Jan 14, 2019A friendly introduction to the Fediverse.If you’ve been kicking around on the Net for the past year or so, you’ve probably come across a thinkpiece or two about Mastodon, an open source social network that’s kind of like Twitter, kind of like Facebook, and kind of like… well, nobody’s really sure what else would fit…Crosspost11 min readCrosspost11 min read
Jan 10, 2019Neologism: Principle of definitional equivalenceprinciple of definitional equivalence — noun phrase — Often shortened to the ≡ symbol. A polite way of saying “Because fuck you, that’s why.” See also judgemental equality, homotopy type theory.Crosspost1 min readCrosspost1 min read
Jan 7, 2019The Doctor’s favorite podcasts of 2018.ev.I know this is kind of late, but I thought I’d put together a list of the podcasts I enjoyed listening to in 2018.ev, in the hope of introducing folks to the work of some really talented people: Weird Things Roleplaying Public Radio’s Actual Plays The Neo-Anarchist Podcast, an in-character ongoing series set in the world of Shadowrun. On Her Majesty’s Secret Podcast. More about James Bond than you thought it was possible to know.Crosspost1 min readCrosspost1 min read
Dec 31, 2018Systembot: Adventures in system monitoring.If you’ve been following the development activity of Systembot, the bot I wrote to monitor my machines (physical as well as virtual) you’ve probably noticed that I changed a number of things around pretty suddenly. This is because the version of Systembot in question had some pretty incorrect assumptions about…Crosspost4 min readCrosspost4 min read
Dec 22, 2018Yuletide .plan file update.I’ve updated my .plan file yet again. The usual warnings apply.Crosspost1 min readCrosspost1 min read
Dec 11, 2018Neologism: Q-holeQ-hole — noun — A Nyquil hangover.Crosspost1 min readCrosspost1 min read
Dec 4, 2018Ansible: Reboot the server and pick up where it left off.Here’s the situation: You’re using Ansible to configure a machine on your network, like a new Raspberry Pi. Ansible has done a bunch of things to the machine and needs to reboot it — for example, when you grow a Raspbian disk image so that it takes up the entire…Crosspost1 min readCrosspost1 min read
Dec 3, 2018VLC crashes when trying to play stuff over the network from Kodi.This took me a while to figure out, so here’s a fix for an annoying problem: Let’s say that you have a media box running Kodi on your local area network. You have uPNP turned on so you can stream videos from your media box across your LAN. You want to use VLC to watch stuff across your LAN. Problem: When you select your Kodi box in VLC and double-click on the server to open the directory of media to watch, VLC crashes with no error message (even in debug mode).Crosspost1 min readCrosspost1 min read
