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This is a human's weblog.

mini

Fully Automated Luxury Networking

Writing again about technology sovereignty, this post might be a little jargon rich, however it is worth it nonetheless, as many innovative solutions have ’evolved’ in recent years to both secure our private services, and also make them easy to access.

Preamble

In modern days, most internet access/usage occurs on a smartphone, either out on the wild internet via a cell phone IP service, or on a WiFi network. That WiFi network might be the users home network, or it may be a coffee shop, a local council ‘Free’ WiFi hotspot, or maybe a villain trying to man-in-the-middle your traffic. Whatever the case, the IP traffic is almost certainly behind a NAT router somewhere.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 12 min read

Before you get 'the jab'

You owe it to yourself to listen to these two gentlemen.

I have been following the story of Ivermectin since late 2020, around when I escorted my Mum to London. At the time all I had to provide some prophylactic against SARS-CoV2 was a protocol comprised of the poster child for scorn of the hate Trump media, Hydroxychloroquine, WITH Zinc and Vitamin-D.

Whilst we were there, members of our close working group of solicitors were exposed, and two contracted SARS-CoV2 in our final week. This was in December, were we spent 6-8 hours a day inside, in close proximity.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 4 min read
self

Substance abuse

I have had revelation, on mind altering substances.

Whilst my initial dividends from sobriety were plentiful, I still failed to achieve the productivity that I had envisaged would come flowing from that overdue change to my body and mind.

It is true, my motivation to strive and ‘own the day’ exploded, no longer being held back by toxicity and the monster in my mind, perpetually dragging me down with terrible self criticism. However, I still struggle with focus, tending to follow the shinny instead of the small handful of tasks that will yield the highest return for my time.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 2 min read

Why is there a Google Chrome passwords.txt file on my Mac?

Hunting for a Adam Smith quote, using the spotlight indexing system on my laptop, I uncovered a passwords.txt file, in the ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/ZxcvbnData/1 folder

This password file has 30,000 reasonably short passwords, included some quite random words such as ‘ghjnbdjcnjzybt’.

In the same folder are also lists of first names, male and female, surnames, us_film_and_tv and a english_wikipedia file.

Like passwords.txt, english_wikipedia.txt also is a list of 30,000 words.

Now it may be that these password lists are for a utility to advise the user, when creating new passwords, that they are easily crackable. What is more, the particular folder they’re located in might be indicative that these files are part of a plugin, or some other non-Chrome code. Either way, it is disconcerting.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 1 min read
entertain

multiplayer realtime strategy gaming

My good mate Rob sought some advice on setting up two PC laptops to play a multiplayer realtime strategy game with his son.

I also wanted to ask for a little IT help down the track. Wanna set up two laptops to play supreme commander together with my son. Any how-tos u could recommend to make a PvP set-up like we used to?

An epic idea. I recently tried lazily do the same with my boy using the lame iPad version of the classic Command and Conquer

  • wasabi
wasabi • 4 min read
self

I was a drinker - Now I'm free

Drinking perpetuated my perceived failures in life. I deserved to be a failure, because I clearly was not strong enough to control my drinking.

I was wrong. I had an addiction, from which I’ve managed to unlock and free myself. Alcohol is (only);

  • an anaesthetic
  • a disinfectant
  • an accelerant, and
  • a poison

For thirty two years I have abused alcohol. For thirty two years I had convinced myself that despite its foul taste, its clear toxicity and obvious depressant qualities, my alcohol use had some redeeming features.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 3 min read
mini

household CUDA workloads

Object detection on Home-Assistant with Unifi Protect cameras and Deepstack

why

Ubiquiti’s 3rd generation security camera system is pretty neat. I’d call it prosumer grade gear. They’re moving their product portfolio towards a 4th generation, which has camera based object detection, but these, higher resolution/HDR cameras are crazy expensive.

I like to run household mission critical workloads on dedicated equipment and add value by integrating those workloads with a unified building management system (BIM) that simplifies the user experience and centralise and aggregates the data created by these Internet of Things (IoT) systems.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 8 min read
tech-sovereignty

sovereignty of the browser

A friend and I were discussing the frustration of the ease of which I kids can stumble upon pornography and other degeneracy online.

I explained the techniques I use with fire-walling and DNS resolver configuration (see blog post TBA). Being a technical fellow, he pointed out some weaknesses in my strategy.

To my mind, and in our household, DNS filtering is everything. With the help of trusted DNS providers, I can limit the exposure to questionable material, limit malware phone-home risks, and greatly reduce the tracking and data-mining of my family by the new robber barons.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 2 min read
mini

not all nVidia GPU accelerators accelerate

Why Kubernetes? And what has Kubernetes to do with GPUs?

So if you’ve been following along, in my intro to Mini series, part 2 you will remember both the mighty DL580 and its four smaller siblings all have ample capacity for installing large interface cards. Notably, the four HPE SL250 servers in the shared power chassis are intended to house either and additional non-hot-swap 4x 2.5” disk drives, or up to 3x doublewide PCIe x16 accelerator cards.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 12 min read
woke

Believing the 'facts' Tucker Carlson tells you

A close friend brought to my attention an npr.org article about Tucker Carlson that elicited from me, the following;

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye

I shouldn’t want to ‘believe’ anything anyone in the media tells me.

Journalists offer stories and ideas that require investigation, not to be taken at face value. Journalists have to earn the right to present ideas to you.

Article such as this one, although I have not checked its voracity, are more about preventing people being exposed to ideas, by debasing the author. They do not want you to even investigate the idea let alone form and opinion and perhaps ‘believe’ in the underlying merit of the idea.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 2 min read
entertain

to VR or not to VR, that might be a question

Part 3 of 5 - follows on from; Part 2 - Requirements and initial design

The dream of VR every year always seems to be, to me, just out of reach.

For many apps, games and experiences, virtual reality goggles are well suited. Furthermore the technology is advancing at a rapid pace. The Sony Playstation VR was released nearly five years ago! The current crop has better resolution, higher refresh rates, a wider field of view, more comfortable and adjustable head straps and excellent head tracking.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 2 min read
entertain

requirements and initial design

The high-level requirements for my simpit are that it is;

  • deeply immersive
  • suitable for different sized pilots as, for the short time being, my son cannot fully depress toe-brakes.
  • flexible such that helicopter controls could be swapped in place
  • not an affront to one’s aesthetic sensibilities
  • has adequate space for some instruments

Controls that I purchased are quite sturdy, requiring solid mounts to avoid unintentional control inputs. The peddles I elected to mount on a sliding sheet of concrete form plywood, as it has a nice hard wearing yet slippery surface, suitable to the movement of ones heels. The sheet itself can slide forward enabling shorter statured pilots full control of the peddles.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 4 min read
entertain

flight-sim setup

When you use peddles in an aeroplane or helicopter, it is imperative that when they’re pushed, you yourself do not move. Thus a typical office chair on wheels that spins is completely inappropriate.

Initially upon installing peddles one goes and grabs a chair from the kitchen to sit on. This chair and the controls, cables & PC setup looks somewhat unsightly and often one’s better half starts asking when you’ll remove your ‘toy’ from the kitchen table.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 1 min read
entertain

digital airframe recommendations for DCS

Keen to encourage friends and family to fly with me in the incredible DCS World, I complied this list of what one needs. This was for my cousin, whom is obsessed with military aviation. He is particularly fond of airframes used by the Royal Australian Air Force, such as the Dassault Mirage III.

Steam/DCS (software)

Decent graphics card (GPU)

Decent ‘gaming’ monitor/display

  • $250-$900
  • ensure it has a high refresh rate, >=75hz
  • ideally G-SYNC (or FreeSync) depending on GPU type
  • easy to setup

Modern PC that can accomodate a discrete GPU

  • thus, not a small, bible sized PC
  • Intel i5 or greater CPU. Ideally with high single threaded performance
  • 16GB RAM

TrackIR head tracking

  • whilst you can task head panning to a 4-way ‘hat’ on your stick, head tracking is pretty solid now, and a must have for flight simulation in my opinion
  • TrackIR 5 comes with a special camera that you place below/above your monitor facing your head, and a TrackClip which attaches to the brim of a hat or visor and has three retro-reflective markers that direct infrared light back to the camera. optionally you can use a TrackClip Pro, which attaches to most PC headsets, comes with active LED markers.
  • TrackIR

HOTAS hands on throttle and stick

  • ideally a stick and throttle with 4-way hats to steer radars and targeting pods etc
  • semi complex to setup, as the various buttons need to be ‘mapped’ to various systems in each jet
  • I like and use Thrustmaster products, both;- T.16000M which is now on my sons’ PC Thrustmaster T.16000m- HOTAS Warthog (my current setup) Thrustmaster Warthog
  • you can now swap out the stick grip for a F-18 grip (On my wish list!) Thrustmaster fa-18c-hornet-hotas-add-grip
  • like road push-bikes, there appears not to be an upper limit on how much you can spend —> [Procure] https://virpil-controls.eu
virpil-controls.eu

virpil-controls.eu

  • wasabi
wasabi • 3 min read
mini

regaining your tech sovereignty

Many words are being intentionally debased of late. Sovereignty is certainly one of them. It is not a term created by those who want to lord over others. Quite the contrary, especially when used to express self-ownership.

Self-ownership, also known as sovereignty of the individual or individual sovereignty, is the concept of property in one’s own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity and be the exclusive controller of one’s own body and life.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-ownership

  • wasabi
wasabi • 5 min read
mini

our Mini computer

Part 5 of 5 - follows on from; Part 4 - not a fifth wheel

our home server solution Mini

provides for a resilient, performant pool of processing units and persistent storage to run ‘household’ apps.

In total there are 108 CPU cores and (currently) 960GB of RAM. This pool of CPUs and memory is supported by a 40TB raw SSD, and 48TB usable spinning rust.

Mini is a hyper-converged infrastructure utilising the Ceph storage system to pool the SSDs install in each server node, enabling virtual pools of storage available to all virtual machines running on any node in the cluster. Depending on the specific Ceph pool types deployed concurrently on the same set of SSDs, different redundancies can be mixed. The configured rbd block device pool for example, which provides virtual ‘whole disks’ for a VM to itself manage the filesystem therein, is using a 3-way mirror type of redundancy. So for every block of data stored there are two additional copies stored in the pool. This why I quote the net SSD size as a raw 40TB. If I only used the Ceph storage for this rbd pool, with 3-way mirroring, 13.3TB would be usable.The same set of disks is also housing the cephfs pool which provides a shared filesystem, not unlike NFS. This pool is using a RAID5 style parity structure, less resilient and performant than the 3-way mirror structure, but much more efficient, space-wise.Both of these pools simultaneously share the exact same disks. Ceph is awesome.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 5 min read
mini

not a fifth wheel

Part 4 of 5 - follows on from; Part 3 - converged cluster

The fifth server, certainly not a fifth wheel, was to be my existing Supermicro server, then eBay jumped out at me with another HPE Gen8 server. This was a piece of metal I have always thought was kinda cool. The DL580.

This computer was made for what one could describe as the late big iron era. Applications were scaled up not out. Big databases needed to support online transaction processing tended to run on large single operating system instances with shedloads of CPU and memory.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 3 min read
mini

converged cluster

Part 3 of 5 - follows on from; Part 2 - home computing journey

My desire for our home server / lab, was to have various workloads (apps) NOT bound to specific physical server(s). In essence I wanted for my home the same high-availability that is available to enterprise applications. Maintenance on any one physical server (node) or disk drive to have little effect on the applications running on the cluster.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 5 min read
mini

home computing journey

Part 2 of 5 - follows on from; Part 1 - What is Mini

We all have a slightly different experience with computing. If you were born during the outset of this millennium, you may remember the birth of mobile phones/computing. As a child you may have been fortunate enough to initially experience computing through the family PC. Possibly a laptop, probably a desktop computer.

My father bought one of the first Apple ][+ desktop computers imported into Australia. Number 3 in-fact, which, as a six year old, was a magical piece of kit. Dad programmed BASIC programs (apps), and used the Visicalc spreadsheet program.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 18 min read
mini

What is Mini

I have named my home server solution Mini, in deference to the mini computers of the 1970s & 1980s. Which is kind of relevant as the workloads I intend to run are more akin in style to the pre- client/server era architectures of mega databases on mega hosts.

My requirements for Mini are;

  • high performance
  • high availability
  • relatively low cost
  • a sandpit to teach my kids

I want high performance as at least two family members use our network attached storage for 4K NLE video workloads.

  • wasabi
wasabi • 3 min read