Baking bread, and trying to be a better partner. Mixed success so far.

I’m gonna work more on my novel and I’ve also been considering changing my website to say Xe instead of Christine Dodrill in the upper left corner of the navbar.

Installing an entry panel to bring coax into my radio shack.

I have a window passthrough panel (basically just a $60 piece of cedar with some coax barrel connectors in it that you shut into a window and then wedge the window shut with another piece of wood) but it’s kind of crummy and anyway I used up all of the available slots and it has no way to pass through the control cable for my new rotator.

So I bought a box from K7FP Metalwerks. Gist of it is I put a 2.5” diameter hole in my house (done, after some pain – it’s a solid poured foundation, and hammer drills are pretty punishing!), stick a piece of PVC conduit into the hole (mostly done), and mount a nice metal box over the exit point of the conduit. The coax all enters the box through grommets on the bottom, goes to lightning protectors that are mounted to a big copper sheet inside the box, and from there through the conduit and into the house. Inside, you can put a nice wall plate with a grommet to hide the conduit. More expandable, better looking, and I get back the ability to open my window if I want.

I’m hoping to finally write another blog post on my tiny little website. I’ve fallen into the trap of adding this or that to the site itself instead of focusing on actually writing content, and it’s been far too long since I sat down and wrote for enjoyment.

My biggest struggle with this is figuring out what to even write about. I’m a CS student and still in the early stages of my major-specific coursework, and any other tech-related topics I’d be interested in writing about feel like they’ve been done to death, or that my opinion on the topic wouldn’t matter all that much considering how little I know about actual programming and CS concepts. Granted I know more than the average person about computing and take on side projects here and there that range on the more technical side for someone of my rank, I’m not fully there yet.

It might be time to just search for something to write about that’s interesting to me, if not solely for the sake of writing and building that habit back up. I always feel great after sitting down for a good writing session.

Got a new (to me) server that I’ve been having fun with. OS/VM’s are installed so now the focus is shifting to maintaining what I have and racking it up once the rails get here.

I found out the hard way yesterday that the rails that came with it were the wrong ones and while trying to rack it I dropped it twice and made large gouges in my floor :/

Fortunately I didn’t get hurt nor did the server, but sadly can’t say the same for my floor.

At the moment, I’m sitting on my balcony while it (finally) rains, sipping on a mug of Malsala Chai, and reading Rust for Rustaceans.

Its a good day.

Putting this new desktop through its paces, running Bitbake RPi Linux builds, while monitoring them with dockerized Grafana and Influxdb instances.

Looking to get containerized tftp instance to continue experimenting with PXE Boots, and a containerized samba instance to complete my data backup/consolidation from my WIndows/CAD VM.

Writing a draft of part 2 of a 3-part fresh Debian install with bspwm on X220.

Aside from clearing out the shed (which hadn’t been done since we moved in five years ago and was in desperate need of being done, I’ve been working on some personal projects:

• config-gen is a tool that takes a JSON schema and produces a hierarchy of idiomatic C++20 classes that expose it directly, using libucl. This lets you have all of the power of libucl (which is totally fantastic: it supports human-friendly config file formats, inclusion, overrides of defaults, and so on and is also very fast) without having to deal with libucl’s APIs directly or tie any of the rest of your code to libUCL. I’ve been working on this on and off for a little while, but it’s now in a mostly useable state so I pushed the make-public button yesterday.
• Minimal FreeBSD Azure tooling. The Azure agent is a big Python blob that is designed for large Linux distros. It doesn’t do things the idiomatic FreeBSD way and it requires a load of dependencies. I’ve started with a tool that queries the Azure metadata service that I can then wrap in rc scripts (still to do). The tool compiles to a binary that’s <40 KiB and depends only on things that are already in the base system. It’s using libucl as a JSON parser and uses config-gen to generate wrapper classes that expose the results of the metadata query in a nice way, so it also serves as a small demo of how config-gen can work for something that isn’t its intended purpose.
• A ZFS-to-Azure backup tool that I’ve been working on. I want something that can atomically snapshot a set of filesystems, compress and encrypt them and write them to a set of append blobs, so that it can run with append-only permission. Even in the case of a compromise of the machine, it can add new nonsense to the end of backups, but it can’t tamper with any existing ones. I’ve done the start and end (libzfs_core wrappers to snapshot / bookmark a set of filesystems and generate send streams, Azure Storage interface to connect with a shared access signature with limited permissions and write to a family of data and metadata blobs). The compression bit is now mostly done, but encryption is not. My plan is to use libsodium with single-use symmetric keys for each send stream and and write metadata in records with a fixed-sized header encrypted with an asymmetric key that contains a single-use symmetric key for a variable-sized chunk. The backup daemon has one of the pairs, so in the event of compromise the attacker can see the any data that it’s currently backing up (but they could anyway because it’s on the filesystem) but doesn’t get the ability to decrypt any prior backups (even if they manage to get read access to the storage blobs, which they don’t have just from compromising the backup daemon). The basic principle is that a root-level compromise of the system shouldn’t allow the attacker to violate the integrity of the backups or read any data from prior backups.

Fix several issues with my personal “infrastructure” (used to self host some tools and websites). It should take most of my time this weekend.

Working on a small dictionary service running on Gemini :)

I recently read about https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly/-/blob/master/doc/design_pack_objects_cache.md and want to extract it out as a standalone component for my own use. I have a quick read on the implementation of the client and the GRPC handler, but gona have to re-read again in details.

Apart from that, I am taking the wife to take the 2nd vax shot and probably gona try too cook here something nice so she could take a break. (! ^_^)

Decompressing from holiday; enjoying terrible weather and tinkering with things inside.

Also designing a multiple-device charging station I can print, so devices can be ready to go when I need them and on charge when I don’t.

Still working on what I’m realising needs to be referred to as the Über workbench. Not because it’s “great”, just because of how ridiculously big/heavy it’s becoming as it goes together. I’m a rank amateur with less than enough patience or skill to make things perfectly, but thankfully the sheer weight of the thing already (even without the 400kg-rated casters attached, nor stretchers, or top surface) is enough to remove the very slight twist in the top frame.

I suspect I’ll need to make a little ramp pretty soon after it’s finished, to get it over the small height difference between the inside shed floor and the ‘outside’ area (covered, but open on 2 sides - the whole reason it’s going to have wheels is to be able to work ‘outside’ where there’s more air flow/less built up heat).