deadlyllama

As it's listing similar songs time, Genesis' Driving the last spike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_the_Last_Spike fits in the historical(ish) story as ten minute long popular song territory.

Arguably you could also include Telegraph Road (Dire Straits, 1982) although its story is even more generic.

That's a blast from the past!

Shine's output doesn't sound great. If you need the performance on embedded hardware, that's what it's there for. If you need quality sound and can't afford to crank up the output bitrate, prepare to be disappointed.

See also: The Scottish Restaurant...

egcs! Now there's a blast from the past!

NoIP/DDNS/etc still means a dynamic IP address, with possibly broken reverse DNS, from a dynamic DNS pool.

To send email you need a static IP with correct reverse DNS, or other people's servers will reject your mail (best case) or silently mark it as spam. Welcome to the real world of email deliverability, the worst part of running your own mail server.

Is confidential computing needed if all you're doing is forwarding packets? Your cloud provider can see the packets as they leave and enter your VM.

If I was building this I'd stand up a VPN (choose your favourite protocol) between the cloud VM and home server. For the cloud end pick something from lowendbox/lowendtalk or just use the cheapest Vultr instance. NAT port forwarding down the tunnel back to your server at home - just a few iptables rules. Job done. Bonus points if you get an IPv6 /64 and route that down the tunnel too.

It's possible to use policy routing at home so that traffic that needs to go down the VPN does, and traffic that can egress through your home internet can too. Replies to incoming connections that came down the tunnel go back up the tunnel. Outgoing SMTP connections go down the tunnel. Outgoing HTTP goes out your normal internet.

Breaking is mostly self-inflicted. I followed the 123qwe.com version of the ISPmail tutorial, but made some changes to fit in with my aged Nextcloud setup. This caused a few hiccups. Changes were -- mysql not postgres, allowing mail logins by username as opposed to email address.

The other problems I've had were

* Mr Tutorial likes really tight TLS restrictions but some of my mail clients can't cope with them.

* Turned on IPv6, had correct reverse DNS but forgot to put the v6 address in my SPF record. DMARC said "be strict" so gmail started rejecting my email.

* Random markings-as-spam by gmail. This seems to be slowing down.

* I've got the Dovecot xapian plugin but it doesn't feel like it's making searches faster. Need to make sure my IMAP client is actually doing server-side searches though!

* Turned on port 465 (TLS submission), cannot get it to work so still doing STARTTLS on port 587

Also I knew that exim system inside out, I felt I really understood how exim processed mail. Now I don't have the time to learn postfix inside out in the same way. Oh to be an eternal university student again...

One thing that has helped is the trick I worked out a few years back of hosting everything inside an lxc container on btrfs. I can snapshot and backup the whole system including database. Moving to a new hosting company means building another minimal debian system and rsyncing the container over. Borg backup of snapshots gives me confidence they can be restored, I'm not going to be backing up a database file while it's being written to.

Moving my gmail over was the biggest pain, due to gmail being labels-not-folders. Spent quite a lot of time on some python code to spider my email and apply rules to remove duplicate messages. Lots of corner cases pop up there.

I've just gone back. I ran my own mail server from 1999 on a residential cable IP until taking the Gmail for your domain bait. Hey, free mail hosting with XMPP and nice webmail!

Last time I was on exim/cyrus/spamassassin. Now on postfix/dovecot/rspamd. Nextcloud for calendaring because I had it already.

I miss the old set up and even feel nostalgic for the perl I wrote to glue things together (evil SMTP time rejection on spam scores). Haven't written perl in a decade...

I don't miss having to fix things when they break. But I also don't miss being able to fix things rather than dealing with unresponsive support.

I wonder if some of what went wrong with XMPP was the big platforms (Facebook, Gmail) adopting it, then dropping it. Coupled with the rise of smartphones and the cloud. Previously you ran your chat app on a desktop PC and it stored your chat history/etc.

I imagine federated chat means more opportunities for your users to avoid seeing ads too... Just use someone else's server!

Had the IBM Workpad c3 (Palm V with an IBM logo on the case). Got it second hand from a local IBM employee.

Read loads of books on it while walking to university (1 hour each way) with iSilo. Dropped it on the road once and it was barely scratched. Played too much SimCity during lectures.

And yes, some of my terrible handwriting bears a strong resemblence to Graffiti.

Upgraded at some point but didn't feel the later models were a great improvement. I really liked that monochrome screen!

Sounds like the scene in Soylent Green where Roth gets to listen to classical music and watch calming scenes of nature... as he is euthanised.

When your workplace starts emulating 70s dystopian sci-fi, that's a sign you might be doing something wrong.

There's a good Geekzone thread on head unit installation. Especially useful if you want to keep the factory reverse camera operating. Note the camera needs 6V. Voltage conversion boards are ultra cheap on aliexpress or if you're in Wellington you could have one from my stash :)

New Zealand?

My Dad's old Subaru Legacy used its display to show Japan rotating around as we turned corners, us always in the sea.

I'm onto my second 2005 Mazda MPV (they're great cars). This time I've replaced the head unit with one of those nasty cheap Android things. Basically a confused tablet with some extra hardware, running any mapping or other app you want.

Not just timing critical stuff. BIOS calls for serial were slow, character at a time. If you wanted to fill a buffer and keep processing you wrote your own interrupt driven serial code or used a good library. No serious software on DOS would use the BIOS serial code.

This sort of thing was just normal. No multitasking so you had full control of the hardware. Third party libraries or custom code for serial, sound, graphics, often keyboard. Drop into assembly for extra speed. DOS was basically a library for filesystem access, process creation and limited memory management!

I still have 1.193180Mhz burned in my brain...

I'm a minister, in New Zealand (not the US!). I'd always recommend a Christian counsellor to a parishioner who needed counselling, and I'd always go to one myself. If I'm going to unburden myself on a professional I'd rather have a counsellor who was on the same wavelength about God stuff, and I'd really really rather not have one who thought my beliefs were wrong/stupid/etc.

Looking at the Secular Therapists project they clearly fall into the "think my beliefs are wrong/stupid/etc" category. The about us page talks about religion "infecting minds!"

NZ hasn't banned Huawei 5G but the cell networks have chosen Samsung (Spark), Nokia (Vodafone), and Ericsson (2degrees).

A lot, as long as it respects Western intellectual property "rights."

Like persuading Oxford University to NOT give away the rights to its COVID-19 vaccine: https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine...

We used a Google spreadsheet for our gift registry ten years ago. One of my friends, a sheet metal worker, gave us a really decent toolbox. Still using it.

Even when the church holds the funeral - often at no charge if its a member of the church who has died, and for a small suggested donation for others - a funeral director handles the body. And that costs thousands and thousands of dollars. My Dad's church funeral cost NZ$15,000 and the church would have seen less than NZ$1,000 of that.

When I was a student at VUW, the institution this article is about (early 2000s), computer science had its own, separate IT system. With staff. Who were legendary. I see the head sysadmin from back then is still there...

No "shadow IT," this was completely official and above board.

Everything that could be was NetBSD.

Compsci had its own network range within the university's /16.

I remember the ease of dealing with them, compared to the battle to get one network port livened so the computer club could expand its nascent WiFi network to the quad. Heck, within compsci land, the computer club managed to get a server with a static IP and even got it exposed to the internet.

I used to (late 2000s) work for a tiny, tiny company that was courting a customer in the mobile banking space. They wanted us to tick boxes. So we bought a box (some sort of Fortinet) that said it was a firewall and IDS. Plugged it in, used it as our new router. "Cost of doing business."

Could we have argued with them during the sales process? Only if we wanted to lose the sale. The Fortinet was cheap compared to the value of the contract.

CGA looks worse in modern screenshots though. The colour palette could be awful but the monitor would add some blur between the pixels and that helped. EGA had the same. VGA 320x200 was pixel doubled (640x400 was fed to the monitor) so it looked much blockier.

And if the colour palette wasn't to your taste... For years I had CGA with a monochrome composite monitor. So it was all shades of green. The old LucasArts and Sierra games were fine on mono CGA.

Also we walked uphill both ways to school, etc, get your 4k displays off my lawn...

That's why I've been using Joe's Own Editor since I first installed Slackware in the 90s. I learnt the Wordstar keybindings via Turbo Pascal (used WordPerfect for word processing).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor

Yeah, but they'd all be in the same /32, which is trivial to block. You'd have to intersperse "legitimate" users through your space to thwart that.

Multiple boot floppies? Never had to do that. I was very excited by the new version of DR-DOS that let you build a menu system in CONFIG.SYS to load a different set of drivers and memory managmemt at start up.

Also the wierd IRQ issues. Simpler when you had to set them with header pins on the card in question. When early plug and play came in it was awful, automatic IRQ conflicts and sometimes no way to change them. Was a real pain when the knock off sound blaster clone I had would auto assign itself anything other than IRQ 5 and some games would stop making sounds!

CGA had a green / red / yellow mode (320x200), but never saw anything as well dithered on it!

The Android Developer Phone 1 was announced in December 2008. I got mine in March 2009. That's twelve years next month.

I still miss the hardware keyboard.

In Wellington (I live there) there's a QR code on every shop you're supposed to scan with your phone for contact tracing. Most people don't but they still see them - so yes it's still on our minds.

Zander attributes burnout (at root, excessive, sustained stress) to optimising our lives. There is some truth in that. But to write an article in late 2020 about excessive stress while ignoring the major stressor of COVID-19 is naive at best.

Even in New Zealand where we're not in lockdown and life is pretty normal, there's still that "what if we get a big outbreak" sitting in the back of your head constantly.

Modern life comes with a range of stressors and competing in the labour market is just one. There are loads more that we as individuals can do little about. Limited progress on climate change is another big one.

And there's good competition, I'm paying NZ$90 for the same speed (900/400) with no data cap. Static IP. And all the NZ prices quoted include sales tax (NZ law requires this) so the equivalent US price without sales tax would be about US$52/mo.