Scott Williams 🐧

Do you use your powers for good or for awesome?

Senior #DevOps Engineer at a major research institution (views/opinions my own) and a severe #Linux and #opensource enthusiast. Also into #retrocomputing, #fountainpens, #Volkswagen, #music, and #cooking. #fedi22

Hoosier currently living in California.

Pixelfed: Scott Williams (npub1xdw…9dt0)
Firefish: Scott Williams (npub1230…9ua3)

Pronouns: He/Him
Location: California, USA
Religion: Free Methodist
Git: https://github.com/vwbusguy

Public Key

npub13d2m5v9uc8rxu9xsszehrhhl40p2at6ddeh90eqq6q4prpn9r5wq0r3gn6

NIP-05 Address

vwbusguy_at_mastodon.online@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgk4d6xz7vr3nwznggpvm3mml6hs4w4axkumjhusqdq2s3sej368qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntgsy9n2

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub13d2m5v9uc8rxu9xsszehrhhl40p2at6ddeh90eqq6q4prpn9r5wq0r3gn6

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Published at

2024-08-01T17:31:39Z

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Last Notes

2024-09-28 21:21:33

To my followers that experience OCD, I took this picture for you. You're welcome.
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/113/217/271/207/858/447/original/d90ef47e1f71e6f8.jpg

2024-08-31 00:01:32

Just got an email from #Lenovo that they won't replace the failed hard drive on my #ThinkPad under warranty because "#Fedora #Linux is not a supported operating system on this model." 😩

2024-08-25 15:27:42

I really need to sell some #fountainpens. I have over 100 and only actually use about 5 of them any more. I would rather sell them and they go somewhere that they'll get used.
The two I use most often are Pilot VP Decimo and a copper Kaweco Liliput. I generally use at least one of those every day. I have other pens I like more for writing, but I'm in a different place in life than I was a few years ago when I was writing for 3-4 hour stretches at a time.

2024-08-05 16:32:35

Ever put in contacts right after brushing your teeth and now your eyes are minty fresh?

2024-08-05 04:25:17

What do non-domesticated cats in the wild do if they climb too high in a tree and get scared and stay up there for days? 🤔

2024-08-02 21:44:54

Today, I deployed #OpenGist, an open source project that's similar to #GitHub and with a UI similar to #Forgejo and #Gitea, and easily setup authentication through Forgejo. Very cool project!
https://github.com/thomiceli/opengist
#git #programming

2024-08-02 18:17:26

Wreck It Ralph's career at CrowdStrike was short-lived when he did this and broke the internet.
#CrowdStrike #WreckItRalph
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/893/794/744/342/266/original/e4d8d607715b6f4c.mp4

2024-08-01 01:55:44

What you'll expect to spend time on when making a PR: Testing, linting, debugging.
What you'll actually spend time on: Fixing all the whitespace because because #vim decided that those copied tabs should really be spaces and you can't convince it otherwise not matter what.

2024-07-31 23:32:57

CNBC: #TacoBell to roll out AI drive-thru ordering in hundreds of locations by end of year
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/31/taco-bell-to-roll-out-ai-drive-thru-ordering-in-hundreds-of-locations.html

2024-07-31 20:30:05

New #Atari branded and licensed handheld that ships with 50 games and has support for (separately sold) #Evercade cartridges. Made by "HyperMegaTech".
https://atari.com/products/super-pocket-atari-edition
#gaming #retrogaming

2024-07-30 17:50:44

When you meet another #fountainpen user around town.
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/876/702/546/873/354/original/938102e838f9f13d.mp4

2024-07-27 20:03:38

You've got to be kidding. Windows Servers are having outages due to an update.
Forbes: Microsoft Confirms It Broke Windows As 30 Minute Reboots Hit After Update
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2024/07/27/microsoft-confirms-it-broke-windows-as-30-minute-reboots-hit-after-update/
#Microsoft #Windows

2024-07-24 02:08:50

As a person with #Appalachian roots, someone needs to tell JD that the Mountain Dew they're singing about in the old bluegrass songs isn't a Pepsi product and doesn't come in Diet.

2024-07-24 00:02:07

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Like #Trump, her speech was very #populist. Plenty of appeals to the middle class and fighting for a future for the American people using bite-sized quips and slogans to drive the point home.
Unlike Trump, her statements were clear, simple, coherent, and easy to follow.
I doubt she'll sway many Trump voters, but she might well get Dems to turn out and vote and perhaps a few never-Trumpers, too.

2024-07-23 23:59:02

Watching #KamalaHarris' rally today and she's channeling some Obama 2008 energy with her speeches. I don't remember the last time I saw a Dem rally with that much energy. Also, I'm not used to hearing a president nominee speak in full, complete sentences that don't wander off like little bottle rockets that sometimes pop or whine at the end.
She definitely has the advantage in #rhetoric skills and I imagine she'll easily dominate a debate against #Trump.

2024-07-18 17:31:07

Actual request from work today:
"Hey, we have a 14 year old production server that's been sitting on the floor of Frank's office. Frank is leaving so we need to move it, but we're too scared to touch it."

2024-07-18 16:53:49

Here's my sweet spot for #Gnome #fonts on #Linux.
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/808/531/116/116/276/original/989638ca10f3da7e.png

2024-07-08 20:06:47

RCA jacks in the center console of this early 2000s Chrysler. No Bluetooth here! But there is a built in DVD player.
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/752/666/688/583/030/original/eb4265ab283f270b.jpg

2024-07-06 14:50:12

Article: #Pinball is cool again—and these stunning machines are why
Pinball is cool again—and these stunning machines are why
https://flip.it/fyive6
#retrogaming

2024-06-15 03:39:32

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Learning electric work from cars has ruined me for this. I mentally equate "ground" with the negative side, since negative is "grounded" to the chassis.

2024-06-14 22:24:13

It's been zero days since I've talked a coworker into installing #Fedora #Linux on their work machine. They're now rocking #Silverblue on their Intel Mac and reporting that it's running much better now than when it was MacOS.

2024-06-10 20:37:49

Having a weird hankering to run #FreeBSD again and I'm not sure why. I have no practical reason to do it, but there's something about it I miss. I'm definitely not in a place in life where I would consider running it as my main OS anymore like I did a little over a decade ago.

2024-06-08 15:57:44

OK, I've figured out how to settle the Gen X vs Millennial cut off:
What was the first boy band you clearly remember while they were popular?
If it's Backstreet, NSYNC, etc, you're clearly a millennial.
If it's New Kids on the Block ie earlier, you're Gen X.
Pretty sure this is as objective as it's possibly going to get and better criteria than Pew going back and forth between 80 and 84.

2024-06-05 16:10:53

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That's true - I remember early Java containers and having to find creative ways to explicitly tweak that and get proper environment vars for things like credentials loaded properly into the containerized Java runtime. Java in containers has come very long way.

2024-06-05 15:51:01

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And of course, before the "not all PHP" people show up - it is possibly to write PHP code to work as a clean little scalable microservice, but the vast majority of PHP code out there was written for the mighty monolithic vertical scaling LAMP stack and is very stateful by nature. Also, the fact that Tomcat can grok the cgroup limits imposed by containerization and tune itself accordingly is impressive.

2024-06-05 15:46:23

I feel like #Kubernetes largely tamed #Tomcat for #Java webapps but #phpfpm remains a greedy and fickle yet necessary beast for #php.

2024-06-04 16:42:47

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Nah, but I did migrate a number of CentOS Stream machines to #AlmaLinux recently. Alma8 is still supported and it's easy to migrate to, even from CentOS 7:
From CentOS 7: https://wiki.almalinux.org/elevate/ELevating-CentOS7-to-AlmaLinux-9.html
From CentOS8 to Alma8: https://wiki.almalinux.org/documentation/migration-guide.html

2024-06-03 20:52:26

CentOS Stream 8 went end of life last week but CentOS 7 is still supported until the end of the month.
#Linux

2024-06-02 16:41:39

Decided against wearing my FreeBSD Beastie socks to church this morning 😅. I normally wear the first socks I pull out of my drawer, but for the sake of not having to explain Unix history to someone today, I'm going with the second pull CNCF Kubernetes socks instead.

2024-05-31 01:35:58

It's very hard to imagine Romney, McCain, or Hillary Clinton still being the party nominee without massive push back for a similar conviction under similar circumstances. It's nothing short of amazing just how much the bar has been lowered and so quickly.

2024-05-30 16:25:44

One thing that would certainly make the initial experience of running #Atomic #Fedora better for seasoned #Linux users is having the `dnf` command exist and grok rpm-ostree out of box. I understand *why* this is the current experience, but there's definitely room for improvement here:
dnf: command not found

2024-05-30 15:39:21

If you're wondering what #git forge to host your #opensource code project on, the right answer is probably going to be #forgejo. If the right answer was anything else, you probably wouldn't be wondering about it.
https://forgejo.org/
Don't want to host it yourself? Then #Codeberg is what you're looking for.
@npub12r3…zz58 @npub1fh7…ee83

2024-05-28 00:44:19

It's crazy how different I feel about #Google versus 13 years ago. They were the innovative #opensource-embracing counter to the corporate behemoth of #Microsoft. It's sad how much Google has embodied many of the very things it boldly rallied against. And now Microsoft can pitch its own web services as simply being not-Google.
(I could be wrong, but I remember "Bing" being an informal, recursive acronym for Bing Is Not Google.)

2024-05-25 16:43:42

The #Fedora 40 Release Party just ended and it was great as usual to connect with familiar faces and get updates on current and upcoming things for the project. Fedora is alive and well with a thriving global community!
#Linux #opensource

2024-05-22 01:33:54

I wonder if #Linux has some kind of minimal #qemu and/or #KataContainers way to run x86 applications on an #ARM host, similar to Rosetta for MacOS or the similar WIP Microsoft compatibility.

2024-05-18 02:16:04

Life Goals:
#Firefox user loses 7,470 opened tabs saved over two years after they can’t restore browsing session
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefox-user-loses-7470-opened-tabs-saved-over-two-years-after-they-cant-restore-browsing-session

2024-05-17 04:02:27

My goodness, #Amazon has thoroughly killed the #Twitch and #TwitchPrime experience with the relentless and intrusive interruption ads.

2024-05-16 19:12:44

Not helpful: Complaining about some feature or bugfix not yet being implemented in a github issue.
Actually helpful: Offering to donate money and/or beta test on your own hardware/OS towards the feature or bugfix you want/need.
#opensource

2024-05-11 16:43:31

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I'm not sure either. All I know is that have these GPUs and I'm not using them, so I'd rather them go to someone who might use them for something. I'm sure they're still useful for CUDA stuff if you can sort out which drivers to install and it *looks* like they both support SLI (but I've never tried it).

2024-05-11 16:28:48

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I have a spare 660 and 560Ti. If you want them, they're yours.

2024-05-11 16:19:53

Android needs something like pipewire, so you can specify that Spotify goes to the Bluetooth speaker, but the rest of the audio goes to the phone so notifications, texts, etc, don't cause blips in the music when you're streaming.

2024-05-10 16:11:22

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oniguruma has it in their docs:
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/417/665/740/792/063/original/14bc5fcdc68cd950.png

2024-05-10 15:56:57

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You know it is. On that note, what unicode codepoints count for \w?

2024-05-10 15:46:56

How do password validators handle utf-8 characters/emoji that take up multiple code-points?

2024-05-08 16:58:28

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Once they were well established as market leaders for their respective slices, they shifted from wow-ing with innovation to finding new ways to squeeze blood from a turnip and figuring out how to market-spin it after the fact.
Don't forget that phones used to have FM radio and universal TV remote control capabilities, too.

2024-05-08 16:55:49

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Crazy to think that all of those features used to be *standard*. Ever since the Samsung Galaxy 7, it's been a consistent story of paying more for less, with Apple and Samsung leading the race to the bottom.

2024-05-08 14:51:18

Retrospective from a month with the #Zenfone 11 Ultra:
I'm now officially a fan of the Zenfone. It hits a certain sweet spot for me between the headphone jack, UI, camera, and battery life. It's the direction #Samsung should have gone.
I don't like the larger size more than the size of the 9/10, but it is roughly the same size of my previous Samsung Galaxy Plus, so I can definitely live with it.
#Android #Asus

2024-05-08 02:14:06

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Is this Haiku?

2024-05-07 00:43:05

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I prefer tactile switches because I enjoy them more and generally type faster and more confidently with them vs linear quiet ones. Part of it I'm sure is an age thing, since I learned on old mechanical keyboards and used manual typewriters and there's a sort of auditory cued rhythm that comes with it, least you jam up the typewriter, that has never left me.

2024-05-06 18:00:42

It's been zero days since my blue switch mechanical keyboard significantly disrupted a meeting at work.

2024-05-03 20:53:09

Technically, by law, everyone who got "ordained online" and can legally officiate weddings is now also legally a mandated reported in the state of California.

2024-05-03 01:48:26

What do you call a headache induced by looking at way too much yaml all day? Asking for me.

2024-04-23 15:43:59

Who, since the PC-101, has ever wanted Num Lock off by default on a full sized keyboard? I can understand having it off for one's without a 10-key where the Num Lock overlays letters, but good grief, why default to it off for a full size one?

2024-04-23 14:59:28

I work with AI sometimes as part of my dayjob, but I'm personally far more excited about the future potential of #fediverse.

2024-04-17 15:13:13

Random thought of the morning: Lacking an Adam's Apple seems like a significant advantage for a ventriloquist.

2024-04-16 20:14:02

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Relatedly,
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/quantum-computing/commodore-64-outperforms-ibms-quantum-systems-1-mhz-computer-said-to-be-faster-more-efficient-and-decently-accurate

2024-04-16 20:13:19

Forget ARM. Forget RISC. Let's build a truly #opensource and #openhardware spec for a 64-bit capable architecture based on the 6502 instruction set.

2024-04-16 16:10:26

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Matrix the protocol is well-done. If the flagship client for Matrix had been better executed, it would be far more popular.

2024-04-16 15:38:51

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Device verification doesn't "stick" with Element X. You have to do the emoji instead of scan, but then when you verify, Element X still complains about not being verified. This also means you can't then use it to verify other sessions.
I can imagine that people who installed Element X as their initial gateway to #Matrix would be quite underwhelmed by the experience.

2024-04-16 15:33:36

For some reason not all of my #Matrix conversations show up in #ElementX so I end up having two versions of #Element installed on my #Android phones which is not wonderful for battery life and data usage. Element X should have been branded as Element Beta or something along those lines.

2024-04-13 18:02:25

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Yeah, the (rather boring) software bundles for it were going for more than the system itself. That's a pretty clear sign.

2024-04-13 17:20:54

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I did some looking last night in ebay and there are a whole bunch of TI99 units on ebay for $20-30. Almost every other machine from that era has skyrocketed in price in ebay but that one.

2024-04-12 20:31:41

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There are plenty of #Commodore64 fans here on the fediverse as well! I'm still doing adventures with them.

2024-04-12 18:46:27

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The same article mentions that it sold poorly 🤷
Computers shipped != computers sold

2024-04-12 16:48:52

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Reading through the history on Wikipedia, it looks like it suffered a similar development fate to OS/2 where it became a one size fits all and they were so concerned about cannabalizing their own product lines that it got nerf'd in committee to something highly proprietary and impractical. An earlier rejected iteration used an 8080. 🤦
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/259/270/556/040/996/original/7e6fa252348297ef.mp4

2024-04-12 16:39:46

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I'm going to take a wild guess that this is Finnish language and therefore a slightly underclocked PAL version.

2024-04-12 16:35:14

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Oh weird - it was a different instruction set than the 6502 and 8080 based stuff everyone else was using. I imagine it probably had a very limited software library comparative to Atari, Commodore, Apple, Osborne, etc. as a result.

2024-04-12 03:21:40

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My uncle just told me last week that he first learned on a TI99.

2024-04-12 03:09:27

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I'm guessing that was back when you had to "park" the hard drive before moving the machine?

2024-04-12 03:01:40

My first family computer was an Osborne One. Now, let me hear about yours.

2024-04-11 19:52:39

Victorian era: You are strictly required to mourn for 2 years after the death of a parent. By no means should you even begin to think about work of any kind for at least the first six months.
Me, in 2024: Gee, I'm thankful my employer is gracious enough to let me use up to 10 days of my earned PTO for bereavement, but I'm only going to use 5 because there's just too much going on and I might need those days in case more relatives die this year. 🫠

2024-04-10 17:59:57

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CBASIC gets around this by not having line numbers but "statement numbers" that you reference with GOSUB/GOTO.
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/248/224/817/790/383/original/c3c49d30e033a857.jpg

2024-04-10 17:55:41

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CBASIC and QBASIC for the win!

2024-03-29 23:23:04

If you're running #Fedora 40 Beta or Rawhide or #Debian Sid or some other rolling #Linux distro, an ssh backdoor was found in xz and you need to downgrade immediately.
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2024-3094

2024-03-29 13:13:08

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[@catsalad](https://infosec.exchange/@catsalad)
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/179/149/823/998/537/original/b8981da9cb4b7805.mp4

2024-03-23 03:40:27

A lot of people in the Redis community are now learning about the difference between permissive and copy-left licenses.
If you contribute code licensed with MIT or BSD, anyone can use that code in proprietary software, never release the source or modifications to it, and the only thing they owe you is publishing the BSD license text notice somewhere with the software. You still get attribution, but redis can absolutely legally do this.

2024-03-22 23:42:38

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I love that the #AlmaLinux community is so genuinely amazing. The distro is solid, the org is a well oiled machine, and its members contribute upstream to Fedora, EPEL, etc., so that RHEL, Rocky, CentOS users, etc., can benefit from them, too.

2024-03-22 23:27:58

#AlmaLinux and #SUSE SLES are my current favorite #Linux server distros.

2024-03-21 22:25:30

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k3s is great if you want a standalone or low resources k8s.

2024-03-20 16:44:00

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OpenSearch Dashboard. It supports a number of query languages, including good old Lucene syntax. I made a few pre-baked Discover views, which makes troubleshooting incidents against a particular stack much easier.
Using fluent-bit and/or fluentd to get the log data into OpenSearch either through k8s operators or a simple Ansible playbook to servers.

2024-03-20 16:33:06

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As far as open source alternatives to Data Dog go, OpenSearch combined with fluentd/fluent-bit is an incredibly powerful stack. If you're looking more for advanced analytics, there's also grafana and Percona's distribution of it (pmm) is especially useful if you have relational databases in your stacks.

2024-03-20 16:30:40

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That's part of the issue, is it's not that we lack monitoring and logging, but there's a desire to have something internal to our infra but external to the k8s environments themselves to report on service checks, so we still have a clue if something breaks alertmanager, etc. Centreon has been that for us, which replaced straight nagios, but it's all sorts of janky.

2024-03-20 14:32:16

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Indeed. I was a FreeBSD user back around the time FreeNAS got started and they demo'd it at SCaLE.

2024-03-20 05:31:48

End of an era.
#TrueNAS is switching from #FreeBSD to #Linux
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/18/truenas_abandons_freebsd/

2024-03-20 02:14:39

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I'm curious if you've picked up CheckMK since and if so, what your experience has been. I was looking at it today as a potential Centreon alternative.