Category Archives: Thoughts

Car Accident

I finally got some good news about my car accident from 2020 (https://wordpress.com/post/blenderfox.com/7610)

After just over 3.5 years, the other side’s insurance (Aviva) finally settled and the costs have been recovered. And I expect it was quite a lot of cost too. As mentioned in https://wordpress.com/post/blenderfox.com/8108:

Total costs the other side will have to foot:
Value of my car (written off): £3000
Value of the car next to me (written off): £2500
Value of the car that both our cars got shunted into (written off): £1500
Repair of the damaged car (sole survivor): £1500
Hire car (45 days @ £75 per day): £3375

Total Costs: £11875

And this is not including the other side’s own car, which was likely also written off.

I’m just glad it’s over now

Writing Prompt: Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

Daily writing prompt
Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?

18th. When I could start drinking. Never got totally sloshed, but being able to drink made me feel like an adult (naive, I know)

Covid

So last week, my boss and I had a one-to-one review going over things that had happened since the last review. Generally OK, but he was definitely not sounding right.

Turned out that he had picked up covid, and since I was both sitting next to him and had a face-to-face meeting with him, I decided to test myself, but gave it a day before doing so to make sure if I did have symptoms they would have enough time to manifest properly.

I was clear and tested negative.

However my boss was bedridden for about two days before he started answering some of his slack messages.

Now, over the weekend, his bad luck got even worse, and we found out his dad passed away. So not only is he recovering from Covid, he now has to deal with the end-of-life stuff for his dad.

There’s an expression in Chinese which literally translates to “misfortune doesn’t come alone”

Wishing him a speedy recovery and I’m sorry for his loss.

Google Domains and Terraform

Two major updates recently

Firstly, as suspected, I finally got the notification saying that Google Domains’ registrations would be acquired by SquareSpace so all my registrations would be transferred over them should I not do anything. Obviously, I didn’t want that, so I transferred them over to AWS (Route 53) so now my domains are registered with AWS, but are DNS managed by Cloud DNS. I had some weirdness when trying to migrate all my domains in bulk, with respect to the auth code not being accepted on one of the domains when doing the bulk migration, but it was accepted when I did the migration on that one domain alone, so… go figure.

Next update is Terraform. In case you didn’t know, Hashicorp has changed the Terraform license and essentially made it no longer open source. This behaviour is similar to what Red Hat did with its RHEL offering and the backlash is just as bad.

Immediately I knew someone would fork it, and already, there’s the OpenTF Initiative and this is the key part:

Our request to HashiCorp: switch Terraform back to an open source license.

We ask HashiCorp to do the right thing by the community: instead of going forward with the BUSL license change, switch Terraform back to a truly open source license, and commit to keeping it that way forever going forward. That way, instead of fracturing the community, we end up with a single, impartial, reliable home for Terraform where the whole community can unite to keep building this amazing ecosystem.

Our fallback plan: fork Terraform into a foundation.

If HashiCorp is unwilling to switch Terraform back to an open source license, we propose to fork the legacy MPL-licensed Terraform and maintain the fork in the foundation. This is similar to how Linux and Kubernetes are managed by foundations (the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, respectively), which are run by multiple companies, ensuring the tool stays truly open source and neutral, and not at the whim of any one company.

OpenTF Initiative (https://opentf.org/)

Essentially, make Terraform open source again, or a fork from the MPL version will be made and maintained separately from Hashicorp’s version. This will essentially lead to two, potentially diverging versions of Terraform, one BUSL and one MPL licensed

I’m already looking at alternatives and the two currently that I’m looking at are Ansible and Pulumi

Ansible I’ve had experience in , but there’s two main issues with it:

  • It’s underused compared to Terraform and the providers are woefully undersupported and undermaintained
  • It’s Red Hat

Pulumi I’ve heard lots of good things about, but its a new technology, and I don’t know if it is can “Import” existing infrastructure.

Guess a “spike” is worth doing for it.

Updates

It’s been quite a long time since I did any updates on this blog so a couple of updates are in order

House

I’ve now been living in the new place for just over a year. Generally everything is good, we’ve started putting in a lawn and currently letting it get its roots in before we try to cut it

Twitter

Oh, boy, what an absolute train wreck. I’ve tolerated Elon’s presence at Twitter because most of the stuff he did wasn’t far off what Jack was doing prior. But cutting off all third party clients, forcing everyone onto the new TweetDeck (which likely will be paywalled too) has literally driven users away. Twitter has been losing users and revenue constantly, and it is totally unsurprising.

I’ve disabled my two TweetDeck profiles (a professional one, and a casual one) from Ferdium. But I doubt I will be going back any time soon.

Red Hat

Another train wreck of a situation. Red Hat’s decision to first kill CentOS’s stability, then for RHEL sources to only be accessible behind a subscription has pissed of a lot of users, even if it’s not strictly speaking against license.

The only one left in its sights will be Fedora so that leads me onto the next update

Manjaro & Archlinux

I’ve been tinkering with Manjaro more and more lately, with its rolling release schedule meaning I never need to upgrade from a major version to another major version.

It’s downside I’m finding is that some packages, especially those in the AUR are essentially “compile from source” packages which does the build on your machine during the install. This can take a varying amount of time depending on the code. With my RSS reader of choice: QuiteRSS, this build takes a mind numbing 2.5 hours to do, even on a high spec machine.

That’s where I found out about setting up your own Arch repo. I’ve been tinkering with that, setting it up on GCP and fronted by a CDN. This works pretty well, but I still need to find how I can do scheduled builds to keep that up to date, but it looks like I’ll be switching to Manjaro at some point in the near future. Sound works fine, using lyncolnmd‘s work.

Another downside with Manjaro, however is that its btrfs filesystem, my home directory backup, and CloneZilla don’t seem to want to work well together

WordPress & Domains

One final update, I will likely be transferring out the blenderfox.com domain out of WordPress, while I had this registered as part of the blog, I’m finding it much harder to maintain this domain using WordPress’s very limited DNS management tools. I will likely transfer it out to Google Domains, even though there’s talk of them shuttering that service. Secondary service would be AWS.

Speeding

Well, it was going to happen at some point in my life, but I ended up getting a speeding ticket after registering an average speed over 5mph above the speed limit for an average speed zone.

Instead of points, I’ve been offered a driver education course, which I of course am going to have to take. I opted for the classroom rather than virtual.

Not how I wanted to spend my Saturday morning, but I can combine it with some shopping.

Operation Update

I got called by the hospital and they gave me an update on the lump removed from the mouth. It was thankfully nothing serious, but recommended I keep an eye on it in case it came back (there is always a risk of that)

Twitter, TFL and Dilbert

It’s been a while so here’s a few updates in the meantime

It’s coming up to a year since I moved house and only now have the pile of construction rubbish been moved from outside my old flat. Dumping of rubbish by the neighbours in the adjoining block of flats into the garage is still happening.

Conservatives lost control of the area to Labour but I’m seeing absolutely no change

We went through a period of very cold weather (-6degC) and this was costing us £10-£15 per day in gas usage.

Moving onto other updates. As posted previously, I went into hospital to remove a lump from my mouth. I’ll soon get a follow up call from the doctor to check how I’m doing. Stitches took about 10 days to dissolve. I just have a small white patch there now where the lump was removed and the doctor cauterised the wound.

Twitter has descended into a real s**thole since Elon took over. First killing all third-party clients and then indicating it may start charging for API usage.

The third-party client purge I can tolerate — it was originally started during the Jack era, but charging for API usage, or even limiting tweets per day is not something many people will accept.

I started working on stripping out twitter functionality from my TFL updates bot and that’s near enough done now. It now tweets (or should that be toots) into a Mastodon account at https://mastodon.xyz/users/updatesbf

RSS feed functionality should still work, but it is not enabled yet, until I can get Keda to work.

Operation Update

Time for a final update on the operation.

The stitches they put in my mouth have finally dissolved just over two weeks after the operation. All I have now is a small white patch in my mouth where the lump was with white lines across it where the stitches used to be.

Operation Update

So it’s been a couple of days since the operation. The pain has now died down enough to be tolerable without painkillers – or at least as frequently.

I’m able to eat semi-solid food now stuff like soups, porridge and congee (look that up if you don’t know what that is). I have been able to drink hot drinks without too much pain now, like tea, although I still need to mix in a bit of cold water to cool it down first.

Brushing my teeth has been easier now and I’ve started using salt water rinses as instructed — although the side effect of that seems to be that it dries the hell out of my lips (well, that’s what salt does, after all).

I’ll be heading back into the office next week, but only for one day since I’m training for three days and the fifth day is taken up by another freaking train strike.