Today is a super blue moon and the next one won’t be until 2037!
Happy Birthday iMac!
I just read an email from Steven Levy about the 25th anniversary of the launch of the iMac. I never had one of the original iMacs and in 1998 I was on the side that thought Apple was a company that was done for but what a perfect occasion to share a few remembrances I have about Apple.
Summer Moment of Zen 2023
Today I celebrated my annual moment of summer Zen!
PiMame
In early June 2013 I saw a guide on Adafruit about using a Raspberry Pi as a Mame game console. What I really loved was the idea of using the GPIO (general-purpose input/output) pins to directly connect the joystick and buttons. Not long after I was reviewing material in a warehouse to ensure that none of our networking equipment was stored there because the next day a chatarrero (scrap collector in spanish) was coming to take everything away. I did not find any of our networking equipment, but I did see an old Sony Trinitron security monitor that I immediately thought would make a great game console due to it’s form factor like the old Vectrex from my youth. So read on for the implementation and evolution of the project!
Blog Security Review
I have spent the last few afternoons down in a security rabbit hole that started with a certain someone complaining that my blog was reported as unsecure because it did not support HTTPS. As this rabbit hole is quite deep, I invite you to ensuring you have a cool beverage or hot cup of coffee close at hand if you decide to continue reading…
Raspberry Pi computers
On Wednesday February 29th 2012 Modern Family aired the “Leap Day” episode, which I loved because Phil was so excited that he had an extra day he took it off to spend with this family. Mr Eben Upton also took full advantage of the extra day and released the Raspberry Pi model B credit card size computer that cost 27.7€. The origin story I remember hearing at the time was that Eben and a friend were drinking a beer at a pub lamenting about the knowledge level of the computer science majors at a university where one of them taught. They remembered how they had been baptized with some government subsidized computer in the early 80’s that introduced them to programming and hacking (using this term in a good way to mean really playing with and understanding how things work) but the new students knew a little HTLM and thought they knew everything. So they thought what if we turn More’s Law on its head and instead of doubling the capacity, pack everything that was possible into a computer for a price point of of $20. With a computer for $20 anyone could hack away without too much fear of breaking something, and it would be possible to equip whole computer labs for the price of one regular computer.
So on that particular extra day back in 2012 I did not take it off, but I did spend hours in a virtual line trying to buy my first Raspberry Pi.
2023 Summer Solstice Project
This summer’s solstice project was getting Dark Castle to work on an old Macintosh I had ripening in my storage room for the last 10 years.
Principal Agent
The nantucket whaling industry and the concept of the principal agent
Yesterday I listened to Freakanomics episode 549 “The First Great American Industry” about the American whaling industry and it introduced me to an economic concept I had not known about: the principal agent problem.
Grafana Monitoring
Grafana monitoring and more importantly alerting!
So the first docker containers I fired up on my new Raspbery Pi 4 with 8 GB of RAM when I received it back in July of 2022 were Telegraf, Influx, and Grafana to monitor the new little doggy. And I got a really pretty dashboard working and then kinda forgot about it:
Until this week when I realized that I had a process pegged at 100% since way back in december:
So the first thing to do was to figure out what was pegging the CPU which turned out to be a nightly log rotation that went bad. Unfortunately can’t put too many details because I did not take any notes while investigating and solving, only can comment that it had created thousands of files and every time it tried to run hung. Trying to clean up the files was really fun as doing an rm with a wildcard even gave me and error that there were too many files. Google to the rescue and I got that under control but realized that having a really pretty dashboard did nothing if I did not setup up alerting when things were abnormal.