The “fediverse” is the term for the federated social web, a collection of social media concepts (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Friendica, Bookwyrm, etc.) that can all talk to each other by virtue of a common protocol: ActivityPub. The technical details don’t matter. What matters is that, in the fediverse, everyone can […]
Computing
75 posts
Will a 2019 Intel-based iMac (without the T2 security chip) happily run GNU/Linux? This was the question I set out to answer when we recently retired the first Mac we ever bought for our house. The answer is YES. But the details matter. Background: Forced Obsolescence of Good Hardware For-profit […]
The adventures continue! I run a number of computers at home, almost entirely GNU/Linux-based. As the hardware continues to age, data integrity had become more and more of a concern. I am particularly worried about sudden disk failures, and with a combination of ddrescue and timeshift I have been setting […]
Many months ago, I wrote about my experiences in cloning a system from a failing disk to a fresh disk. This process repeated itself this weekend. This time was a little different. Previously, the cloned disk used the old style “master boot record” (MBR) or “gnu partition table” (GPT) method […]
Updated on September 16, 2025: A reader noted I referred to 192.168.1.50 at one point as the “Web Server”, but this was a typo. I should have said “Media Server”. I have made edits to clarify example IP addresses where the main web server and where the media server are […]
I own a number of internet domains, including most notably cooleysekula.net (this one), polari.us (where some social media stuff is run), and astrohep.org (hosting some services for astrophysics and high-energy physics research). Since these are all hosted on servers I own and run out of my house, and since we […]
UPDATES: Last week, I started seeing the emails from my server: the disk hardware early failure detection system, known as SMART, was beginning to spot errors on a disk in the server that powers this domain (and a few others). I sort of plan for disk failures, but I hate […]
Like many institutions, I’m using a video conferencing client whose name rhymes with “Vroom” in order to conduct classes. Things were going great for the first 2 weeks. Last Friday, things took a serious turn. It all started with a long-standing problem on my home desktop machine. I run Ubuntu […]
I have really thrown myself into physics, since I am stuck at home (a) because there is a pandemic and (b) because SMU won’t let me on campus until tomorrow (because I was abroad when they ended work-related international travel 2 weeks ago). This has been a grand opportunity. Here […]
Thanks to a visit from an old friend (now Prof. Katherine Rawlins at the University of Alaska in Anchorage), we discovered the existence of and visited the National Video game Museum (NVM) last weekend. It was awesome. It was a tour of the computers and games of my youth; a […]
I love podcasts. I don’t get to listen to all the ones I like all of the time, but I love knowing that interesting content – from polished news programs to amateur computing tips – are there at my command when I do have time. However, a trend has grown […]
Phase one of the home server upgrade, taking its operating system from Ubuntu 14.04 -> 16.04, was a fairly long process. In the wake of that upgrade I was left with a non-working MediaGoblin instance. Today, I took the next step: 16.04 -> 18.04. This went substantially better.