by srhuston

Fixing a Hole

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering

–The Beatles, “Fixing a Hole”

For a while I’ve had an old HP 3435A desktop digital multimeter. Picked it up at a surplus place for $60 so I could have a meter that sits on a shelf and is always ready, doesn’t need batteries, has a decent readout, autoranging, basically a bunch of features that my existing meters did not have. Recently when I went to use it, I found that the voltage it was showing was impossibly wrong – I seem to recall it was an AA battery I’d just removed from something marginally working but it read 0.2V – and then shortly after the only thing it would display is “OL”, its code for out of range. Around the same time as that, I saw a video from Great Scott! that talked about a portable DMM that also has a two-channel 50MHz oscilloscope. Now I already have an old analog scope here, but .. well, it’s old, and it doesn’t have a lot of the nice features that newer scopes do. So after getting that new meter in my hands, I decided recently to take the old one apart and see if I could find out what was wrong with it.

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by srhuston

Quick Thought..

For the times, they are a-changin’

–Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are a-Changin'”

With the direction things are going over on that blue F site, and a comment from Wil Wheaton who seems to have done similar to me when it comes to use of a website (though I’ve obviously never had the following here that he has had there, I came to the same conclusion – put the things where the people see them and you get interaction)… I’m giving more thought to resurrecting this a bit more. I do post things on that facey-space for a narrower audience than I do here or on other public forums, and I don’t know if/how I would continue that – not all of my thoughts are meant for everyone, and I think most people are that way, but I don’t think people would sign up for something to see those more reserved moments. Maybe I don’t share them? Maybe I don’t share them here? Don’t know the answer, but something’s blowing in the wind. I think I’ll start by creating a new category, and maybe put some of those “quick thoughts” that I’d share other places there. Maybe I even do something with themes and whatnot so only 1-2 “quick thoughts” will be visible on the front page to keep the noise lower or something? More thinking required.

by srhuston

Everything Zen? I Don’t Think So.

Follow men’s eyes as they look to the skies, the shifting shafts of shining weave the fabric of their dreams.

–Rush, “Jacob’s Ladder”

[Note: Yes, I did think of the Bush quote after already settling on the Rush quote, which is why the title]

Last week I virtually attended the ISC2 Security Congress which was in Las Vegas NV. Three days of cybersecurity talks and other related topics which is always good for increasing the continuing professional education (CPE) credits needed to maintain my CISSP, as well as get insights to new technologies, things I wouldn’t otherwise hear about, new threats, and all sorts of other things. One that comes up now and then is the topic of burnout and fatigue, and they always try to have a few people to talk about how to manage stress. This year was no different, and one of the keynotes in fact was Dan Harris. Dan is a retired news anchor and journalist, and wrote a book called “10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works – A True Story.” While I’ve probably seen him on TV before (I know Stephanie commented that he was one of her favorite journalists when she watched TV news more often in the past), I don’t know that I knew who he was, but I was definitely intrigued as soon as he started talking.

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by srhuston

Do You Remember

Ooh that smell, can’t you smell that smell

–Lynyrd Skynyrd, “That Smell”

Well, I called it. Missed posting something yesterday, and “today” (the 21st night of September) got away from be because of earlier events. Namely, when we got home and the youngest went to close up the chicken coop, he came back in a few minutes later and said “well I just met the skunk.” One whiff later and he was going into the shower, now secure in the knowledge that the smell of a skunk that walks through the yard is much different than the smell of one that was sitting under the patio chair next to the coop and got scared when you came around the corner.

I had intended to do some work on the next project, which is going to be setting up a FoundryVTT server again (I mentioned before that I was running it, and we got mostly through a campaign before other things kept us away from it, which I also mentioned). I plan to do it in a Docker container as I did with the IRC server and its associated systems, I just need to figure out some of the logistics since I also want a Let’s Encrypt certificate for it so I need to think through how I’ll set that up using the existing configuration and whatnot that is working for IRC now. Maybe I’ll have some time to experiment with it all tomorrow. Er, today. After I get some sleep.

by srhuston

Don’t Tell Me ‘Cause It Hurts

Don’t speak, I know just what you’re sayin’

–No Doubt, “Don’t Speak”

While having my hair up in a towel after a shower, and thus unable to use my glasses effectively, I thought, “the Mac has made a lot of advances over the years, I should be able to use speech-to-text to write something!” So I looked up the commands you can use, and gave it a go. I started with the title, clicked where it should go, and said “caps on” so it would put things in Capitalization Mode for Titles.

It filled in the title “Caps on” and waited for the next thing.

Ok, so the commands aren’t perfect, at least if I can get the ideas down I can fix it in post! So I moved down to the body of the article and started talking. I had a vague idea where I wanted to go, and just started going with it. After three sentences, I deleted the whole thing. Turns out, I don’t talk at all the way I think and write apparently, and what comes out feels disjointed and crappy when I’m reading it on a page. Soooo…. I don’t think I’ll be doing that after all. Of course, the idea that I had was kind of a crappy one anyway, so maybe that’s why the words didn’t flow freely and make sense as I was writing it. I think this is a better topic anyway…

by srhuston

The Ruiner

Welcome to the Grand Illusion, come on in and see what’s happening; pay the price, get your tickets for the show.

–Styx, “The Grand Illusion”

I’m going to ruin it. Maybe. I haven’t said it out loud, but I thought one way I could get better about writing things was to put something – anything, no matter how crappy – up once a day. If I could at least put one thing up a day, then at least it’s something. And maybe I could even start to do better things since I’d be doing it anyway, so what’s an extra few minutes writing something else. Or even writing ahead of schedule and having something post so I can get ahead of things. And there’s two reasons this is likely to ruin it. One, I’m mentioning it out loud. And two is that my goal was one week, and it’s only been a couple days. Oh well, we’ll see. I will say I’ve got some other ideas that keep popping up, so if I can keep those low-effort posts going then maybe I can use some “other time” to write the higher quality bits and ready them for publication.

(I came up with the post title at the end, and now wish I’d used Nine Inch Nails, “The Ruiner” as the quote. But The Grand Illusion still works I think. After all this is a grand illusion that I’ll actually be prolific here and put up something people would want to read 😀 )

by srhuston

Hot Pockets

Lookin’ for some hot stuff, baby, this evenin’

–Donna Summer, “Hot Stuff”

When I was a kid and went camping, at one point I had this small felt-covered hand warmer that took solid fuel sticks. You’d light one outside of it and get it smoldering, and then place it inside the clamshell and close it, and within a few minutes you had a nice pocket hand warmer. It lasted a long time, got very warm, and the sticks were pretty inexpensive as well (though I never even used a full pack if I recall, I’ve always suffered from the problem of not wanting to use up all of something because then I won’t have any left). The other night I was thinking about hand warmers as we’re getting into the colder seasons soon, and with my joints being the way they are keeping my hands warm can be very important. Opened my old camping gear bag and the old one isn’t there, so I have a feeling either it’s packed in a box never to be found again or it got thrown out because something was wrong with it. But I can get a new Stansport solid fuel hand warmer for only $14. While a lot of people swear by the “hot hands” type of hand warmers that are filled with iron filings and heat by their oxidation, I find they take too long to get warm and often don’t feel like they’re doing a great job, and the ones that run on lighter fluid supposedly run longer but then you have to carry a bottle of lighter fluid with you too, which I don’t want to have to manage. No, I think one (or maybe two since I don’t wear pullover sweatshirts with a large front pocket) of these might go in my cart.

by srhuston

A Trick of the Tail

Dirty old mountain all covered in smoke, she can turn you to stone so you better start doing it right.

–Genesis, “Dance on a Volcano”

Made it to a scout meeting tonight, first one this year I could attend and first one in a while (most of last year I was still having so much trouble with arthritis that even though it was after work, I had no energy to get a shower and leave in time). Hopped on the wireless there with my Chromebook and fired up Tailscale, and while I did have a hiccup or two at first, the rest of the evening my web traffic was coming from my own home network. It wasn’t necessary for security tonight – I didn’t care if my traffic was coming from the church’s wireless, and that wireless is encrypted as well – but it was a good experiment since that was the first time being somewhere outside of home where I could test it out. And I attribute some of the slowness I saw to the normal speed of the network there. So I’d say it was a success, and opens the doors for other things I’ll be able to do remotely now.

by srhuston

Come And See The Show

Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends
We’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside.

–Emerson, Lake & Palmer, “Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression – Part 2”

If I’m going to get back into the swing of things, I should just dive in I suppose. So, what’s going on? Well, I last was updating things in 2021, and things back then were pretty okay. The pandemic was winding down and things were “returning to normal”, yet my job was still remote at the time for various reasons. I had started to feel some stiffness in my hands now and then, but hadn’t thought much about it. Around the last post I made I was starting to have some trouble with a bad tooth, but hadn’t made plans for doing anything about it yet because it was only mildly troublesome. If you’ve ever seen Deadpool, there’s a line in the movie that fit quite nicely for me at that time.

Here’s the thing. Life is an endless series of trainwrecks with only brief commercial-like breaks of happiness. This had been the ultimate commercial break. Which meant it was time to return to our regularly scheduled programming.

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by srhuston

How Do I Shot Web?

I want to put more stuff here. Ideas, things that worked, etc. And I keep wanting to do that; even now there’s a handful of drafts that I started to some extent, sometimes just a line or two as the main idea to expand on and sometimes a chunk of a fleshed out post but not the whole thing. But I keep falling short, and I’m not sure why. After some reflection I think part of the problem is that I know how some of my posts were presenting when I was doing my best here, and I keep trying to aim for that. But that’s not who I am right now, so what I think I need to do is just write something to get it on here. And then maybe having the long-form “better” posts building in the background will work OK, because it won’t feel like such a shock. And eventually I’ll be back to that. Meanwhile, there’s at least something popping up more frequently than every two years.

It could happen!