Rubenerd

I was searching for a NetBSD-specific package, but somehow ended up on an entirely unrelated page for the Cayenne Convection Oven, Half Size:

Vollrath Convection Ovens offer the perfect opportunity for operations to break into the fresh-baked market or expand existing menus. Ideally suited for dough products, pastries, and cakes- use with pre-made frozen products to achieve fresh-baked sales with high speed and minimal fuss.

The manufacturer is quick to warn though:

Due to the unique efficiency of Convection Ovens, traditional recipe times and/or temperatures must be adjusted to achieve the best results. When considering a traditional oven recipe, you should generally either lower the temperature by about 25° F, or lower the baking time by approximately 25%.

I’m not sure what 25° furlongs are in metres, but I’m sure it runs on a single tank of kerosene. Here’s a picture with some of the aforementioned baked goods; it looks delightful.

Everyone’s favourite programming language is now at stable release version 5.28.2. From the perldelta:

Perl 5.28.2 represents approximately 4 months of development since Perl 5.28.1 and contains approximately 2,500 lines of changes across 75 files from 13 authors.

Perl continues to flourish into its fourth decade thanks to a vibrant community of users and developers. The following people are known to have contributed the improvements that became Perl 5.28.2: Aaron Crane, Abigail, Andy Dougherty, David Mitchell, Karen Etheridge, Karl Williamson, Leon Timmermans, Nicolas R., Sawyer X, Steve Hay, Tina Müller, Tony Cook, Zak B. Elep.

A fix for the semi-notorious GDBM test failures didn’t make it, but presumably it’ll be in for 5.28.3. I wasn’t personally bitten by it, but saw enough people mention on newsgroups and Twitter.

The indelible mat@ has updated Perl in FreeBSD ports, and it’s ready for brewing elsewhere. I’ll consider this my secular Easter::present :).

Wadarco is rapidly becoming one of Clara’s and my all time favourite artists. I know her best for her Fate/Extra and Fate/Grand Order illustrations, but she’s also drawn characters for Chain Chronicle, a game of which I just learned.

She recently contributed some coloured pencil art to Fate/Grand Order Chaldea Ace Volume 2 which was adorable. Here’s Mashu as a Sailor Moon-esque magical girl:

And the second page with Attila and Ereshkigal. Technically the first, but as cute and silly as it may be, they can’t come before Mashu.

Wadarco’s official site is here, and she’s also on Pixiv.

Matt Burgess reported last week for Wired that Adidas is testing a new shoe manufactured from a single synthetic material, instead of the dozen found in their typical sneakers. This is the press image showing the different components:

By limiting themselves to one material, it means:

1. They can be crushed and easily recycled without needing to pull them apart.

2. It could enable a subscription service, where people like me who don’t care enough about fashion can send back worn shoes and get replacements.

3. Because they can’t use bleach, the shoe is an off-white. I love earthy and neutral colours now, so I think it looks rather nice.

I still have questions about the supply chain, including the treatment of people making these shoes, and where the raw material for the shoes comes from. I also appreciate there’s a financial disensentive to doing so, but I’d be even more impressed if these shoes were somehow more resilient, and required fewer replacements in the first place. I was going to end saying this is a step in the right direction though, but that’s bad even by my standards.

I don’t care that much for fashion, as mentioned in point two. But my hope is this is part of a wider industry trend towards more sustainable clothing. Australia has learned how wasteful the cotton industry is first hand, for example.

The world’s greatest search engine isn’t just great for privacy, it has a ton of hidden, fun features. !Bang shortcuts are how I basically get everywhere online now.

Here are some more I learned of today:

• Search json prettify, and you get a JSON Beautifier and Validator. You can even choose your indentation spacing.

• Search colour picker, and you get what it says. You can choose analogous, triadic, and tetradic.

Here’s some beautified, validated JSON with a random triad colour scheme:

{
    "colour0": "7bfcb5",
    "colour1": "b57bfc",
    "colour2": "fcb57b"
}

I had reason to disable SELinux on a VM. On CentOS and RHEL you can do temporarily with:

$ sudo setenforce 0

To set permanently, change this flag in the following file:

$ sed 's/SELINIX=enforcing/SELINUX=disabled/' \
    /etc/selinux/config

Filing here because I always forget.

Dropbox recently announced that free accounts would be limited to three devices. That includes a laptop, desktop, and my personal phone… but there are other ones I want to add. I only ever needed the free tier, so it’s time to look elsewhere.

To be clear, it’s an inconvenience, but I’m not angry with Dropbox for this change. They owed me little as a free user, and it finally gave me the impetus to research alternatives. Encrypted sparsebundles were also a hack.

My wishlist

• A simple file-sync service that handles merge conflicts and deletions nicely. I’d lean towards a centralised source of truth somewhere, but I wouldn’t be adverse to a P2P approach.

• Self-hosted, either on my home bhyve, or an OrionVM FreeBSD instance. If I’m putting the effort into moving services, I may as well go all the way rather than substituting with another hosted service that could will change. It also means I can have data encrypted at rest without ugly containers.

• Integration with a good iOS text editor like 1Writer, and presents a generic enough share for something like nvALT on the desktop.

• A FreeBSD binary, or source available. And while I’m at it, native macOS and a .deb for my lone Debian box. Qt is fine :).

• Easily shareable, for stuff Clara and I work on together.

Options I’m considering

• NextCloud on a ZFS jail or on my bhyve box at home. My experience with the original ownCloud was mixed, but I’ve been told by people who’d know that it’s much improved.

• Rsync superficially looks like the easiest option, but I can see where it could get messy quickly with lots of different machines.

• Syncthing looks like the nicest distributed option.

• Resilio Sync (né Bittorrent Sync) has positive reviews, but I may as well use Syncthing if going down this route.

Let me know if you have any suggestions.

I’ve always heard my American friends and TV shows namedrop Chef Boyardee, but I had no idea who he was. I heard him on Good Mythical Morning and decided enough was enough, so I decided to find out who this gentleman was.

He was a chef, but now his name graces canned foods. Above is his cheese ravioli in tomato and meat sauce, along with what I assume is a stylised image of the late gentleman himself.

An earlier version of this post referenced `.config` in the title, but `.conf` elsewhere in the post. The latter is correct, apologies for any confusion.

I try my hardest to avoid clickbait titles, and my summaries that appear on Twitter tend to have the most pertinent part of the post spelled out. Today’s is no exception; you could legitimately take the title of this post and be done with it. Even this introductory paragraph is entirely pointless.

devd(8) is FreeBSD’s elegant and fairly straight-forward system to respond to hardware changes with pre-defined events; the manpage(5) lists some helpful examples. The config resides below, with the usual conventions of ports and personal scripts appearing in the latter:

• devd.conf
• /etc/devd/*.conf
• /usr/local/etc/devd/*.conf

Seems simple enough. And yet, there I was late last night hitting my head on the desk because my shiny new test config files weren’t being executed when hardware was live-attached or detached from my running OrionVM instances. I was triple-checking my devd syntax, digging into the documentation and newsgroup postings for when it was first developed. But as with so many problems of this nature, the solutions were nested but trivial:

• Config files need to have the .conf extension to be parsed, as my list shows above. My otherwise well-formed config files weren’t, so they were being ignored. I know how they felt.

• Once you’ve added or changed a rule, you need to service devd restart or service devfs restart for them to be loaded, depending on what you’re working on.

So if you find yourself troubleshooting these issues late at light, give these a try. Late at light? Late at night? Whichever. You may be surprised, and subsequently perform an embarrassingly nerdy dance before heading to bed.

I was wondering why Hugo could generate on my FreeBSD cloud VM, but not locally. I ran a plain hugo command:

$ hugo
==> Error: Cannot walk regular file

Could this just be it? If so, it’s one of the most routine mistakes one can make on a *nix system.

Earlier in the week I’d created a symlink to the layouts directory of my current theme, to save some typing.

$ ln -s ./themes/rubenerd-rubi/layouts ./layouts

Even though Hugo’s config.yaml was specifically set to use that theme, it still attempted to load that folder as well. I’ve since learned this is expected, and in fact desired behavior: you may want to override a theme with a local site file.

(Yes, I use YAML. I couldn’t grok TOML).

So lesson learned, don’t try and get clever.