Fireside Chat
Tonight I signed up for the Fireside beta. They asked for all my social
media accounts to prove I'm a human. The problem is, I don't have a
twitter account, a facebook account, instagram, etc. Years ago I took
the advice of numerous psychology studies and my own therapist's advice
and got off the social media platforms. It was one of the best things
I've ever done for my mental health.
So hopefully this blog, though infrequently updated (and slightly broken
since the last major perl update), will serve as proof to the people at
Fireside that I am human and not a bot.
It was the Astonishing
Legends Podcast that led me to Fireside. It would be nice to use it
for one of their interactive live chats sometime.
[/musings]
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Tenth Runniversary
Today is my tenth runniversary. It's been a decade since I first stepped
on that treadmill. Like my first day running, I ran on
the treadmill while listening to br\oken.
I've had some set backs in my recovery. Not properly rehabilitating the
atrophy in the left leg has caused some problems with the muscles around
my hip. Listening to my trainer only made it worse.
But now I'm taking care of it properly.
Like that first day ten years ago, I have a goal I am working toward.
This time it is the Dublin Marathon in October. This will be marathon
number 13. I don't expect to PR. I think 10 minute miles are a much more
reasonable goal at this point, but frankly I'll be happy just to cross
that finish line.
It's been a long, hard road out of Hell, but God has been by my side and
put some amazing people in my life to help me along the way.
I have to thank the Giraffes for today. I have to thank the Giraffes for
much of my life this last decade. I was heading for an early grave, and
they changed that. Giraffes, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and
I look forward to running the LTC and many other races with you in the
next decade.
[/running]
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Take back your privacy
Recent surveys have found that 76% of [the most visited] websites in the
world cotain trackers from google and 24% contain trackers from
facebook. This has been reported by CNBC,
PC
World, The
Verge, Fortune,
and Breitbart.
Almost anywhere you go on the internet, they are following you, building
a profile on you, and selling that information, your information,
to the highest bidder. Even if you don't have a user account for google
or facebook "services," they've built a profile of you using this
surreptitiously collected data.
It turns out there are some steps one can take to prevent these
companies from following you wherever you go. It's not perfect, but it
helps a lot. First, don't use Chrome. Second, install ad-blocker plugins
for your browser. Third, use your firewall.
It turns out Google and Facebook are large enough that they have their
own Autonomous Systems (AS) composed of numerous subnets. Google owns AS
15169, while Facebook owns AS 32934. Using a little bit of shell, it's
relatively easy to look up all the subnets owned by these companies.
whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'
whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS15169' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'
That's a lot of subnets. Because I have different operating systems on
different computers and still want to block traffic to and from
all those IP addresses, I've written some simple scripts to add
rules to various firewalls. I have scripts for IPFW on FreeBSD, IPTables on Linux, and the Windows Firewall that should work from XP SP3
through Windows 10. I've only tested it on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and
it worked in those.
All of these scripts can be found in this
directory. The IPFW and IPTables scripts are self-contained. For the
Windows command shell batch files, the *ips.txt files are also needed.
I have to say, the internet looks very different with these firewall
rules in place. There are noticeably fewer advertisements and pages load
faster. Embedded YouTube videos and Instagram photos don't appear.
Sometimes the frame disappears, sometimes you get a "failed to connect"
page appearing in a frame in the middle of a page. (Yes, these rules
block YouTube and Instagram; they are owned by google and facebook and
reside in the subnets owned by those companies.) On a relatively rare
occasion, I come across a site using some sort of javascript or css or
something hosted by a machine in one of those ASs and that will be
blocked. Sometimes the site handles that gracefully, sometimes it stops
being functional. A small price to take back your life.
Update: Twitter has trackers on a decent amount of sites out there too,
so I've added scripts to block Twitter's AS 13414 as well. Those scripts
are in the same directories as the others.
[/musings]
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New PGP Key!
So apparently Evil32 happened.
Approximately 24,000 PGP keys were generated that had collisions with
the 32-bit short IDs of existing keys. Then someone decided to use those
conflicting keys to generate revocation certificates and upload them to
the keyservers. Joy.
Though my old keys still work, they were affected by this mass
revocation of collsions. I have created a new key which can be found at
http://skinnymf.com/~mforde/mforde.asc.
On a related note, if anyone is interested in Key Signing Party, shoot
me an email. I haven't been to one of those since college.
[/musings]
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Time Travel?
A few months ago I happened to snap a photo of the DeLorean on Main
Street in Boonton near the Darress Theatre. It's probably one of my
favorite photographs of the car and certainly one of the best I've ever
taken.
The theatre was built in 1919 and has remained largely unchanged since
then. A lot of Boonton still has a very old "look and feel" to it, and
this section of Main Street served as a perfect backdrop for the
DeLorean.
[/dmc]
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Ninth Runniversary
Yesterday was my ninth runniversary. Like my first day running, I ran on
the treadmill while listening to Broken. Unlike the first time, I only
listened to it once, and covered 4.48 miles during the duration of the
EP, thanking God every step of the way.
I'm confident in knowing that the bone in my ankle has healed completely
now; however, I'm still rebuilding the muscle in that ankle and the rest
of that leg. There was significant atrophy during the early phases of
recovery. Slowly as it may be, I am making progress, and I am thankful
for that.
[/running]
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Merry Christmas
While the holidays are supposed to be a joyous time, I know and
understand how hard they can be for some people. If you're having a
rough time over the next week or so and need someone to talk to, feel
free to message me. If you're reading this blog, you likely know my
email address or phone number.
[/musings]
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Don't Call it a Comeback
On June fourth, I was running in the Tourne on a trail I first ran
twenty years ago, a trail I've run hundreds if not thousands of times
before. On that morning, my foot came down on a wet rock at just the
wrong angle, slipped just enough and I rolled my ankle. Not only did I
roll the joint, I came down on it with enough force to break it; a fact
I would learn when I final saw a doctor about it on June ninth.
No surgery was required, but I was unable to run for three months. I was
finally cleared to run. The plan was to start with short distances,
about a quarter mile, on a rubberized track then build up from there,
moving on to treadmills and eventually roads and trails. I was
instructed to spend six months rebuilding my 60 mile per week base.
On the morning of September 11 (a day I will never forget and a morning
that will always make me feel a bit uneasy), I took to the track for the
first time. I started by walking a mile. As I finished the fourth lap, I
said a prayer, asking God to give me the run I needed and the wisdom to
know when to stop. I queued up my playlist: AC\DC's "Back in Black" and
LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out." I took my first stride.
I've been progressing well in the last two weeks; pushing it on some
days, resting when necessary. Though the short, slow distances have been
frustrating, it feel good to be running again. Every stride I take I'm
reminded of everything I love about the sport.
It's good to be back.
[/running]
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Fun Conversations
The DeLorean often leads to conversations one wouldn't normally expect.
Case in point: today I had to call my auto insurance provider for an
issue with my daily driver. After taking some info to pull up my account
the conversation went something like this:
Agent: Which car is this?
Me: The Pontiac.
Agent: Am I reading this right?
Me: Reading what?
Agent: I'm sorry, do you have a DeLorean?
Me: Yes.
Agent: I never thought I'd see someone with a policy on a DeLorean.
Me: Well, you've insured both of mine...
Agent: You've had two DeLoreans?
Me: Yes.
At that point there were a few more questions and then we got back to
the issue which my phone call had been about originally.
[/dmc]
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X11 Mouse Cursor Themes
Starting after installimg the binary nvidia drivers on both my laptop
(Quadro K1100M) and my workstation (GeForce GT 630) Blackbox was
defaulting to a mouse cursor that was suboptimal, a black, notched
triangle.
The settings in the Xresources for the mouse cursor theme are honored by
XDM at the graphical log in, but when Blackbox or Fluxbox start, the
cursor would change to the black notched triangle. TWM honors the
settings in Xresources, but TWM is just a little too minimalist, even for
me.
But there's a simple fix!
Create a file in your home directory (if it doesn't already exist)
.icons/default/index.theme. In this file, add the following lines:
[Icon Theme]
Inherits = polarblue
where polarblue is the name of the X11 mouse cursor theme you wish to
use. FreeBSD installs many of the X11 cursor sets into
/usr/local/lib/X11/icons/, your Unix flavor may be different. In theory,
you can also install new themes of your choosing into ~/.icons/ and use
those without the need for any elevated privileges.
Additionally, there's the option of creating a .Xdefaults file in the
home directory and adding the line
Xcursor.theme: polarblue
Again, where polarblue is the name of theme you want to use.
[/unix]
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FreeBSD Unix on Dell Precision M4800
I installed FreeBSD 10.3 on the laptop I recently acquired and
almost eveything worked out of the box. The gigabit ethernet and
wi-fi coards worked fine and by setting the BIOS to discrete graphics
only, the nVidia Quadro was recognized.
I installed the binary driver from nVidia, because they support FreeBSD
because they're awesome like that. The nvidia-xconfig(1) program was
useful to streamline the process of getting X.org to use the Quadro.
There were a few things that did need some tewaking though. First
there's the sound card. Because the quadro supports HDMI (in addition to
VGA and DisplayPort), it includes an HDA-compliant sound card. This card
is recognized before the primary HDA-compliant sound card in the
machine, the one that's actually connected to the speakers.
I did some research and there were some suggestions about using
sysctl(8) to control soundcard GPIO pins to connect the nVidia sound
device to the speackers but what ultimately worked was using sysctl(8)
to change the default primary sound device to the dedicated card. There
were a few ways to make this happen but the one I found that actually
worked was to place sysctl(8) command lines in /etc/rc.local.
First I found the device I wanted as the default:
mforde@gaz:~> cat /dev/sndstat
Installed devices:
pcm0: (play) default
pcm1: (play)
pcm2: (play)
pcm3: (play)
Device pcm2 was the one I wanted so I added the following lines to
/etc/rc.local
sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=2
sysctl hw.snd.default_auto=2
Now when boot completes pcm2 is set to my default and sound "just
works" and sndstat shows pcm2 as the default.
I found ACPI support has some weirdness as ACPI support often does. What
I found was that Suspend works from console, but resume doesn't...
HOWEVER After I start X ACPI suspend and resume work just
fine. Normally I prefer to boot into a console and only start X if I
really need it, but because I want suspend and resume to work "by
default" I've enabled X to start at boot by allowing the xdm console in
/etc/ttys.
But this had one last issue. See, when manually starting X, I added the
-dpi 143 option to get graphics and text to be appropriately sized for
my screen. XDM needed to know about this.
This probably wasn't the best place to do it, but I edited
/usr/local/lib/X11/xdm/XServers and modified the call to X(7) to add the
-dpi 143 option. Now when Xdm loads at start up, the DPI is set
correctly.
The function keys for adjusting the screen brightness don't work;
however, xbacklight(1) works just fine. Similarly the volume keys don't
work but I can adjust the volume quite easily with aumix(1).
I've submitted my dmesg output to NYCBUG's
dmesgd repository.
I suppose I've posted this for two reasons. The first is so I have a
record of how I eventually got these little things working in case I
have to do it again. The second is in case anyone has similar issues
with their hardware; if they happen to stumble upon this, it might give
them some hints.
[/unix]
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Megapath sucks
Speakeasy was by far the best ISP I ever dealt with. Freindly, and above
all, knowledgeable. Since they have been purchased by
Megapath then merged into Global Capacity, their tech support has been,
frankly a bunch of idiots. Furthermore, their website routinely has
"Service failed" errors that prevent you from logging in, changing
passwords, and viewing account information.
Today, after being unable to log in to the website due to "service
failed" the tech support rep on the phoned didn't understand what a
subnet mask or gateway address were. Eventually I just got her to read
me "all three IP addresses" on the screen in front of her.
But at this point my only other option is Verizon. So I'm sticking with
Megapath.
[/musings]
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Found this sitting in a tarball of my old home directory...
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[/musings]
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