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Morning, programs! Long time, no typing. I've been updating Fedi but not writing here for a while. Maybe that was a mistake. Since hackers.town seems to be down at the moment perhaps the universe is trying to tell me something?
I like writing in the long form even though it doesn't get me the immediate feedback of people's replies and favourites. Please continue e-mailing and XMPPing replies about these entries! You can reach me at mc@hack.org.
It's Newtonmas, Isaac Newton's birthday according to the Julian calendar. I'm having sweetened rice porridge for breakfast, as is traditional, after sleeping for eleven hours.
Joachim Witt is playing on the computer. Es regnet in mir. Perhaps not the most upbeat beginning of a day but somehow appropriate. "Ich will jemand anders sein". Yes, I often want to be someone else. Someone happy and succesful.
Yesterday #1 and his SO joined us for lunch, dinner, and celebrations. We exchanged gifts and ate a lot. We watched the traditional Donald Duck (yes, that's a thing in Sweden!) and the modern Robin Hood story "Karl-Bertil Jonssons julafton". I had some idea we would watch "Sherlock Holmes: The blue carbuncle" or some other traditional movie but instead we just sat and talked until late.
I left the keys to my old office the day before yesterday. An era is over. I'm back to working from home.
I have left this nice corner in a shared office close to home:
(Two desks stand next to large windows. On the desks there are monitors and keyboards. In the corner you can see a very nice Håg Capisco chair and a tea mug on the desk. A black backpack is on the wooden floor.)
I bought the desk from our office host and had some adventures trying to get it home on a small cart but it went well in the end:
(An adjustable desk standing on the high end on a wooden floor in my flat.)
I decided that this desk would be the non-jobdesk connected to my tower computer, bakunin:
(A white desk with a tower computer, a 27" monitor on an arm, a pair of speakers, a black HHKB keyboard, L-Trac trackball, and some closed laptops covered in stickers. On the monitor you can see two windows, one with an Emacs with a music player and one with the Fedi client Tut.)
I'm using our extra room as a dayjob office:
(Wooden office desk with a laptop covered in stickers standing closed in a laptop stand, a 27" monitor, an L-trac trackball, a HHKB keyboard and some boxes with electronics.)
Not quite ready yet but it's coming along nicely, I think. I think it's good that I can close the door to this room and "not be at work".
I'm not the only one getting a new office. Dayjob is also getting their own office.
I've been visiting the new office in Gothenburg twice recently. First I spent Sunday to Wednesday two weeks ago in Gothenburg, then I went back again last week just for a day.
The new office is in a good central location close to a really nice Science Fiction bookshop but it's also a rather cold (literally!), spartan thing in dark grey and white.
(Photo of a room with white walls and a dark grey carpet. There's a white office desk and a black chair. On top of the desk there's a laptop. Some pipes are visible in the ceiling.)
I feel a little sorry for our CEO who sits there by himself most days. The only employees are me and him. Apparently it's getting better soon with a sofa and some plants. Some curtains have already changed the mood slightly to the better since that photo was taken. Any other suggestions on how one would make this office a nice place to work?
On the first trip I met an old friend and #2 for dinner but otherwise spent most time at the office fixing things like the network.
There was a slight panic since we thought we would also have to move our build server at any time. We just had to have the network sorted before doing that or we couldn't use our build server, obviously.
Nothing about the network really planned. We just bought the first available switch with POE+ available and two Ubiquiti Unifi AP. Our friendly ISP offered to leave a small combined router/firewall and helped us setting it up. It doesn't really push the full gigabit we have, but at least we get both v4 and v6.
I hope we can revisit the network setup soon and perhaps get a slightly more performing router. We get 10 Gb/s for the same price if we want to. The cost is really for the dedicated fiber. We just need something to plug the new optics into, for instance something like this that can almost push 10 Gb/s port-to-port at just 15 Watts!
Tried out a new hotel close to the new office. That was actually a nice experience, as far as hotels can be "nice" at all. Great vegan breakfast and very friendly staff at Hotel Flora.
I got stuck in a train for seven hours on my way home because of communication problems between trains and the traffic control. Apparently most trains in the entire country had to stop becuase of some update that went wrong! Anyone know anything about it? Do tell! Of course I started reading about MobiSIR and GSM-R, as you do.
My friend Nemo fetched me in fucking nowhere, otherwise known as Kävlinge, and drove me all the way to Malmö. We stopped on the way to have a look at his new data center close to the highway in Lund. Really nice centre with a 1.1 MW generator and huge stacks of batteries. Quite impressive. I hope they get many customers to fill it. Entire racks and cages of racks available. If this is your thing, send an e-mail to info @ 31173.se!
Nemo cheered me up a lot, as he often does.
Thursday and Friday went by in some kind of brain fog of sadness. As I said in earlier gemlogs: losing ~30 IQ points, feeling guilty and fighting against the tears. Something like that.
I had forgotten about the yearly mini synthpop/EBM/darkwave/goth/industrial festival ElectriXmas so I scrambled to get a ticket when Nemo mentioned it. We went there together on Saturday after having had some nice vegan beers at my place.
I was reminded that I forgot my earplugs pretty early in the evening since the DJ played music at an extremely loud volume. It was so loud that when we went into the concert area to listen to Me the Tiger, Emmon, Cryo, Cat rapes dog, and finally Boytronic the sound leaked through from the DJ outside. Dammit. This went on the entire evening. The sound in the concert area was rather bad anyway, so this was really a problem. To compensate for the bad sound I drank more beer, as you do. Not a very smart move, I admit.
I drank even more beer. Even danced a little when one DJ played some Welle and DAF, then I thought "Fuckit! I'm going home!" and went before the headlining band Boytronic even went on.
Sunday that week was spent nursing a slight hangover, feeling sad and feeling like I needed a weekend. I'm glad I discovered Me the Tiger and Emmon, though. New to me and really nice music.
The very next day I went to Gothenburg again over the day. This time I thankfully went with SJ and in first class on my way home. The difference in price was really small, so I think I can justify it.
On the way home we got stranded in Lund just ~12 minutes from home. A train had had a malfunction and was left in the City Tunnel under Malmö for two hours. A lot of incoming trains were affected. Our train host said we could change to a local train for free and that it would be able to leave. So we all went off to get the other train... Then our original train left without warning! Aaarrgh!
I finally got home only two hours late.
I did an experiment for a few weeks and tried a six hour work day. That was a total failure! I felt so guilty all the time! It was terrible. Felt very stressed to perform.
I'm back with an extra day off per week instead. I'm taking Fridays off from now on instead of Mondays. The only question is: Do I still suit up on Fridays or do I dress in a suit on Thursdays instead? What do you think?
My real Lenovo battery, the second I've bought for one of my old Thinkpad x230, is dying. I get about 20 minutes battery time. I was thinking about options, even considering buying a new Thinkpad or at least a newer used Thinkpad. I decided to at least try patching the Embedded Controller but had already almost resigned that I would have to buy a new box if I bricked it.
No problem patching it. Then changing to the new(ish) non-Lenovo battery with crossed fingers... IT WAS CHARGING! Whoo! Unfortunately the Thinkpad no longer sleeps on lid close but it still suspends from the command line so it's not a big deal. Totally worth it.
The Matrix chat system seems to be everywhere these days. A lot of French and German government agencies have started to use it and the latest news is that Swedish agencies are going in the same direction:
I'm not overly thrilled about the Matrix chat protocol or the available clients. Yes, the thing with synchronizing group chats is quite cool, but also a bit scary if you think about the loss of the ephemeral feel of an IRC channel. After having looked at the Matrix spec I wasn't exactly happy.
I tried the Matrix client ement.el for Emacs for a while. It doesn't support E2EE at all but with the helper program Pantalaimon it might work. I tried installing Pantalaimon, too, but something still seems off.
Then I tried gomuks for a while. Quite impressed with how it handles images. It gives you a sort of ANSI graphics-like representation of an image at first with a better representation the larger the terminal window is and can then show you the real image with the viewer of your choice on Ctrl-click. Neat!
Not that impressed with E2EE handling. It doesn't seem possible to start an encrypted room. The interop is so-so. Sometimes in an encrypted room the recipient doesn't see my messages at all and there's no way of knowing if they saw them at all.
I get it that the E2EE stuff is tough to get right but I'm not impressed.
If you want to reach me, please use e-mail or XMPP (OMEMO available) at mc@hack.org.
My living room music player is broken. It was just an old Raspberry with mpd that NFS mounted my ripped music collection but it was a quite nice user experience with nmpcc on the laptop and the Android MPDroid. I sometimes miss my old Squeezebox which was even nicer, but you can't get everything.
I already had a Raspberry 3, a slightly more modern model than the old one, so I thought I'd experiment with it, perhaps even make it a more generic media player, so I installed LibreELEC, which is a Linux distribution with "just enough OS for Kodi". Kodi is a media player, as I guess you all know.
The first test of the new player was during Newtonmass Eve with the SVTPlay plugin. It handled live channels so-so but if it wasn't live it seemed to work OK. It's quite slow, though, so perhaps I'll get a Raspi 4 to replace it. Or go back to using just mpd.
mc,
Prickle-Prickle, the 67 day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3188
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