I’ve paused my experiment with FreeBSD. It’s good (some parts really good) but I got caught on a number of barbs such as power management and serial ports. I could have nerded harder, but there are other things I need to do. It did confirm my dislike of the shitshow that is software application management under Ubuntu and it’s derivatives, and it introduced me to ’naked’ Gnome which I actually quite liked.
Following on from yesterdays post I have fought and won with my printer (by cheating). It’s a Brother HL-L8260CDW, a network capable dual sided laser printer, and I had it working with Linux and OSX using CUPS. How hard could it be?…. @vermaden gave a very detailed answer to my plea on Mastodon. Ultimately not the solution, but a heap of info to point me in the right direction. I learnt how to mount OSX disk images for starters.
I used to run FreeBSD back around the time of version 5.x. The problem was I also ran at the time Mandrake/Mandriva Gentoo Windows 2000 IPCop firewall QMail Each of those had their own PC on 24/7 and the heat and noise got to me. I had bought my 2 week old daughter a PowerBook laptop1 and I was impressed by the BSDness of OSX 10.3 so I resolved to ditch all my noisy PCs and cut down to one or two Macs.
This was the original brake pedal fitted to the car. The more I studied it, the scarier it got. Apart from the poorly set up balance bar, it wasn’t fitted securely to the car. The bracket it pivoted on was held on by two bolts through the floor which was a steel sheet approx 1-1.6mm thick. The bolts were located side by side so there was effectively no leverage advantage to reduce the load on the floor.
More About The History Of The Stupid Car I tinker. I can’t help it, it’s almost a compulsion. I didn’t tinker with the Elise as it was too expensive to cock up. A kit car on the otherhand was ripe for meddling with. Having bought it second hand, I kew it already worked (for some value of working) so there was a degree of ‘compare and contrast’ with each thing I did.
I’d always fancied owning a Jaaaag. I was getting older, I was now a manager, my Mazda6 daily was about to expire expensively and so I wandered over to Autotrader…. There I found a 6 year old black XF with a 5 litre V8 going for £20k. It called to me. With the Stupid Car and my wife’s Kia Picanto it would bring the average number of cyliners per car in the family to 6.
In chasing down the issues with my car, I want to plumb in a fuel pressure sensor. The easy way to do this is to add a 10mm brass tee piece in the hose that goes to the engine from the fuel pump, so off to Amazon I go and buy a couple for less than £6. I get it all plumbed in and boot the car so that the system pressurises.
As soon as you put a machine on the internet, people will start poking it for weaknesses. This is mainly done by people running scripts they got from elsewhere. It’s the equivalent of walking down a row of parked cars and trying the handles to see if any are unlocked. Most servers will just respond with a 404 Not Found error and on they walk to the next server. However, I thought I’d amuse myself with this
I have a menagerie of tech at home. Connectivity ISP Andrews & Arnold, who else? Not the cheapest, but a very high quality service. I have an embarrassing number of routable IPv4 addresses. Heracles The router. A GL-iNet Brume running a self built flavour of OpenWRT. My Wireguard endpoint for any VPN shenanigans. It got it’s name as it replaced my previous router that was called Cerberus. Gru, Bob, Dave, Kevin, Stuart A collection of GL-iNet Velica They were on offer on Amazon (I think £60 a pair) so I put OpenWRT on them and set up a mesh WiFi for the house.
As so many of my posts will be about my car, I thought I’d better write something about it. It is a Fisher Fury kit car, with a 4.3L V8 engine. Background I used to have a Lotus Elise which was a lot of fun (even though I crashed it due to running out of talent). However I found it frustrating to own. Although I’m a software engineer, I find software unsatisfying as it’s ephemeral.