The Overdrive 1000 is a mini-ITX 64-bit ARM dev kit with an AMD Opteron A1120, ECC RAM, USB serial console in lieu of a GPU, and a respectable mount of I/O abilities. You'd think that a system like that would at least come with a decent OS preinstalled so …
Simplification
The modern web has a disturbing tendency towards overengineering things. This is probably because most """web sites""" are actually huge multi user applications with JavaScript frontends that exceed GNU Emacs in size, complexity, and memory footprint. Even many of the "static site generators" are stupidly overcomplicated if all you need …
Blogging with Pelican and Syncthing
Over the past few months I found that I was spending more time and effort rsync
ing my writing directory between systems than I was actually writing blog posts, which is in part why I made so few of them. This was stupid, as it flies in the face of …
Praise Kek and Check 'em: Religion in the Age of the Internet
The Internet, that great achievement of science and technology, is developing its own religion. This isn't immediately obvious to outsiders, in part because the same people most likely to believe are also the most likely to understand that Christianity is still the best moral and ethical system for the masses …
Victory
Donald Trump is the President-Elect as confirmed by the Electoral College. We are now in the Mosins on Mars timeline. Thank God almighty we didn't get stuck with the crazy bitch who would have started WWIII instead.
Can't Fool the Mule
An Explanation of the Trump Phenomenon to Asimov Fans
Many of you are probably wondering how Donald Trump is so successful as a Presidential candidate. You might also be wondering how it is that the left and the right wings of the establishment, supposedly mortal enemies in this oh so …
Laptops and Licenses
Today has been a most satisfyingly productive day. I tested how well Haiku OS runs on a tiny 16GB USB drive that barely sticks out of the port on my Thinkpad T530 (spoiler alert: it works fucking GREAT), and used it as a developer workstation for porting unix applications to …
Automating Let's Encrypt Certificates for Nginx
The Let's Encrypt public beta is here, which means you can get free 90-day SSL certificates for as many domains as you'd like, absolutely free. The 90 day certs are designed to encourage automation, and the client even includes support for updating your certs non-interactively from the command line. Basic …
C-Kermit the Frog goes lpribbit
Background
Earlier this week, when I was staring at my work machine bored out of my skull, watching paint dry a long rsync between servers run, I decided to poke around the options menu of MinTTY, the Cygwin terminal emulator I use when I'm on Windows. Under the Terminal settings …