Rubenerd

There’s a ton of tech I take for granted but barely discuss. Mosh has received all but one blog mention here, but I use it daily. I consider it mandatory for administering FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Linux servers in remote availability zones.

Mosh sessions are specifically designed for fault tolerance. Unlike SSH, if you drop a connection, Mosh will continue to keep the session alive for you to reattach. No more ah crap, did I run that session inside a screen?!

The side effect of this is you may encounter these when you re-connect to a server:

Mosh: You have 2 detached Mosh sessions on this 
server, with PIDs:
    - mosh [49443]
    - mosh [80599]

If you don’t need them, just kill their process. Too easy:

# kill 49443

This also unintentionally demonstrates FreeBSD PID randomisation; specifically increment randomisation. Linux doesn’t support them, for better or worse depending on who you speak to. I concede they’re no panacea, and random PIDs can introduce their own problems, but security is abouy layers. It’s good FreeBSD affords us the option.

Last Music Monday was the first ED from Gintama, one of my favourite songs from the all time great anime and manga series. So it seemed fitting to do the second one!

The music video was as delightful and fun as I hoped it’d be.

There are tons of guides online for creating jails, and an always excellent page in the handbook, but precious few instructions for deleting them.

Assuming you used ezjail with default settings, you can blow them all away with this:

# echo "WARNING, THIS WILL DELETE ALL OF THEM!"
# chflags -R noschg /usr/jails
# rm -rf /usr/jails

Then you can start over again; as opposed to just starting again, or starting over. I remember noschg by thinking of Benedict Reuschling :).

Wait, I don’t think I’ve ever posted about using jails here, or ezjail, or even iocage. Making a mental and physical note to correct this.

Oscar Lanzi answered a question I’d had for ages:

The usage in ionizing smoke detectors requires a radioactive isotope to work. In addition to a sufficient half-life to make a smoke detector with a suitable service life, Am-241 emits mostly alpha radiation (which is used for the ionizing mechanism) with relatively little of the more hazardous and useless gamma radiation.

He linked to Wikipedia, which states:

The radiation passes through an ionization chamber, an air-filled space between two electrodes, and permits a small, constant current between the electrodes. Any smoke that enters the chamber absorbs the alpha particles, which reduces the ionization and affects this current, triggering the alarm.

Today I learned. And while we’re here, here’s another article on Wikipedia, found by clicking random article:

Apiotoma tibiaformis is a species of sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Cochlespiridae.

Geshunteit. And let’s try another:

The radiation passes through an ionization chamber, an air-filled space between two electrodes, and permits a small, constant current between the electrodes. Any smoke that enters the chamber absorbs the alpha particles, which reduces the ionization and affects this current, triggering the alarm.

Wait a minute.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

01:24:30 – A unique look at the Disc Jockey with Rubenerd and Frank Edward Nora!! PQ Ribber is your host!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

Here are three more videos I watched this week.

The Verge on domesticated foxes. Beautiful creatures, and I admire and respect any attempt to save a threatened species. But I’m still a bit conflicted.

Mustard: This plane could even land itself; why did the L-1011 fail? Mustard is becoming another of my absolute favourite YouTube channels, his production values are stunning. Great to see my favourite widebody jetliner getting some love.

Classic Australian Commodore computer ad. Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you!

[Mustard: This plane could even land itself; why did the L-1011 fail?]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkFYD7R_Xig)

James Annan of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama placed a bet in 2005 with two climate skeptics. If temperatures fell by this year, he would pay solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev $10,000, and vica versa.

It’s now 2018, and those who live on Earth know what the result was. Though curiously, neither have been willing to pay out the bet. This isn’t surprising, but it’s still hilarious!

Climate skeptics talk big — boy do they talk big — but like those healthy popcorn machines or a clean new vacuum cleaner bag, all they have is hot air.

xkcd is nearly always fabulous, but this was the first in a long time that made me laugh out loud. I still remember slipping in high school chemistry class on soap we’d made, and the resulting bruises to my arse and dignity.

Valve announced a new version of Steam Play back in August, with a newer Proton engine and substantial work done to Wine:

… we’ve continued to look for ways to make more titles easily accessible to Linux users. … So, two years ago, we started an effort to improve the quality and performance of Windows compatibility solutions for Steam games.

As a result of this work, today we are releasing the Beta of a new and improved version of Steam Play to all Linux users! It includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles.

This was huge news. Games are about the last reason many of us begrugingly kept Windows around. So naturally, the first question that came to all of our minds: can it run Dovetail’s Train Simulator 2019? Short answer, yes!

Trying Train Simulator

Here we have everyone’s favourite steam locomotive in one of the many yards of Marias Pass. I can’t get enough of that LNER reflective apple green paint.

And the inside of a JNR 105 Series on the Wakayama-Sakurai Line:

Preparing the target machine

My testing setup is a fresh install of Ubuntu 18.10 on my budget gaming rig. If you also have an Nvidia card, grab the most recent drivers:

# add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers
# apt-get update
# apt-cache search nvidia-drivers
# apt-get install nvidia-driver-396

Then install Steam for Linux:

# apt-get install steam-installer

Starting this will bootstrap Steam. Once installed, you’ll need to enable Steam Play for all games:

1. Open Steam, and click the Steam menu.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Steam Play in the sidebar.
4. Confirm Enable Steam Play for supported titles is checked.
5. Under Advanced, check Enable Steam Play for all titles.

At the time of writing, the Compatibility tool could just be left at Proton 3.7-8, though it may be worth trying a new stable one if it exists from the dropdown.

Installing the game

Train Simulator 2019 almost works out of the box, though with some visual issues with bodies of water. The only roadblock is asset files need to be extracted, or the game will fail to load them.

Following Goliathfan’s excellent guide, you can extract as per below. My Steam install was in a slightly different place by default, so:

$ find ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/RailWorks/ \
    -name "*.ap" -execdir unzip '{}' ';'

I got a bunch of errors when first launching the game and trying a Quick Drive scenario. Quitting the game, running the above again, then starting again seemed to resolve it. Maybe the first launch fetched more assets.

I haven’t tried the 64-bit version yet.

There you have it

Now we just need this on FreeBSD, so I can pull out of Philadelphia on my Acela Express in style.

This is a test to see if I could type and sit at the MUJI Living Dining Table, unit 4549738727811; gesundheit. It’s low, without much clearance for my legs, but coupled with these low chairs it feels nice.

It’s relaxing somehow, like a squishy, warm weather kotatsu with back support.