Another snippet of literature (following this one) that I think about regularly - this time, from Excession by the late great Iain M. Banks. The Culture Series describes an interstellar post-scarcity civilization, wherein most of the administration and governance is carried out by hyper-advanced AIs called Minds, and biological beings (who live on terraformed planets, on megastructures like Bishop Rings, or aboard planet-sized space-faring Ships) are free to pursue leisure and self-improvement. Basically, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.

Less a blog post, and more “something I want to have a persistent addressable record of”. Terry Pratchett has many pearls of wisdom that bear remembering¹ - this particular exchange takes place between Mightily Oats (a naïve well-intentioned religious missionary) and Granny Weatherwax (the tough embittered rustic crone-witch who will help anyone who needs it, but recognizes that “‘good’ ain’t the same as ’nice’”…)

(Future similar “posts” that are merely short quotations from literature will be similarly tagged with #snippets)

Way back in this post, I talked about enabling Analytics Tracking on this blog. I disabled it a while back, as the move to an actually self-hosted blog behind Cloudflare Tunnels (as opposed to an AWS-hosted one) messed that up a bit, and I was more incentivized to have a self-hosted blog without analytics, than vice versa. This post is the story of how I got self-hosting analytics working.

I’ve written before about setting up my ssh config so that I’ll automatically join an existing screen session when ssh-ing to certain hosts, by setting RemoteCommand screen -D -RR -p +

However, this has a couple of issues:

• It will always create a new window within the session, even if an idle window exists. More often than not, I find myself immediately killing the new window and switching to an existing one.
• It doesn’t restrict the rejoin to a named session - in my current usage, I typically only have a single screen session open at once, but that could change!

EDIT 2024-04-16: turns out that there’s a built-in, fc, which does basically the same thing, though it edits the command that was just entered (which is typically what you want when you encounter an error or want to do “the next thing”, anyway).

While reading through my dotfiles, I found some configuration¹ that didn’t seem to be working - it claimed that <ESC>,v would allow editing of the current line in vim, but that didn’t seem to work. I guess I’d copied that from some other configuration and lost patience with trying to get it working, or that it relied on some other configuration option which had been broken². I dug in to find out more. (This article was invaluable!)

I’ve been using tags - or taxonomies, as Hugo more generally calls them - to organize posts in this blog for a while, but haven’t imposed much structure on them. I tend to just apply whatever tags feel appropriate at the time I’m writing, which led to posts with near-duplicate tags¹. We can solve this problem with COMPUTERS²!

Part of the self-hosted setup that supports this blog (along with all my other homelab projects) is a Docker Registry to hold the images built and used in the CI/CD pipeline. Recently I tried to install TLS certificates to secure interaction with the Registry, and it was a fair bit harder to figure out than I expected, so I wanted to write it up both for future-me and for anyone else struggling with the same problem.

[Content Warning - politics, abortion, human rights]

Last Friday, SCOTUS officially handed down a previously-leaked decision overturning Roe vs. Wade, a legal decision ruling that the U.S. Constitution generally protects a pregnant person’s liberty to choose to have an abortion. Without this federal-level decision, the legality of abortion is decided on a state-by-state basis. Many Conservative states had “trigger” laws to ban abortion which immediately went into effect upon this decision; others are debating their response.

I want to start this article by clarifying that I want web3¹, as commonly proposed, to succeed. The ideals that the web3 movement often espouses - transparency of web service logic, privacy and personal control of user data, anti-monopoly - are ones with which I resonate². Unfortunately, there are several common questions that current projects seem unable to answer, leaving me skeptical that they will succeed.

Last Friday was my last working day for the foreseeable future. I’m taking a Leave Of Absence, meaning I’m still technically employed (and thus retain the all-important Health Insurance and other benefits), but am not working (or getting paid) for three months¹. I’m planning to use this time primarily to rest, decompress, and avoid burnout; and then secondarily to think more intentionally about how I want to spend my time and my labour in the future.