masenf.com

While attempting to rebuild a docker container FROM phusion/baseimage on my old Raspberry Pi 3 Debian Buster host I ran into the following error:

it’s rare to see a government exercise a great deal of transparency in its operation. but what we’re seeing in 2018 in America is undeniably a new era in public dishonesty. the highest levels of leadership in this country are openly spreading rumors and falsehoods for political gain.

Over the past several months, I've been slowly trying to reduce my dependence on external (read: out of my control) services as much as feasibly reasonable. Given that I was a server admin in a past life, this gets egregious pretty quickly.

I always get a pleasant feeling when I recieve a PGP encrypted file or message, but the message isn't much good if I can't read it. Unfortunately, as I receive so few of such messages, my setup decays without daily use and becomes broken.

A lot can happen in a year. I graduated from college, got a job, moved to Seattle, and married Samantha. So things are feeling significantly different than they did last year, and I still have no complaints. Things change and people change and while there may be some merit in nostalgia, clinging to the past and drawing comparisons with the present ensures that one stays stuck. It’s easy to get left behind while everything else is hurtling forward through space, and not realize that these things don’t matter.

There comes a time in every Unix user's life where they need to enter control characters into their editor. Maybe you're trying to add some ASCII BEL characters to annoy would-be cat'ers, or add some null characters or something, but most likely you want to search and replace!

I've had a small obsession lately of watching DEFCON videos from years past on YouTube when I get a free moment. It's mostly been good aside from making me paranoid to use my computer. Mostly these guys and gals bring up great ideas for protecting yourself from Ahem..."Adversaries" with things like drive encryption, rapid drive destruction, secure communication, strong passwords, long keys, etc. All these are great things! They keep unauthorized users far from your data and I wouldn't advocate against them.

I started winter term with a personal programming project and expectedly ran out of time to continue. The quarter became difficult quickly, which is exemplified by my lack of postings in February and March. I've been hauled up throughout most of the winter dealing with issues in Parallel Computation, Programming Languages and Objects. Thankfully, last Friday was my final Final and I was able to resume work again.

Today, I've begun migrating this site, as well as all other sites which I previously hosted at JustHost (shared hosting) over to a shiny new VPS located in a data center in New Jersey. The new hosting provider is DigitalOcean, and they provide $5/month VPS boxes with 20gb SSDs and unmetered bandwidth (well it's unmetered for me because I signed up early, otherwise very affordable). If you're looking for a reliable hosting provider and prefer the do-it-yourself approach over a canned solution like cPanel, by all means this is a dream.

Today I stumbled across an old blog database of posts that I'd published in the summer after my freshman year. In my desire to archive my content and own it (as I've mentioned several times), I have migrated that content to this site. Each of these "rescued" posts bears the classic tag.

The biggest failing of modern society is the collective unconscious understanding that we are powerless, unable to affect change, and improve our situations. It's easier to just get a job, take care of your self and your own, and keep quiet about the things which ail the world.

"Time travel is weird" - Samantha Warring

Most of my personal friends and family know that I'm really turned off by most forms of advertising (specifically excluding word of mouth recommendations which are not spamming). My main problem with it, is that it hits most people where they're most vulnerable -- their subconscious. We would assume that advertising doesn't directly influence our buying decisions, however that assumption is almost always flawed. Since I've started watching more TV, I've caught myself thinking that I needed a new Dyson, Kenmore super dishwasher, and other shiny things before realizing that I'd been duped.

Funding for government departments creates cushy bureaucratic jobs

Samantha and I in Seaside, OR (Feb 2012) I currently reside in the city of subdued excitement – Bellingham, WA – about to enter my final year of Computer Science at Western Washington University. While amassing technical skills and experience in my field of study, the journey itself has taught me more about life. I’ve learned to put less emphasis on factors outside my control to focus on the aspects of life that I most certainly do control: how I feel and how I react.

So, I've been paying about $5/month to host this site along with several other domains for myself and my comrades. Given the price point, i feel like I could probably do better than shared hosting. While I haven't had any specific problems, my site (obviously) does not draw that much traffic. If any posts or information hosted here or on any of my other hosted sites goes viral, it could very easily bring the entire server down. Not only would I likely be reprimanded for such an event, it's worse knowing that potential visitors would get turned away.

I'd like to share my latest bit of frustration regarding the various 'answer' sites out there. I'll preface this rant by explicitly excluding sites of the StackExchange variety or forums which are answering specific questions, often in regard to implementation or opinion on how to best accomplish a task (even then, often these sites' users do provide valid citations or justifications).

As the natural-born overachieving perfection-seeking pragmatist that I am, I often find myself exceeding the specifications on my Computer Science assignments. Generally, I find them to be either too simple, or not interesting; and in an effort to 'get the education my parents paid for' I make my own rules.

After a month of waiting and sitting on my design, I finally decided it was time to go live with the new site layout. I'm not doing this because I feel it's particularly good or finished, but mainly because my old theme was making very restless and I wanted a nice clean place to write and share some thoughts and information with the world.

In August 2007 I bought my first modern laptop, an HP dv6000m with specs about like this:

This video really said a lot to me this afternoon:

The Linksys WRT54GL is arguably one of the most rock solid home/office routers that one can buy today. Even though the hardware is becoming more and more dated running one with a custom firmware can give someone like me (a nerdy hobbyist) an extremely powerful router for a relatively low price.

In the days of modern graphics hardware, fast computers, and enormous digital music libraries, most people have heard of or seen a "visualizer". However, most people using main stream media players such as Windows Media Player and iTunes are missing out on what a true visualizer is.