by ezs | Mar 15, 2020 | evilzenscientist
March 1 – 7
Most of this week I was in the office, running an architecture workshop in a closed conference room. Certainly no social distancing.
There was a slow build up of coronavirus news. March 2 – 18 cases locally, March 3 – 27 people locally tested positive. Most of these were centred on a care home in Kirkland. There were a couple of school closures based on early positive tests. Kirkland and Redmond saw a cluster of first responders with symptoms after responding to the care home.
March 2 also saw the Governer of Washington, Jay Inslee, declare a state of emergency.
From the afternoon of Friday 6th the decision was made to work from home; this was initially somewhat voluntary and quickly morphed into a mandated request to work from home and distance.
Continued shortages and panic buying – with long lines reported, and bare shelves for toilet paper, hand sanitiser, bleach and the like.
A local, Issaquah, nursing home had more residents test positive during the week. This is in addition to one reported last week (March 6).
The Seattle Times made all coronavirus news free and not paywalled. This will become a useful archive and reference for the realtime local news.
March 1
March 2
March 3
March 4
March 5
March 6
March 7
by ezs | Mar 14, 2020 | evilzenscientist
I’ve been monitoring the slow build of novel coronavirus (aka SARS-CoV-2, aka COVID-19) since the new year – and the spread from Wuhan, Hubei, PRC to the rest of the world.
Early cases in the greater Seattle area started appearing in late January 2020 – and from looking at the preparedness of the US it was clear that this could only take two courses – quickly fizzle out, or become a major public health emergency.
It took around a month from the first Washington state case to the first death on 29 February. Since then it’s been just two short weeks featuring public anxiety, panic buying and now state-wide school closures, working from home and public distancing.
The first major panic buying spree was around the start of March. Here are shelves in our local Target, Issaquah, WA with all shelves of toilet paper, hand wipes, sanitiser and bleach stripped bare.
Since the beginning of March many workplaces have taken measures to allow employees to work from home where possible. Microsoft and Amazon both announced immediate short term restrictions on 4 March 2020. My own employer, BECU, has also supported working from home where possible.
The remaining posts in this series will chronical the development and spread of COVID-19 over the coming weeks and months.
Especially useful data, modelling and visualisation have come via the Johns Hopkins University dashboard and other online resources. I’ll try and keep a running list.
Good resources:
http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/
by ezs | Dec 28, 2019 | evilzenscientist
Todays fun – installing old (2005 era!) software on a modern (2019) distro.
I’ve been playing LAN shooter games with the boy for a while; it’s old school EA Battlefield 2 from mid 2005. It’s ancient. Today we looked at setting up a dedicated LAN server for this one.
openSUSE Leap 15.1 continues to be solid on a wide variety of hardware. I rescued an old laptop and it’s installed and running as a server (runlevel 3 – no GUI). Only additional module needed for the EA dedicated server was libncurses5 – easily installed using zypper. (As an aside – it’s a pleasure seeing this working so well after the delights of ZMD/ZLM back in the day..)
Hunting down the original EA bits for the server is a pain – eventually managed to find a pristine (and checksummed!) copy on a fan server.
by ezs | Oct 25, 2019 | evilzenscientist
Zypper lost the repos for SLES 12 on Azure again. There is a good KB from SUSE on this. https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=7022311
by ezs | May 30, 2019 | evilzenscientist
After a couple of goes at this – I finally found time to get this working.
I found that good old scripting worked beautifully – kudos to Neil Pang for acme.sh – it’s a work of art.
Installation instructions are easy; there’s a great walkthrough for Apache2.
A little testing with CloudFlare (turning off their re-write and dynamic SSL support) – and it’s working a treat.
by ezs | May 20, 2019 | evilzenscientist
Finally got this all working across multiple servers, websites and vhosts.
by ezs | May 10, 2019 | evilzenscientist
Again the SLES team made this really easy – using zypper and the online update repositories. Less than 15 minutes per server – and a single reboot.
Documentation is at https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles-12/book_sle_deployment/data/sec_update_migr_zypper_onlinemigr.html
Accept the recommended upgrade – and read and accept the EULA – and you’re away. For me 240MB download, 156 packages, 10 minutes of install, one reboot.
zypper migration
Available migrations:
1 | SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4 x86_64
by ezs | Apr 28, 2019 | evilzenscientist
Another placeholder to keep notes and hints on Family Tree research.
There was a hint that a distant relative had been transported – good contemporary documentation for that fact; but nothing conclusive linking the father to children.
Eventually the route to solve this seems to have been through the wife/mother of children. Unfortunately the data isn’t very clean nor consistent.
- Transcription errors (and inconsistencies between FindMyPast and Ancestry) on names and birth locations
- Were they really married? No records of banns, church marriage or any civil records.
- Name changes as the enumerator takes names; and as general literacy improves during the 19th Century
- Inconsistent dates of birth – as folk want to seem older/younger/closer in age to their spouse
by ezs | Apr 20, 2019 | evilzenscientist
In preparation for hitting the trail – we decided to taste test several dehydrated and freeze dried offerings.
The boy isn’t too keen on oatmeal – and all of the lightweight hiking blogs talk about making your own oatmeal/granola mixes. Time for some other ideas.
I went off to REI and picked up a few ideas. We’ve been fans of the Mountain House camping meals for a while – they are quite salty though. More recently we tried a few of the Good-To-Go meals – which were pretty good.
This was also a great time to check out the camping stoves, teach the boy how to light them – and get the water boiling.
Here are the details. All prices are correct at the time of purchase.
Good-to-Go Oatmeal
https://www.rei.com/product/121301/good-to-go-oatmeal
https://goodto-go.com/products/oatmeal
$6.50
This was always going to be hit or miss. The reviews on REI are like Marmite – love it or hate it. Let’s see.
We followed the instructions to the letter. What resulted was a really strange gloop. The smell was kind-of-spicy, kind-of-porridge. The consistency was nutty. The taste was, in our opinion, quite vile. The vegetarian of the house however demolished a bowl after returning from a trail run.
Verdict:
3/10 for taste
2/10 for cost
We won’t be taking this on the trail. A real disappointment.
Backpacker’s Pantry Huevos Rancheros
https://www.rei.com/product/618926/backpackers-pantry-huevos-rancheros-egg-scramble-mix-2-servings
https://www.backpackerspantry.com/freeze-dried-food/breakfast/huevos-rancheros
$7.50
Ok – I did what quite a few others have done – and picked this up without reading the details. This is dried eggs; not freeze dried and dehydrated cooked eggs. It makes up about 300ml of egg/beans/cheese mix – that then needs cooking up in a pan. Not really backpacking food at all. That being said – it was good.
Following the instructions – this turned out really well. Could have done with a few minutes more to rehydrate the black beans – some were still a little crunchy. With some hot sauce this could be a real hit for car camping.
Verdict:
8/10 for taste
6/10 for cost
Not for the trail – but great for car camping.
Mountain House Scrambled Eggs with Bacon
https://www.rei.com/product/510120/mountain-house-scrambled-eggs-with-bacon-single-serving
https://www.mountainhouse.com/M/product/scrambled-eggs-bacon.html
$8.00
Reading the reviews and the instructions – there’s a “remove excess water” comment. Urg. Not what we want to be doing in bear country. Again – we followed instructions to the letter.
Very wet. Lots of excess water. Salty bacon too. Strange egg texture. As noted in the REI reviews – it’s unlike scrambled eggs and bacon. We would certainly try this with a tortilla and hot sauce. Concerned about the extra water though.
Verdict:
7/10 for taste
6/10 for cost
Mountain House Breakfast Skillet
https://www.rei.com/product/800872/mountain-house-breakfast-skillet-2-servings
https://www.mountainhouse.com/M/product/breakfast-skillet.html
$10.00
Pricier than the rest – but two huge servings. Hash browns, egg, sausage, pepper and onions.
This took a good while to rehydrate – but in the end was worth the wait. It looks a lot like beige gloop – but certainly textures and tastes were good. We think this would be great in a tortilla – and adding some hot sauce really lifted this one.
Verdict:
8/10 for taste
7/10 for cost
This was the best of the four.
by ezs | Apr 18, 2019 | evilzenscientist
I’ve been running a set of ASUS wifi routers for a few years – RT-AC66U and RT-AC68U – and using the custom firmware via AsusWRTMerlin https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca/about
The RT-AC66U has moved out of support – so no new firmware or security updates. The dilemma is what to do next?
Run old RT-AC66U units until they fail – i.e. do nothing.
Update old RT-AC66U units to RT-AC68Us and have a consistent set of routers – i.e. standardise on an older hardware platform.
Update all ASUS routers to something newer and current.
I’m tending toward the former right now – running IPsec, firewall and all of the other pieces seems to be pretty ok for now. In terms of attack surface and ease of access there are softer networks just next door. Not the best answer in my security head – but I’ll keep reviewing prices and hardware.
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