us To Hurt

I come from a place of “leave me alone. Get off my Lawn”. The left seems to come from the place of “I’m in pain, you should hurt more.”

I’m sick of it. Ally is sick of it.

Given any opportunity, they will hurt you.

The big one is Elon’s “My heart goes out to you.” gesture. The left decided it was a NAZI salute. If you argue that it isn’t, then you are stupid.

In Ally’s case, when that didn’t work, they told her that a dead friend would be rolling over in his grave over her not believing that Elon is an evil NAZI.

AI For the win?

I’ve taken to reading the short AI results for many of my technical searches.

This works well. Occasionally, it is a little off, but the summary is often good. And the links to the articles that it is summarizing are right there.

The other night, I asked it, “how far is 1ms at the speed of light?” It gave me an answer that was off by 3 powers of 10.

Because I had come to “trust” most of its answers and the numbers felt right, I didn’t bother to verify the match.

This lead me to telling the story of the picosecond but calling it a nanosecond.

Trust, but verify.

Question of the week

What is the best thing you’ve seen since Trump took office, again?

Returning to Normal

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and new year. Here, we are slowly returning to normal. Once child has returned to school and the other is scheduled to head back on Sunday.

We haven’t gotten the tree down and put away, but it is on to-do list.

Almost all the junk food is gone. Which is good for me. Meals are back to normal.

You get what you pay for

I needed to solder a header onto a GPS board. No problem, I just dig out the Weller 921ZX. Oops, sometime in the past 10 years since I used it, it was dropped and the iron broke.

No problem, this is a serious brand, they will have replacement parts.

Except they don’t. This was a lower cost product when I purchased it. It has been discontinued. There are no replacement parts available.

So I bought a cheap version. And I got exactly what I paid for. The indicator light doesn’t indicate very well. When it was reporting 500F, it wouldn’t even tin the tip. I had to crank the thing to 800F before it started to perform reasonably.

It will do for now. I’ve put the project on hold until finances get a bit better.

Wow, this is spectacular, and bad

Years ago, my client was unhappy with the Wi-Fi in the office. He went to one of my co-workers, a programmer, not a system admin, not a network admin, a programmer, and asked if it was ok to buy a particular, expensive, router.

It arrived, he plugged it in, in place of the access point I had in place and the network died. They couldn’t get Wi-Fi to their MacBooks. The world was pretty bad.

Of course, this didn’t set off any alarms for me because I monitor the hardwired servers and such.

When I arrived the next day, they told me in a panic what was happening. I retrieved the login credentials for the new access point, discovered it was an “all in one” router, switch, access point. I got it mostly configured to work.

Boss complains about the Wi-Fi. I explain that they are in a building with multiple networks, all competing for the same frequencies. That I could fix it if he gave me the budget to do so. Having just spent all this money on a home gamer’s super router, he wasn’t interested.

He stumbles on somebody doing network mapping in the building. He pays this random dude to do network mapping for him.

Next time I’m in, he shows me the report that he paid for and explains that we are in a very crowded network area and that we had to fix it.

His answer was “more power”. I again offered to fix it.

He finally gave in, I installed Ubiquiti UFOs. These are their PoE Wi-Fi access points. Not routers, access points. They have a central management software. I installed 4 of them in the office. Told them to play nice with each other. Our Wi-Fi network issues went away.

These devices could overpower most routers, but they didn’t have to. They handled hand-offs seamlessly so they could use lower power and only cover the areas they were assigned to.

In other words, fantastic equipment at a reasonable cost.

I was also using their routers. Again, good quality at a good price.

Over the years, that love for Ubiquiti has faded. I still love their UFOs. It is their routers that are the issue.

The cost of their higher – end routers is a bit much for what you get. And their configuration method is based on VyOS.

It is time to replace those routers. I’ve done it twice with upgrading in the same product line. It is time to step away from their routers.

pfSense

pfSense is a firewall router that runs on FreeBSD on almost any equipment. The hardware requirements are trivial. Two network ports, that’s all.

This became viable because I found a dirt cheap “miniPC”. It uses an Intel n100, which is fast enough for what I need.

But what makes it truly remarkable is that it comes with 2 10G SFP+ ports, 2 2.5G Ethernet ports, 2 USB 3, 2 USB 2, 1 USB-C, another USB port, two HDMI ports, and more.

It has two comm ports on headers, and a large set of GPIO pins. It has an internal SATA port as well. 2 M.2 ports for SSD and 1 M.2 port for Wi-Fi. The entire thing comes in an extruded aluminum case with a fan. So far, I’ve been happy with it.

So what’s the issue? It’s made in China and there is no datasheet for the motherboard. This means I require a new skill, decoding pinouts.

Moreover, FreeBSD (the base OS of pfSense) doesn’t seem to expose the GPIO ports the same way as Linux would. This means I can’t use the GPIO for the PPS.

Convicted Felon

The saga continues. Trump has been certified as the winner of the 2024 election. A county judge out of New York wants to brand him a felon in an attempt to keep him from taking office.

To that end, he intends to sentence Trump before the inauguration.

What a crock.

The Excitement Builds

If you are reading this on Friday the 10th, the Supreme Court is or was in conference discussing cases they will accept. Three of those cases are Second Amendment Cases.

Orders will be released on Monday or Tuesday. As long as we do not see “denied”, we are looking good.

Question of the Week

Do you think that the Democrats are going to try anything on inauguration day? Either at the mob end of things or in the halls of Congress?

Happy New Years

Welcome to 2025. This is the time of year when I used to write the wrong year on my checks. I’ve not written a check by hand in over 5 years. That’s what computers are for.

And we are getting older. It used to be that we would sit around the TV for a few hours waiting for the ball to drop.

This year we were all doing our thing. Then at 2345 the alarms went off. We stumbled into the living room. Went to YouTube to find a ball drop channel.

We did the toast to the new year, then stumbled to bed.

Firewalls

I am bringing up a server in a new infrastructure. Instead of using the half arse load balancers and firewalls provided by the vendor, I decided to use a micro/nano instance and install pfSense.

pfSense is based on FreeBSD. Wonderful. The issue is that the vendor does not support FreeBSD nor do they support pfSense. This led to 24 hours of frustration.

The issue? The installation went smoothly, as expected. Everything is done on the serial device. When booting into the newly installed OS, the screen would lock up right after it said it was loading.

The issue? The installation media runs the console on the serial port AND the video console. The default for the installed OS is to only use the video console.

I received a message to my help request shortly before I wrote that I had turned on serial devices and everything just worked.

Why is this important? For testing, I had the firewall locked way down. Fine. Everything works fine for me. I try and install a LetsEncrypt certificate and it failed.

It told me it was a firewall issue.

It took me another day before I figured out that I had locked out web access to the firewall. I was only allowing my server to connect.

Small Steps

There have been a couple of cases out of the circuit courts in the last few weeks that are positive wins for the Second Amendment.

My guess is that we have a few more judges that believe in doing what the Supreme Court told them to do. And I believe that everybody is waiting for the Supreme Court to put the hammer down on another set of Second Amendment cases.

Everything Is Relative

I have been so immersed in getting our data center up that I lost sight of client needs. I was just about to write to one of my clients to see if they had noticed the improvement in performance.

I woke up to a message of frustration. Nope, it wasn’t better. Was it better than it was? Yes. Was it good enough? No.

Fixing it.

Of Course It Is Illegal

I have a friend who is currently living in one of those shit states. One of those states where you can assume it is illegal unless it is specifically made legal. And that could change tomorrow.

At the homestead, varmint are taken care of with the right caliber. Those squirrels ransacking the birdfeeders? They be varmint needing .22LR, subsonic.

The possum and raccoons getting into garbage cans or attacking the chickens? .357 Magnum varmints.

Deer eating the crops? 30-30 varmints.

Bears getting into the beehives? 45–70 varmints.

Where he lives, he has bear coming up on to the back porch. He can’t do anything about it because it isn’t legal to shoot them. And the neighbors would complain.

I offered him an air rifle for the squirrels. He was concerned it would make too much noise and the neighbors would complain.

I gave him a “Wrist Rocket” slingshot for Christmas.

He can legally possess it. I can legally give it to him. He cannot legally buy a slingshot nor can he legally make a slingshot in his state.

I wish he would move to my state, he would enjoy more freedoms.

Question of The Week (2)

1) Are the security posts of interest? The explainers about things computer?

2) Are you excited that the Supreme Court is prepared to hear another Second Amendment case?