2024 phlog
==========
2024-11-10:
A couple of days ago I deleted my Twitter ID. I did
that because of Musk's support of a fascist presidential
candidate. I am hoping more people do that in order to
hurt Musk where it will really hurt him, in his
pocketbook. I have been on sdf mastodon for a while and
I just created a bluesky account to see what that is all
about.
2024-11-07:
Well seems these days, racism and hate always wins in
the US. I hope the EU can get together and hold back
the "forces of darkness".
2024-10-31:
TNNT (The November Nethack Tournament) Starts today in
my time zone at 8:00PM. I am once again in clan surly
dinos again. Seems there are a couple of new clans this
year and people are being shuffled around. Will be an
interesting year. Visit tnnt.org if you want to
participate in this fun activity.
2024-10-29:
The US Election is next week, I voted for Harris and not
a single GOP candidate. People need to understand what
Trump will do for the US and the World. If he is
elected, US will end up being close to a 1930s type of
depression.
One of his goals is to personally control Fed Policy.
He wants to replace the Fed Board with his lackeys who
will do what he says. His main objective is to force
the Fed to lower interest rates to 0% overnight.
That policy with his tariff proposal will destroy the US
economy and make the US Dollar worthless.
2024-10-26:
Ended up disabling Mersenne Prime search (GIMPS), even
using a very low throttle it stressed out the system.
Plus it was so slow, the check may take months. So just
BOINC for now. But BOINC does provide a clear benefit
to society.
2024-10-22:
After the new Mersenne Prime was found by GIMPS, I
decided to see if I could get it to run along side BOINC
on the W541. I found setting "Throttle=10" it seems to
work OK alongside BOINC. The CPU Temperature so far as
been averaging 125F (51C). So far so good!
2024-10-16:
Found an oddity with file gophermap, if a "link" has a
white space character were it does not belong, lynx(1)
will fail when you try to access it. I guess this makes
sense due to Microsoft's stupidly allowing spaces in
file names. So, before saving changes to file
gophermap, ensure there are no unwanted trailing or
other white space characters.
2024-10-14:
Completed the move of my WEB Site to Geming and Gopher.
Now what to do about the WEB Site ? I no longer maintain
it but I use it as a pointer to my Gemini caspule and
Gopher Hole.
2024-10-08:
Upgraded my OpenBSD systems to 7.6, the upgrade
was very easy and quick. All working fine.
2024-10-07:
I decided to mirror most of my gemini site on gopher
at SDF. I noticed a lot of people still use gopher,
plus it gave me something new to learn and an
additional mirror.
2024-08-12
Emacs on OpenBSD with RCS does not get along too well.
To use RCS with Emacs on OpenBSD you need to install
GNU RCS from ports (grcs-5.9.4p4). That alone will
not get around the issue. What I had to do is ensure
the binaries from GNU RCS is linked to a Directory
that is first in your path, for me that is "~/bin".
2024-06-24
All my utilities are now also maintained in gitlab
along with here in sdf. I found gitlab easier to
use then github, once you figure out how to create
a new repo in gitlab. Their free account is an odd
retention policy, but it should be fine for me. I am
keeping an eye on a new announcement about an OpenBSD
GOT repository being build, it sounds intriguing.
2024-06-14
For the past month, on my Laptop, I enabled my
old "Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search" setup.
But after a few weeks I disabled it, no matter what I
set the Throttle to, it ran too hot. So I re-enabled
BOINC for the "World Community Grid" and "Rosetta".
Time will tell if I keep this active on the W541
with Slackware. The Average Temperature is about 20F
(12C) higher, I do not know if I can live with that.
I miss the desktop days, but laptops are far more
convenient these days :)
2024-06-14
Converting from RCS to git was rather easy, but
trying to get the git repository loaded into gitlab
was way too hard. Seems no matter what, they want
you to use https instead of ssh for pushing/cloning,
so I could not get that to work after 2 days of trying.
https is a deal breaker for me, so for now I will stick
with RCS and anonymous ftp. Plus the documentation
seem to be tailored to Microsoft Windows or MACs,
making things even harder. The only easy option is
go go back to github, but due to Microsoft 2FA and
the need for a Cell Phone, that is a no go for me.
2024-06-12
I finally found a way to convert my source from RCS to
git and keep all the history. It was on stack, pretty
much you convert it from RCS to CVS, that is trivial.
Then via "git cvsimport", it will load the objects
to git with history. The missing piece was utility
cvsps(1). I am slowly moving to back to git again.
That is a tough decision, but friends kept pushing me
to do go to git. Plus, RCS on OpenBSD has issues with
Emacs. So I guess I relented. Years ago I converted
to git/github, but because I lost my history and github
2FA, I decided to abandon git and stick with RCS.
This conversion activity may depend upon github,
Microsoft 2FA requirement upset me and I left github.
I calmed down a bit since and will read about this
2FA more, or see if I can find a good alternative.
If so, I may finally be 100% on git for source.
2024-06-07
On OpenBSD I found a work-around for the Emacs Issue.
Instead of installing "emacs-29.3-gtk3", install
"emacs-29.3-gtk2" instead. That allows Emacs to
work fine on OpenBSD. The gk3 version freezes when
you use Menus on the menu-bar via your mouse in X.
Depending on what you have installed, there is a good
chance gtk2 has been installed as a dependency for
some other package.
2024-05-24
My lisp tags setup NetBSD pkgsrc emacs29-29.3 and
emacs 29 from ports on OpenBSD breaks the menus.
Emacs will freeze Xorg when I try and use any of the
drop down menus. On NetBSD I reverted back to Emacs
28, all works good. That is not an option on OpenBSD.
I will check to see why that is the case in an emacs
forum, but I suspect it is something in "~/.emacs".
2024-04-03
This has been a "fun" week. It was discovered that a
backdoor was put in library liblzma starting version
5.6.x. This backdoor added a hole to sshd with many
distros using systemd. I know the BSDs and Slackware
was not affected. Do a WEB search and you will find
more information then you will need. As of now,
I believe all affected distros have been patched.
2024-03-28
Updated the T420 to NetBSD 10.0 from RC6. All went
well and no major issues. But if I run a heavy Hash
Analysis Program I created, after ~1 hour, X will
get corrupted. I may create a PR for that, but for
now I am running that on my Slackware System since it
executes 10x faster then on BSD.
2024-02-24
I had more time, seems ksh(1) and csh(1) is pledged on
OpenBSD, so since I really like pledge(1)/unveil(1),
I stopped using tcsh(1) on OpenBSD :( For a fun
activity on OpenBSD, you can issue this command to
see what ports have been pledged:
find /usr/ports/ -name 'pledge*'
Of course you need to install ports, see the FAQ
for that.
2024-02-22
I finally examined OpenBSD's ksh using objdump(1).
Seems ksh(1) and csh(1) is not pledged or unveiled,
which makes sense based upon how it is used. Because
of that, I am decided to use tcsh(1) on OpenBSD. I was
using csh(1) only because I prefer its interactive
use compared to "sh type" shells. I have always used
tcsh(1) on Slackware and still do. I was exposed to
it when I used Coherent 386 on a 386sx.
2024-02-06
For the last few years, I have been playing with using
the original csh(1). I am a tcsh(1) user so all that
is really missing is cursor movement to edit commands.
Right now, I decided to use the original csh(1) for
an undetermined period of time to exercise my memory.
Over the years I have become very dependent on using
tab completion for some commands. I was exposed to
csh(1) decades ago on SunOS, at the time I did not
like it too much. But now I see an elegance I missed
back then.
2024-02-05
I played with git again with a couple of new utilities.
But when you sign commits with gpg, OpenBSD and
NetBSD has issues. This is due to pinentry, gpg2
needs that for a GUI prompt. Why the the gpg people
"broke" gpg2 forcing a GUI on us is beyond me. So,
that reinforces my use of RCS and ftp distribution
of my things. gpg (not 2) is no longer available on
Open/Net and I kind of expect support to stop for it.
But, Slackware still ships it :)
2024-02-05
First time in a while I have seen the Lake fully
frozen. It has been two years. But the last couple
of days some small sections melted. Years ago, by mid
December the lakes would be frozen enough to skate on
and in some cases to drive on. Now, I am too afraid
to venture out on the lakes in my area.
2024-01-01
Happy New Year!
$Id: 2024.txt,v 1.14 2024/11/10 14:31:26 jmccue Exp $