I've spend a lot of time the last two weeks doing some major updates to the infrastructure and backend of this site. The site is no longer hosted using virualmin, but running in docker. It required me to spin up a few supporting services like Coredns and a registry. I am working on setting up some custom container orchestration. My goal is to phase out all my virualmin instances and migrate everything to docker with a custom management panel.
More than 13 years ago I hosted a teamspeak3 server for a group of friends that I used to play Eve Online with. And although I myself had moved on from the group, I continued to host the server. My intention was to keep hosting it as long as people kept using it. They used it pretty much every day. I would drop in every now and then to make sure things still worked. It was an extremely out of date version of team speak that you had to ignore updates to the client in-order to keep accessing it. Years ago I had asked if they wanted me to update it, but told them it was possible that we could loose some data since it was so old. They had declined; stating that it was nice to keep it locked behind a particular version.
Today I logged in to check in on things. I found the server deserted, and a message pointing people to a new ts3 server. It looked like they had changed server sometime at the end of 2022. I checked out the new server, and sure enough, they where still there.
For me it's a little bitter sweet. Lots of great memories. Its great to see the same group of people getting together to play games, more than a decade later.
Just in-case anyone is still looking for the Void Teamspeak server and finds this blog post. The server used to be at knightzero.ws:9988 (72.14.184.125:9988) from 2010-09-10 to 2023-10-06. The new server is void.teamspeak3.com.
I am selling my car and ran into an interesting craigslist scam. Someone will contact you pretending to be a potential buyer. They will ask a few questions and then ask to setup a time to see the vehicle. After you agree on the time they will then ask you to send them a vehicle history report via text or email. I have seen this scam twice and both times it was a different report from a different site. The first time it was from "VehicleFactschecker.com" and second was from "revealhistoryinfo.com". The reports seem to cost a small amount of money. Presumably if you buy and send them the report they will ghost you. But if you tell them no, they then try and argue that you are selling the vehicle for thousands of dollars and they just want to be transparent.
Its a clever scam. It preys on the fact people want to sell their used vehicle quickly and for a good price. Its for a small amount and is easy to write off as someone who decided to not buy in the end. I wonder how many people fall for this scam yearly.
I went down the checked on the boat two weeks ago. The drive down 395 is spectacular. By far my favorite stretch of road. It hugs the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains and has some of the most majestic and rugged views. I took a small detour and drove the June lake loop. It was phenomenal and recommend it if you are ever down that way. Next camping trip will be in that area.
The boat had no issues from Hurricane Hilary. Talking to my neighbor at the marina the storm was mild and lost a lot of power coming in over Baja. The rear cockpit was full of rain water. I need to flush the drain lines next time I have the boat out of the water.
I reinstalled the diesel return line from the injectors in the fuel system. Bled the fuel system. The engine still wasn't starting. My neighbor came over and helped me with troubleshooting the issue. It was interesting seeing the parallels between diesel engine troubleshooting and debugging software.
The diesel engine in Suddenly is very simple. Based on an Isuzu DL201. Manufactured in the 1960s by Starrlet; A company out of Tampa FL, which closed down in the 1980s. Parts are difficult to find. We figured out that the issue was with cylinder number 4's glow plug. Unfortunately it failed in such a way that it shorted directly to the engine block. So the wire that runs from the cockpit control panel to the glow plugs also needs to be replaced. Now I need to find a replacement glow plug, which is proving to be difficult.
The plug has some markings on it: JKC, 5G, 10.5v. So far no luck in finding a match based off that. I will likely replace all 4 once I find a proper replacement.
With summer coming to a close; I finally have more time on my hands, and getting motivated to work on this site more. It's been a pretty busy few months.
Jess moved in; which was a bit of a process. Since her lease was ending soon; we took our time moving starting in June and wrapping up in August. It wasn't too bad as far as moves go. I hired some people off of taskrabbit to help and it went pretty smooth.
Went down to Morro Bay for my cousin's wedding at the begging of August. It was a fun trip. Drove with my mom and had to make a pit stop in Santa Cruz to pickup my grandmother. The ceremony was great. They had it in a small wedding chapel in the back court yard of a small book store. It was great seeing and catching up with family.
Hurricane Hilary hit southern California. Which meant I had to drive down and do some hurricane prep for my boat Suddenly. It was a quick trip. I drove down Friday-Saturday; did the prep work; drove back Saturday-Sunday. I haven't been back since, so not 100% sure how well the boat weathered the storm, but in this case no news is good news. I am planning on heading back down this weekend for a week.
I bought a car. A 2023 Ford Escape hybrid. I ordered it back in November 2022, and arrived mid August. It took forever to arrive. Ordering it from Ford is the way to go if you can wait. The process was simple and didn't need to deal with pushy sales people, dealer markups or haggling. Now I need to sell my Dodge Journey.
I've started walking a lot more. I am trying to walk at least 3-5 miles a day. Hoping to get into a good cadence and keep it up.
For work I've been working on Nginx caching, Rails stability tuning, and Nextjs performance tuning. It has been an interesting experience dealing with Nginx cache at scale. Also leaning into Bash more. I used to write it off in favor of Python, but lately seeing the value and power of Bash scripts.
That's all for now.
One of my goals for 2023 is to be more organization in both work and life. To achieve that goal I have adopted a daily notes system. It's adapted from a blog post by Chris Krycho that I found on hacker news. It uses Obsidian a powerful notes and organization tool. Along with Obsidian I am using the Periodic Notes and the Templater plugins. Periodic Notes makes it easy to create new daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes based off predefined templates. Templater makes it easy to create new meeting or project notes based off predefined templates.
Everything gets summarized and filtered up to the next level making it easy to track outcomes. In addition to the daily note I am using taskwarrior and timewarrior for a more traditional to TO-DO and time tracking. Taskwarrior is a free and open source command line TO-DO list. I use taskwarrior-tui which is a fantastic Terminal User Interface for taskwarrior. Timewarrior is a free and open source command line tool for tracking time. Timewarrior has hooks for taskwarrior which means any time I start or stop a task in taskwarrior it automaticaly creates time entries. I can run reports to see where I am spending my time. I am enjoying the morning routine of setting up my work day.
I've added new tag listing pages along with single post pages. I have also decided to keep things staticly generated for right now.
2022 was an interesting year, but like most people I am glad it's over. I did a lot of driving, more than usual. I stayed on my boat a bit which was great. Got into a car accident (that wasn't fun), and also had my fuel tank drilled out and gas stolen. Not a great year for my car. Got some boat projects done. Watched a lot of great sunsets.
I have a few goals for 2023 that I will be writing about in more detail in the coming months. Some of the highlights are better organization in both work and life, weight loss, switching to Linux on my desktop. In the short term I need to find an apartment, and waiting on a new fuel tank.
I said I was going to blog more, then I didn't. But I've finally found a little bit of time to do some work on this site. I added published dates, tags, and split the minimal styles into SCSS modules. Next I am going to make everything database driven and split posts out into their own pages. I will need to spin up a REST API for the Next.js front-end to consume. The REST API will come from Laravel. I need to figure out how to host a Node App on my existing infrastructure. Right now everything is statically deployed.
That is kinda it for now.
I'm back! I've decided to give blogging another go. As such I am going to be making a new personal web site. The new site is going to use NextJS for the frontend and Laravel for the backend. I am using NextJS at work and it seems like a good fit. I am still deciding on what aesthetic the site will be using. Right now I am leaning towards doing something fun and base it off a Fantasy User Interface. FUIs are the often flashy user interfaces you see in movies and TV shows. To start with though this post is going to be markdown file, and I am going to build from there. I've already created an archive of the old posts. I plan on importing them to the new site once things are a little more put together.