Post Climate Change Debate Investigations

This week I had the luck to participate in a debate about climate change at work. For me it was a forum to promote the first of the “three R’s” (reuse) that Jack Johnson introduced to me but there were other ideas, and a lively debate was had! As one would hope, the collateral effect of getting together and exchanging and exploring new ideas is that interesting lines of exploration are raised to help clarify certain ideas. So read more for two doubts I had post debate and my investigations into them!

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Sailfish OS

This week I had the opportunity to explore a new mobile device operating system, Sailfish OS, something that does not happen every day, so it was a special week!

Here is snapshot of my mobile OS journey up until now:

So read on for what drew me to Sailfish OS, how the installation process went, and my first impressions after a week of use!

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Refugio Automation

Since getting a small little cabin in the local mountains I have had on the to do list pulling out one of my currently unused Raspbery Pi’s and setting it up and lots of other yet to be determined things for gathering temperature data inside and outside the house. Then last week when chatting with my neighbor Nieves about how soon it would be cold in the mountains as WINTER IS COMING she mentioned that we probably need to get a smart plug to turn on the heater before we came up, as otherwise by the time we left at the end of the weekend the house would just be getting livable. I said yea that was a good idea and was thinking about my Raspberry Pi and having to get WireGuard on it as well so I could get onto the local network to control things… and later in the day I thought, well before doing all that, let me see what is out there. Oh boy was I in for a treat!

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Move over WiFi Range Extender, Jupiterstation now is equiped with a Mesh

After lots of complaining from the youngest member of the family and failed attempts at improving things via WiFi extenders, this week I bought a Wireless mesh system from Mercusys system after a coworker sang its praises.
I did not even shop around for other brands or wish wash just searched Amazon and saw lots of different options but figured the potential 867mbps was more than enough for my needs so I went with the Halo H32G AC 1200 system for 64€

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Looks like i picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue

This week reminds me a bit of the Airplane! scenes “a bad week to have quit […]” where it starts off with smoking and then escalates from there.
Not sure which came out first, but on the same night I stayed up late reading the Cyber Safety Review Board’s report on their investigation and recommendations on the Microsoft Exchange Online intrusion I stumbled on the opensource xz backdoor attack while trying to find out more about the Microsoft incident.

So given that both events are not really too serious in that the Microsoft report was a hack that happened back in June and the xz thing is actually a positive in that it was a foiled attempt to plant a backdoor, why did this make an airplane bad week to have quit moment? Well, good question, and it comes down to the fact that since staying up late reading the report and then reading about the xz I have not stopped looping back to both events and questioning the bigger implications. Kinda like a movie or book that you watch, and then spend the next few days looking at it from multiple angles, and seeing things from those new angles.

So let’s first give a high level overview of both for those who have not heard about them, then let’s enumerate those new angles and pondering in attempt to organize my thoughts!

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