Technology

Recent Keyboards: The Model M, Slice MK and Royal Kludge 84

Unicomp Model M
Unicomp Model M

Three years ago, I made a list of every mechanical keyboard I’ve ever owned. I thought I had settled into the keyboards I would use for the foreseeable future. A year ago, a friend of mine gave me a modern Model M keyboard as a housewarming gift. I also started looking into split ergonomic keyboards, and built a Slice MK from a kit. Being my first ortholinear keyboard, I wasn’t prepared for needing to relearn how to type. Eventually I went back to a staggered layout for my personal workstation while continuing to use the Slice MK for work. Below is an update to my previous post, with comments and criticisms of keyboards I’ve used over the past three years.

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The Mug Club Archivist

Louder with Crowder Mug Club Mug filled with Coffee

Recently, the show Louder with Crowder moved from BlazeTV to Rumble/Locals. Their previous library of episodes does not appeared to have moved with them, preserved only on BlazeTV’s website in an archive section. People like to believe things put on the Internet stick around forever. If you were on-line during the early years, you’ve probably realized how much of the old Internet has disappeared. I never asked for a BlazeTV membership when I joined Mug Club, so I figured this would be a good time to archive the show. Using a little bit of web development knowledge and Python, I created a snapshot of a show that changed the landscape of conservative political satire and comedy in the late 2010s.

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Rack Mount Cluster of Raspberry Pis

Two Raspberry Pis on the Left Side of a 3D Printed Pi Rack with the Labels 3a03 and 3a01

A few months ago, when looking for fun 3D printing projects, I discovered the Raspberry Pi Server Mark III. The prices for Raspberry Pis has skyrocketed, despite the fact that nearly half a million units are produced every month. Luckily, I had several Pis lying around from my previous research into environmental sensor networks. I decided to print the 18 slot version of the Mark III rack, so I’d have plenty of room to expand. As I was printing all the parts, I dug through my hardware and found 5 Raspberry Pis from various generations. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to add Pis to my home lab and experiment with cluster management and distributed tasks.

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I try Sway/Wayland About Once a Year

Sway Window Manager Logo

A few months ago, I wanted to add in a 10G Ethernet card to my primary development box. Since it’s an ITX build, I only had one PCI-E slot that was occupied with an old AMD RX 550 video card. Even though the Ryzen 2700X processor it held was more than powerful enough for my needs, I switched it out with a Ryzen 5700G so I could free up the PCI-E slot for 10G networking. Unfortunately, X11 started crashing recently with the integrated graphics. Sway/Wayland seems to run stable. I currently use Sway on my personal laptop, so I attempted to take the plunge again and see if I could switch to it on my primary machine. I jumped in with an open mind, and found replacements for many of the i3/X11 tools that do not work with Sway/Wayland. The following is a summary of what worked, what didn’t quite work and what’s still broken. The version of Sway I’m using is 1.7 on Gentoo.

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Cricket Wireless, AT&T and Planned Obsolescence

Cricket Wireless SIM Card

I’ve been on Cricket Wireless since I returned to the United States. Cricket is owned by AT&T and uses its cellular network. Until this year, Cricket worked perfectly and without issue. A few months ago, my phone randomly stopped being able to accept or make calls. Data and texting still worked, but calls were impossible. Cricket support had me change my settings, so my phone defaulted to 4G instead of LTE. They claimed this wouldn’t reduce my speed (which I don’t think is correct), but I was able to make outbound calls. The fix only worked for a few months. AT&T seems to be upgrading their phone networks. In either pure incompetence or an intentional push to force customers to buy new phones, they have made several old devices unusable on all their partner providers. Thankfully, my device still works on the T-Mobile network at full LTE speeds, so I said goodbye to Cricket/AT&T and trashed my old SIM card.

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The Coming Dot Com Bust and the Future of Remote Work

Graphic of a Downward Stockmarket Chart

In 2000, the world survived Y2K only to be hit by the dot com crash. Some of us who were still in university wondered what the job market would look like when we graduated. We heard tales of recruiting parties, in major tech hubs, where people handed out resumes. The lead up to that bubble came from companies that believed they could sustain themselves with services that were free to consumers, and supported by advertisements. Services like Juno provided free e-mail and dial-up in exchange for displaying ads. Long before the blockchain, we had useless currencies such as Beenz.

The early 2000s led to a lot of consolidation in tech industries. Some of those companies are now turning into venture capitalists, investing in newer startups to hedge their bets against the next big thing. We are in an era of overvalued companies, that are heavily leveraged with investment or debt. When this house of cards eventually does collapse, those venture capitalists, along with angel investors and startup incubators, will be in the unique position to cut off anything they view as non-profitable or unsustainable. We may see large tech investment firms getting to decide which companies will live and die, similar to banks in the 2008 financial collapse.

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dav-xmpp-sync v1.0.0 Release

White book and pen

I created dav-xmpp-sync as a way to sync my contacts between my CardDav server and an XMPP/SMS Gateway, in order to migrate from Google Voice. I’m happy to announce the release of version 1.0. dav-xmpp-sync is now published to PyPI, as well as docker hub. Many of the features and bug fixes for this release wouldn’t be possible without all the various contributors, both for bug reports and code patches.

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ZFS Woes, or how ZFS Saved Me From Data Corruption

OpenZFS
OpenZFS

I’ve been using ZFS for years on my Linux storage server. Recently I upgraded from Alpine 3.12 to 3.14, which included a ZFS 0.8 to ZFS 2.0 update. Not soon after, I started getting random file corruption issues. I didn’t see any SMART errors on the drives, but still assumed that my hard drive could be going bad. My storage had outgrown my previous backup drive anyway, so I purchased an additional drive. When I attempted to sync snapshots to the new device, I started to see I/O errors and kernel panics. I took a long journey through ZFS bug reports, attempted to switch to Btrfs and even migrated my storage to a different computer. In the end, ZFS saved me from what could have been disastrous amounts of data corruption due to faulty hardware.

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Upgrading OpenSMTPD 6.3 and Running E-mail in Docker

Photo of vintage airmail envelopes

I’ve been administering e-mail servers since the early 2000s, for both my myself and for various jobs. For a brief period I stopped hosting my own e-mail, but returned to running my own stack due to the revelation of domestic spying in 2013. Even though the larger providers have made e-mail less reliable than it once was, I’m still glad I host my own e-mail. I had been using an OpenBSD 6.3 VM for e-mail, and couldn’t upgrade to OpenSMTPD 6.4+ because of some big configuration file changes. Thanks to many good 6.3 → 6.4+ tutorials, I finally tackled this lingering piece of technical debt, and migrated my e-mail from an OpenBSD VM to my standard Docker infrastructure.

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Lineage with microG on a Sony XA2

Lineage with microG Logo
Lineage with microG Logo

I’ve owned a lot of smart phones. I started off in the PalmOS world and have been solidly in the Android camp for the past several years. Although I’ve used a lot of custom ROMS, I typically still install Google Apps and services. As my concerns over privacy have grown, I’ve started looking at microG, a bare-bones implementation of Google Services that limits personal and location information being continually sent to Google. I purchased a Sony XA2 a few years ago as a backup device, and decided to try out the Lineage for microG project on this device. Although flashing a new operating system on a phone should be a common affair by this point, I ran into issues that left me digging through forum threads for help. Hopefully documenting the errors I encountered, and my solutions, will help others with similar devices.

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