Amuyu

Well, the decade is almost over. I know, not technically, but the 10’s are done for and the 20’s start tomorrow. It’s really hard to believe that not so long ago, we were going to start the new millennium. In many ways, it feels like Y2K was just yesterday. In many other ways, so much has happened. The world is different. We have the most politically divisive administration happening right now. Our borders are tightening and disappearing at the same time (i.e. the wall and the multinational). The Internet is not new, and is in fact a core service – not too different from power.

I’m not going to go political and will likely ruminate on the other changes later. For this one, I’m going to focus on the internet and maybe some predictions:

A dozen years or so ago, when I first started this blog, self hosting was not unheard of, but also not very common. Today, it’s in a similar place, but for different reasons. There’s a ton of services that offer blogging platforms for next to nothing. However, they seem to be ephemeral. Many people are also choosing to use one of the various social networks as their blogging platform. I’m not a fan of those for a number of reasons, but the biggest is the pernicious nature of their monetization. Others have written extensively on that, so I’ll skip the diatribe about being the product. For me, at least, self hosting is eminently more doable and practical now. The cost of storage is essentially zero. Back when this got started, gigs cost real money. Now, TBs are around $15/TB. That means a gig is 1.5 CENTS. A gig of writing will take a lifetime. What’s more amazing is the transfer cost has reached essentially zero as well. I have full symmetric gigabit internet coming into my home via a fiber link. The speed of my blog is nearly instantaneous. Even if I post images, they are automatically optimized by WordPress. If you click on one of them, it’s expanded and even at full resolution sending a 3-4MB image is fractions of a second. That’s nuts.

This same "freeness" of storage and bandwidth has led to an expansion of gizmos and services that are internet connected. I run a moderately complex home network. It includes several automations (lights, garage, doors, alarms, etc.) as well as several voice assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.). Add up all the gizmos and gadgets and my home now, on average, has about 120+ things with IP addresses on them. That’s nuts. And it’s only going to get crazier. I have a few upgrades planned over the next few weeks that will help me manage that better (switches with better VLAN support, faster storage, etc.). I’ll write about those as I go through them, but in the end, I suspect I’ll be ready for a cambrian explosion of internet things. And I’ll have to worry about security – even more. The fact that I have this bandwidth and all these gizmos means that my attack surface has exploded. The fact that I have to create an enterprise level network to manage it is crazy. The fact that I have to do it with some serious skills and that it’s not been figured out as a simple appliance is crazy. Maybe there’s a business idea in there somewhere.

Anyways. It’s nuts. The last decade has changed many things and the home network is one of them. It’s not what I started to write about, but I’m glad I put it down. Let’s see how I/we adapt to this over the next decade.

One day at my daughters karate class I noticed one of the other dads writing on his notepad. He had small handwriting like I do and his pen was … different. It was a fountain pen but a cheap one. So I got to talking to him. He pointed me to the brand. Platinum Preppy. They are about $9 each. Dirt cheap. You can also get refill cartridges that make this an extra super good value…

But it’s the start of a rabbit hole.

The first test for these was flying. Fountain pens have a reputation for not flying very well. This is largely deserved unless you take some precautions. Not knowing much about this, I did a quick look on the YouTubes and found this video. That was super helpful, but several hours of GouletPens videos, I was hooked. It took a while for me to internalize the content and then decided to step it up a little bit by upgrading with one of these Plaisir. For $13 or so you get a nicer looking pen. I couldn’t find them with the Extra Fine nib, but the nib from the Preppy and the Plaisir are interchangeable.

But … it still looks cheap.

So further down the rabbit hole I went. Spending more time with the Goulet video channel, I ran into one that talked about good traveling fountain pens. They ranged in price from about $50 to crazy money pens. Two of them stuck out. This upgraded Platinum and this TWSBI. The Platinum is about $100 and the TWSBI is about $65 before shipment and all that. I opted for the TWSBI because it looked cooler and it was refillable rather than a cartridge one. I liked the extra capacity of the refillable and the fact that it would let me try out different inks. And, I liked the idea of giving Goulet some money for all those videos

Turns out that that was another rabbit hole. Inks come in "wetter" and "less wet" varieties. Who would have known? The wetter ones flow faster – which is probably a good thing if you like to write with nibs larger than EF. The dryer ones are thicker and will produce thinner lines – which also don’t bleed through the paper as much. Speaking of paper, that’ll be another post where I get into the notebook rabbit hole. The first ink that I tried was a Waterman Black ink. Not knowing better, and having heard that brand before, it seemed like a good idea. It was only after I did that, that I discovered that it’s well known for being a particularly wet ink. Some more googling, and I found that the Pelikan 4001 varietal should work better. And it did.

But I wasn’t done.

Filling a piston filler, like my TWSBI, apparently has some magic involved. I couldn’t get a full reservoir. I tried several methods. I took the pen apart and cleaned it. Took it apart again and lubricated and cleaned it (turns out that’s important). Tried several variations of the refill and I could only get 1/3 of the reservoir filled. But … TWSBI makes a special gizmo that makes it stupid easy. Another $20 or so later and I finally got a full fill of the reservoir.

The line I produce with this TWSBI is not as EF as the Platinum. I suspect part of it is the pen and part of it is the ink. However, it’s pretty good and … it does write very very nicely.

But I haven’t flown with it yet. That test comes in a couple of weeks. I’ll make sure to bring some extra tissues in case I get a blow out, but theoretically the vacuum fills should not have that problem.

More on that later.

I’m in the middle of taking a MacBook Pro I have that’s been sitting idle and setting it up as my kid’s computer. First thing I had to do was to wipe it clean. Then a reload (High Sierra was loaded on it). As part of the setup, I stupidly turned on FileVault.

I then went to upgrade to Catalina and I have to wait HOURS while the drive is encrypted. That’s ridiculous. It’s a brand new install with nothing on the encrypted drive but the basic OS install.

However, I did find a neat little trick and figured I would share:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0

That disables the low priority mode for a bunch of services like Time Machine and FileVault. The progress bar is still showing hours, but it’s significantly faster. In the few minutes I’ve had it on, the progress bar has moved from ~20% to ~50%!

Great tip for future reference.

Oh, and this does not persist across boots. Not sure I want it on all the time, but in case I do, there is a mechanism to do that via Launch Daemons. I’ll experiment with that on this MBP when I’m running Catalina. I fear that it will not work there because of the new sandboxing of the OS. More on that later.

The lovely Mrs. and I did something for the first time. We left the kids at home alone without a babysitter. This feels like a major life milestone, specially for since I’ve had little ones in my life for 26 years.

We went for sushi at our favorite place, Sushi Nami. As usual, it did not disappoint. William, the head chef, did us a solid by bringing out some rather unique things, including the pictured lobster. He was very happy to see that nothing went to waste and we (I) ate the legs and the inside of the lobster. If you haven’t done that, you are missing out. Eat it like you would a crab. The meat is rather sparse, but what you do get is absolutely delicious.

And sorry for the neon. That’s the Mrs’ idea of cool now days.

For Christmas I got a cast iron skillet to go on my green egg. I’ve been meaning to get one, so that was a nice present. One of the big reasons is that I wanted to see how much yummy crust (i.e. Maillard Reaction ), I could get for meat. My, very well raised, daughter asked for steak (and fixings) for dinner for her birthday. So, I tested it.

Back to the future with an Altair!

Retro computing is one of those things that I dabble in. I’d like to do it more, but there’s this thing with time that I don’t have a lot of. But during one of my breaks this last year, I was able to put together one of the AltairDuino Altair replica kits. It’s cool because of all the effort that went into building it and the fact, that I have a dedicated Altair sitting next to me on my desk. One of the semi-recent updates to the emulation code allowed me to run Z80 CP/M (as opposed to the real 8080 stuff). Lots of fun code can be run this way including Turbo Pascal and such.

But – I wanted to know how fast this was. The canonical test of the time was/is the Sieve in basic.

I took the code I had laying around from my experiments with my Atari 800 and modified it to run in the more limited space of the simulated CP/M environment. The change was to put a % next to the flags variable. In MBASIC that marks it as an 8 bit integer. Without that, the program runs out of space. Here’s the code:

10 DIM FLAG%(8191)
20 COUNT = 0
30 FOR I = 1 TO 8191
40 FLAG%(I)=1
50 NEXT I
60 FOR I = 0 TO 8190
70 IF FLAG%(I+1)=0 THEN GOTO 150
80 PRIME = I+I+3
90 K=I+PRIME
100 IF K > 8190 THEN GOTO 140
110 FLAG%(K+1)=0
120 K=K+PRIME
130 GOTO 100
140 COUNT = COUNT + 1
150 NEXT I
160 PRINT COUNT

And here’s the time stamped output of the run:

[2019-12-24 13:59:10] run
[2019-12-24 14:06:09]  1899
[2019-12-24 14:06:09] Ok

How’d I get the timestamps you ask? Well a bit of background on that. The Altair didn’t come with a "console". You used a serial port to connect it to some sort of terminal. What I’ve done is used a USB to serial cable that connects my iMac to the Altair. I then used minicom which I install via homebrew. One of the options of minicom is to timestamp all the output lines in the serial connection.

Anyways. My little emulation thing ran the sieve in just under 7 minutes. Comparable to a time appropriate machine. Cool.