Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
Short version: Telus installed an upgraded network device. First it broke our landline phone, then our inbound network connectivity thereby disconnecting my blogs. I spent hours on the phone with Telus support, and fixed one of those problems myself despite their ‘help’. The phone still didn’t work, then a really good Telus technician came and solved all the problems..
Longer version… continue reading.
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The news the last couple of days has reported somewhat confusingly on new Chinese AI company called ‘DeepSeek’. I found a fairly clear report on the BBC about what is going on. DeepSeek itself isn’t the really big news, but rather what its use of low-cost processing technology might mean to the industry.
And that implication has cause a massive stock selloff of Nvidia resulting in a 17% loss in stock price for the company- $600 billion dollars in value decrease for that one company in a single day (Monday, Jan 27). That’s the biggest single day dollar-value loss for any company in U.S. stock market history.
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Is it possible to be truly ‘private’ while still having some sort of online presence? How much sharing is too much? What can the ‘bad guys’ find out about a person online?
These are all reasonable questions to ask. I respect that some people make a conscious choice to be ‘anonymous’ online, and aim to separate certain aspects of their personality from their ‘real’ identity. There can be any number of perfectly valid reasons for having such concerns and working to retain a degree of anonymity.
I read some good thinking on this topic from Lou Plummer and from Vixiss on the Viscissitudes blog a while back. As for myself, I don’t really attempt to hide who I am behind different presences online. I’ve had chats with people over the years who seem surprised that a ‘savvy’ technical person would be so seemingly unconcerned about their personally identifiable details being available on the internet. I’ve tried to explain my thinking with varying degrees of success, and this post is another such attempt.
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I run my blogs on a little web server in my basement. This is great because it means I control exactly how my web server is configured. It is also horrible because I control exactly how my web server is configured.
In simple terms, I screwed up. Some years back I configured Fedora to perform automatic updates after updating it to the then-current Fedora Core version 34. I thought automatic updates would keep the OS current. This was not correct.
Worse yet, my server wasn’t even actually running the Fedora core version 34 kernel: it was running FC kernel version 27. Fixing this took me far longer than it should have.
But I did finally fix it. This post explains a bit of how I resolved the issue, but for those in a rush: follow the instructions in the Fedora core documentation, including the ‘optional’ guidance to upgrade the GRUB boot loader. That bit about updating GRUB is not really optional for some releases.
If you are not in a hurry and want some details on how things can go wrong, then read on! The stooges would be proud of me…
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I read Monsterlady’s post earlier this week about ‘core fandom’ and their early Pokemon experiences. I have to admit that I really have no idea what ‘core fandom’ is versus just regular fandom. But reading that post triggered a set of old memories about how Star War’s impacted me back in the day: grist for a new post!
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Artificial intelligence as a term conjures up all kinds of science fiction images for most people. Colossus, Terminator, HAL 9000, the Matrix: most of the stories are tales of man’s hubris as a ‘creator’ turning against him.
These are all interesting cautionary tales. And advances in the field of artificial intelligence over the last few years have been amazing. But are we really on the verge of ‘the singularity’? Will our creations become smarter than us and then turn against us? Are these the end times, just before our robot overlords arise?
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I’m configuring a new PC for Irene. I’d love to move her to macOS, but she has too much ‘history’ with Windows. So I went with this:
A neat little computer- the Msecore machines have a good reputation as a ‘no-name’ brand. But there was definitely some strangeness in setting it up, which ultimately I blame on Windows 11 and its ‘secure BIOS’ technologies.
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So I heard there were some updates for my web server OS, so I updated the updates so I could update. Yikes what a pleasure- but this would probably be easier if I did it more than once a year or so. Or not.
I decided to document a bit about what I needed to do to go from Fedora 25 to Fedora 34, with a few side trips into Apache (HTTP) issues around Fedora 33.
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I have been uncomfortable in my office chair for a year or so. It was a perfectly nice ‘executive style’ chair, but not long after the warranty ran out a couple of years ago it started to ‘list’ to one side by about 10 degrees. This abnormal sitting position was accompanied by a ‘rocking’ from side to side: I looked at the mechanism, and found that a bearing hole in a metal plate that was supposed to be round had become oblong due to wear.
So I started looking around for a replacement. After some trepidation, I decided to opt for a ‘gaming’ chair: yes, I’m a gamer, but I’m not a tech-bro “Gamer”, so choosing one of the iconic clique-indicators of this tribe for my home seemed a bit wrong. Specifically I started looking at the products made by Secretlab, and specifically their Titan model.
