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Hosted by FiftyOneFifty on 2017-09-19 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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I met Michael at Kansas Linux Fest 2017 where he was a speaker. Turns out we've probably been walking past each other in the halls at Penguicon the last three years that I have attended. Michael is a BSD guy and one of us. As well as being an open source advocate, he works professionally as a systems admin and network engineer. I bought his texts "SSH Mastery" (because I've always needed help getting my head around reverse IP tunneling), "Networking for Systems Administrators", and "$ git commit murder", his latest novel. Because I was a good customer, Michael threw in "Forever Falls" for free.
"git commit murder" takes place at a BSD convention. The gathering in the novel is slightly less informal than the Linux conferences I've attended. The conference is targeted at the users, contributors, and managers of the fictional "SkyBSD". Our protagonist, Detroit native Dale Whitehead has come to Canada to deliver a talk on his mesh networking project. The conference is disrupted when attendees start to die in what appear to be unrelated accidents. Dale is unwilling to accept these deaths as accidents, and puts his analytical mind to discovering the killer. He also employees his hacking skills, having already created an admin account on the host university's server within minutes of checking in. This makes him understandably reluctant to discuss his theories with the authorities until he has positively identified a culprit.
The SkyBSD community is not without contention. A significant number of contributors want to move from Subversion to git for version control and just as many are vehemently opposed. Also, the recent release of candid photos meant to embarrass a contributor has many calling for a Code of Conduct and the banning of violators. Others think this is going too far. Dale has to contemplate whether either of these is reason for murder? Perhaps it is a struggle by an old guard who is not ready to surrender leadership to a younger generation?
At first, it was hard to get to like Michael's protagonist, Dale Whitehead. Dale suffers from an extreme form of Attention Deficit Disorder which requires medication and causes him to actively shun the company of other people. The same affliction that allows him to get "in the zone" when programming also makes being in crowds a fresh hell for Dale. He is in constant terror that some aberrant behavior on his part will reveal his condition to his companions and he finds it much easier to deal with other humans via e-mail or IRC. It's clear Michael Lucas has an understanding of the condition, either via research or contact with someone who suffers ADD.
At least one character in the story seemed to me to bear a passing resemblance to a familiar conference fixture in real life. Michael told me the sequel might be set at an open source/Sci Fi convention in a city near the great lakes. Time will tell if the Tuesday Afternoon Solaris Overview or a kilt wearing organizer will make an appearance.
"Forever Falls" is also a mystery, as well a SciFi story. Ella Forecourt is a recruit right out of college for the Montague Corporation. As a corporate security officer, she is assigned to investigate the death of a Montague research scientist at the Freefall installation. In the course of the novel, you learn that Montague has proprietary technology that allows them to "portal" into other universes or dimensions where the laws of physics are different from those of our universe. In Freefall, gravity runs parallel to the surface of the world. In other words, you don't fall down, you fall sideways, and with no ground to stop you, if you fall, you fall forever.
Montague has a research facility built into the "Cliff". With gravity travelling sideways, the surface of the planet appears as an endless cliff. "Above" the facility is a huge metal awning to deflect falling boulders. On top of the awning is where the security team discovers the body of Dr. Devin Grupper. The damage to the body suggests Dr. Grupper impacted with terminal velocity. Even in the lighter gravity of Freefall constant acceleration means terminal velocity is governed by air resistance. Montague does use airships for transport, but there are no records of how Grupper could have secured transportation and a pilot to wind up smashed on the awning without a ship going missing. Thus Security Second Ella Forecourt is assigned to the case. "Forever Falls" is but one in a series of Montague Portal novels by Michael Lucas. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
Klaatu talks about the benefits of tabletop gaming over computer gaming.
Well I’m back again, as I said in the show I did about Raspbian x86 on the Lenovo x61s, I was interested to see how the OS would perform on what I now class as very old hardware in the form of a Pentium 4 tower.
We have a spare tower at the Makerspace which gets used to test low resource operating systems to see if they live up to their name, so on Saturday (yesterday as I write this, but a few weeks ago by the time this show goes out) I put the x86 Raspbian image on to this tower to see how it would perform.
Tower specifications are: Pentium 4 2.8Gig CPU, 2Gig DDR Ram and a 40Gig HDD, which in its day was a very useful bit of kit, but technology has moved on and most people wouldn’t consider it any use as a working PC today.
First problem I encountered was the DVD drive was duff and I didn’t have the image on a flash drive. Luckily I did have my trusty USB DVD in the bag, so I hooked that up, booted into the boot menu and set the disc off loading the OS. I won't go into this again as I ran through the install process last time, HPR 2362, but the install went well and I was left with a new install of Pixel on the tower.
I went through the new install process and was left with an up to date and password secure PC, I then rebooted to check what the resource use was at first boot, which I was amazed was a consistent 66mb of RAM, and about 1% CPU use.
Using the Chromium web browser pushes up RAM usage over a 100 but it was smooth and easily coped with navigating to resource hungry sites such as YouTube and the BBC. So first test passed.
I next opened a Word document in LibreOffice, this took about 10seconds to load but once open was perfectly usable with no lag, so should provide a good office capable PC.
So you can use the Web, Write documents, it has an email client or you can use web mail. And it’s not painfully slow, this PC would now make a very usable homework/first computer for any child, or a computer for an older member of the family that just needs to keep in touch with family and friends without breaking the bank. In fact you could probably pick up a working tower off the likes of Freecycle/Freegle for £0 and you may even get a small 17”/19” TFT monitor from the same place.
Yes it’s not as energy efficient as the latest kit but as I said last time the cost of a new PC/laptop can buy a lot of additional electricity in the time you may run it before it finally expires.
Notes? We don't need no stinking notes!
Edited 2017-09-08 by Ken
I beg to differ :).
This show was recorded on Audacity using a Logitech headset.
In episode hpr1892 :: my chicken coop jezra went to great lengths to protect his chickens. His system based on a BeagleBone Black ensures the door opens and closes only during the day.
In this show jezra explains how he gets the system to send him an email, and a text message using mailx and his phones providers free SMS to Email gateway.
What's so great about Docbook, any way? Glad you asked.
Please excuse the audio quality in the episode & feel free to skip if it's too painful on the ears. In the episode, I mainly talk about my two most recent cars as I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about off the cuff.
This is the dictation device I used
This is similar to my previous Ford Focus
This is similar to my current Ford Focus
Deepgeek, Lostnbronx, and Klaatu talk about cultural iconography.
Hosted by Ahuka on 2017-09-08 is flagged as Clean and released under a CC-BY-SA license.
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The Health Care Marketplace in the U.S. has 6 major partipants: Doctors, Hospitals, Insurance Companies, Employers, Government, and Individuals. Each of them has interests and incentives, and they tend to clash. How we resolve those competing interests has consequences for the systems we create.
First off I have to admit to being a bit of a foodie and I love Sauerkraut but getting naturally fermented sauerkraut here in the UK in my experience impossible and if you can it tends to be expensive. So I went and had a look on YouTube for some instructions on how to do it, and my first efforts worked well. I’ve just made another batch and took pictures as I was doing it. So this is a how to show on making Sauerkraut.
Just to say that this is about making basic sauerkraut but you can add additional flavours with garlic, other veg and spices. At some point I will try chilli but this week I want the clean taste of a basic sauerkraut.
I use a large white cabbage which you need to strip any outer leaves that are blemished or dirty then quarter and cut out the hard core. Now before shredding weigh the cabbage as you need this to work out how much salt you will add for each Kilo of cabbage and other vegetables, if using. You need 20 grammes of salt, nothing fancy but use one without any any additives, just pure salt, I used a rock salt which cost £1.35 for 350g. You're basically after 2% salt to weight of Cabbage and anything else you are fermenting.
It’s also an idea to have about 100mls of a 2% brine to top up if needed to cover the veg in the jar if there is not quite enough liquid made during mashing.
Shred the cabbage and put into a large bowl with the salt, now the fun bit starts. You need to get your hands in and start to crush the salt covered shredded cabbage to start drawing out the moisture, this will take several minutes or longer depending on quantity, but you will feel the texture changing and the liquid starting to be drawn out quite soon after starting. Continue this process until the cabbage seems to have shrunk by about half and there is also a juice in the bottom of the bowl. You can cheat and do this for a few minutes then cover with food wrap and leave for up to an hour and the salt will have done some of the work for you, but you need to give it a good 5 minutes to start before you do this, and you may have to do a little more mashing before transferring to a jar.
At this stage find a jar or jars, large enough to hold all the cabbage with a little to spare, you can sterilise if you wish but a good clean in hot soapy water then rinsed and allowed to dry is sufficient as the salt kills and bad bacteria and encourages to good bacteria to grow. Put all your salted and mashed cabbage mix in the jar/jars well packed down with the juice ensuring that the juice is covering the cabbage by about 1cm (this is where the extra saline solution comes in if you don’t quite have enough.
Now put your lid on but not overly tight as this is a fermented product and if there is nowhere for the gas to go then you could have a pressure explosion in your cupboard (some people use wine makers fermenting valves but this is a little overkill and more cost than needed).
Tuck the jar away in a storage place that’s about room temp and leave for several days checking every so often to see how it is. If the brine has evaporated you may need to top up slightly. After about a week you should have sauerkraut, give it a try, if its sour enough this is when you take it and put in the fridge or cold cellar/garage to stop the fermenting. All you have to do now is start eating, oh, and make your next batch ready for when that’s gone.
Building characters for your next exciting tabletop RPG session? Use PCGen, and here's how!
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