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 […]
Computing
72 posts
Mastodon has been around for a while, but garnered interest recently in the wake of Twitter’s leadership-driven meltdown. I tried setting up a Mastodon instance over a year ago but abandoned the effort due to time pressure. My interest in spinning up an instance was rekindled by recent events coupled […]
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 […]
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.
I’ve been putting it off for over a year: our home server is running an old Ubuntu Linux installation, and needs to be upgraded. Research and teaching and life intervened, and this upgrade fell farther and farther down the list. In the meantime, Ubuntu produced two stable releases… making the […]
Inspired by the creation of the pump.io open, federated social protocol in 2013 [1] and the need to bridge posts between a diversity of social networks (Pump.io, GNU Social [2], Diaspora [3], Twitter, and Facebook), I recently released an alpha version of a social network bridge, named NavierStokes. An homage […]
Data ownership is a serious issue on the internet, especially given the revelations that spy agencies like the NSA have been sneaking into back doors in companies like Google and collecting massive amounts of our personal metadata. While the courts and other US public institutions wrestle with the difficult constitutional […]