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.
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.
This morning listening to Today Explained hosted by the amazing Sean Rameswaram I learned a new word! Not any word, but the Merriam-Webster word of year for 2022: gaslighting. This is a true indicator that I really don’t follow regular American news feeds as it appears that this word was reintroduced back in 2016 in a teen vogue article and has been gaining utilization year after year since, and this year was the most searched word on Merriam-Webster’s site.
I don’t quite remember if it was the first time I had configured a VPN terminator (probably had already done some PPTP work) but I distinctly remember my first brush with IPSec. It must have been around 1998 or 1999. Can’t remember the manufacture for sure, but suspect it was Cisco. That was when real paper manuals were included, and boy was that a case where RTFM was required. And the reason I remember this, is because how incredibly confusing, prone to misconfiguration, and all around not really fun it was. Fast forward to a weekend in early july 2022 when I discovered Wireguard a completely new take on VPNs that make it simple and lightening fast.
So before even publishing my new hexo blog on the real internet I thought that a first requirement was to get some analytics in place so I can see utilization. I figure and suspect that the whole injecting javascript and calling home tends to freak people out and is probably pretty prone to a cat a mouse game of evasion (therefore more ops time to keep it working) therefore I have opted for log analytics. I will achieve this using a docker “on-premise” instance of Matomo (formally Piwik).
Today I had my summer moment of Zen:
This year I ventured into Asturias to a really cool cove that I discovered last summer in Tapia de Casariego:
and as I had hoped, it provided and amazing tide differential:
Once again I targeted a big tide moment, this year was not a double whammy like last year but it was still a big tide:
In the end I was capturing for 6 hours 10 minutes and 2 seconds:
Which gave a lot of time to:
Here is the rig used:
And then combined all the pictures into a video: mencoder -idx -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o 2020_zen.avi -mf fps=24 mf://@list.txt
Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).
For the last 3 years I have been celebrating what has now become an annual summer ritual: finding some cool spot, timing my arrival with the changing of a tide, setting up my camera rig, and spending 5 - 6 hours contemplating a bit of everything while my camera takes a picture of the changing tide every 5 seconds. This ritual I have baptized as my summer moment of zen (all credit of the “Moment of Zen” concept goes to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show).
This summer I coincided my excursion with a perigean spring tide.
Oh what is a perigean spring tide you ask? It is when a spring tide (nothing to do with the season but when there is a FULL moon or NEW moon) coincides with the moon closest to the earth in its orbit (perigee). Let me draw you a picture:
On august 3rd the moon was only 603,305 KM from the earth and coincided with an almost new moon causing a gravitational double whammy, bulging tides to higher and lower levels than are normally witnessed (a tidal differential of nearly 4 meters):
So I got up early and positioned myself on a nice perch overlooking the bay of the Eo River:
and setup my camera rig (camera, solar panel, Mexican blanket, and a thermos of coffee):
and hung out from 07:45 and until 12:45:
Here is how it was when I arrived and when I left:
And then i combined all the pictures into a timelapse video:
Enjoy!
Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).
The second ever summer moment of zen (or maybe 3rd, but was not able to find any record or video from 2017!)
Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).
