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.
If anyone other than me is subbed to the RSS feed, I’m tweaking a lot of things still as I learn Hugo and that is causing all the previous posts to get re-posted. Sorry about that.
I moved all of this to Hugo and self hosting yesterday from https://prose.sh. I love the idea of what https://pico.sh is doing. All driven through ssh/rsync, simple hosting of blogs and static pages, there is a lot to like about it. It does tick a lot of boxes for my inner geek. However….. There were two papercuts with prose.sh that grinded my gears. No subdirectories, so all files (posts & images) ended up in one directory.