The one after a while
“It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
It has been quite a while since my previous post, but I feel that if I start explaining why I have not written sooner, I'll end up not finishing this post at all, so instead let me just skip that part altogether.
I enter the third year of the pandemic as a totally different person than who I was at the beginning of 2020. To quote one of my favourite episodes of IT Crowd "Every value I’ve ever held is being questioned, and I'm loving it".
In 2020, despite what was going on in the world I was optimistic. Fully and totally in the "trust the science" camp. Okay, we had a global pandemic, but I just needed to wait until we had the vaccines and we would go back to normal. I spent that time baking bread, exercising at home, planting flowers and trees in the garden, and doing all those other things that people were doing at that time. I would call that the "Before Some Good News was sold out"-era.
Many things has changed since then. I definitely had my vaccine moment, saw "the science" doing some really questionable things, became a citizen of my country of residence, changed my job after many years in the previous one. I don't know which of those are the cause and which are the effect of the fact that I moved on the Political Compass from the libertarian far-left to the libertarian centre.
I'm ending the year 2021 abandoning the "trust in science" mantra and adopting a different one, "trust no one, Mr Mulder".
I caught another hobby, this time it's making custom mechanical keyboards. It's actually quite cool, though for the most part you end up waiting for parcels from Taiwan to clear customs and pouring silicon moulding rubber on stuff.
After reconnecting my Pi Hole, upgrading everything to the current version I had just enough energy to install unbound. So far everything works great and I learned a ton about DNS servers.
On a similar note, I ditched PingPlotter for a self-hosted kind-of-equivalent. I need it to be able to tell if Virgin Media is down again and for how long. I'm actually really surprised how hard it was to get a simple ping latency graph in cacti, makes me want to start a side project that does something like that only simpler. My dream version would let me enter a few ip addresses into a form and it would start pinging them every second or something, saving the data to influxdb to use with Grafana. The biggest problem I see is the dire state of ruby gems that can ICMP. I might be wrong but net-ping does not seem to even support returning the round-trip time. I could possibly use something like ping -c 1 [ip] and parse the output of that. Hmm.
I talked about keyboards already, but that's not the only peripheral device I replaced. After losing my previous trackball I finally got the SlimBlade. It's really comfortable to use and I love that you can scroll down by rotating the ball instead of rolling it. Quite clever and already became second nature.
In a moment of weakness I decided to join the metaverse. Ordered Oculus Quest 2 and created a Facebook account to be able to use it. The whole thing was rather unpleasant, and imediatelly after creating the new account Facebook recommended to me all my friends from the account I had deleted years ago, despite me using a different email account and phone number this time.
I did not get to remain freaked out by that for too long though, since about 5 minutes later they decided to block my account and requested that I send them a photo of my ID documents.
To which I logged in to Argos and cancelled my Oculus order.
I would much rather have another colonoscopy than deal with Facebook ever gain.