Sabriena’s had back problems for quite a while, but last year some time she ended up with one that stopped her from running. It remains to be seen whether it’s permanent or just for an extended time, but in the mean time she was going crazy from not being able to “get out there”, and she decided to dip her toes in cycling.
Because she’s as cheap as I am (we often joke that wire was invented by our ancestors fighting over a copper coin), she just bought a cheap mountain bike from K-mart. I did what I could with adjusting it out of the box (it came terribly poorly set-up), but in the end we opted to take it to the local bike shop and have them tune it up. It cost around $40AUD, and was well worth it, she’s super happy, it’s a completely different bike, and she’s gone on several long rides since.
I went with her on one short one, even though we’ve got very different goals, but one thing is clear: a 20" BMX with modern gearing (I think I have 16t9t?) is not suitable for keeping up with someone on a mountain or gravel bike. But it was going to take me some mental preparation for me to get on a K-mart bike, though I definitely wasn’t ready to spend the money on a decent one either, particularly as I didn’t know if I’d like it.
Fortunately, someone listed a Mongoose Fireball on Facebook for a price that was cheap. Suspiciously cheap, like might-be-stolen cheap. So I arranged to go look at it, checked out it wasn’t stolen (in retrospect, not well enough, I used what I thought was an official site, but Victoria has no official site, the one I used is commercial and thus non-conclusive). It was in pretty miserable shape, which downgraded the quality of the deal from “might be stolen” to “okay it’s cheap but this isn’t the final price, it’ll need some parts”.
After buying it and realizing my mistake with the anti-theft site, I held my nose and entered the local police station and had them run the serial number for me too. Confirmed it wasn’t stolen a couple days later, all good.
The damage? It 100% needed a new back tyre, and I had concerns about the chain too (not sure if it was left outside or just never oiled ever). It might want a new rear rim, or maybe the bike shop can true it and fix the noises the spokes are making. Anyway, I bought some cheap new tyres for it, some tubes, a new chain, and a chain breaker to do the swap. Some adjustment on the brakes (I am completely new to disc brakes but I did an okay job) and I’m away.
So far I’m okay with it. I haven’t ridden it enough due to my chronic unfitness, but I’ll get there.
Meta update: I need to change the “BMX” tag to “cycling” or something.
Waaay back in the day, a kickstarter was announced for Elite Dangerous, a spiritual/actual successor to the “Elite” series of computer games, the first of which was a substantial rabbit hole I fell down as a kid (I distinctly remember dying a lot, and I think I was saved frequently by cheese-saves via our Action Replay cartridge). We were much too poor at the time for me to back it, and I promptly forgot about it.
I bought it on sale some time ago, and never played it, and I eventually rolled around into trying it a couple months back. Playing it is probably not the right term, it became my personality for a couple of months. It’s not entirely unlikely that I am thinking about the game while you’re reading this.
I’ve progressed reasonably quickly in terms of content (though definitely not skill), and I decided that using an Xbox One controller was probably holding me back. Yeah, I’m sure that’s it. I remembered seeing people advertising HOTASes (“hands-on throttle and stick”) around, and I originally wanted a flight yoke for MS Flight Sim. I could unfortunately find neither on Facebook or Gumtree local to me for a reasonable price, so I started researching what a new one would look like.
After a lot of research, coinciding with a swelling of my fun-budget, I decided upon the “Gladiator” from VKBsim. They’re pretty nice, eminently hackable (they literally provide YouTube videos showing various customizations you can do, they come with several parts to change things out, and people 3D print or otherwise fabricate addons for them all the time), though they are a bit steep. To the point where I did the numbers and I couldn’t afford a set of rudder pedals at the time, though now I wish I could as I really dislike Z-axis on joysticks still. Seriously, it’s been 25 years or thereabouts since I tried the original Microsoft Sidewinder and I still fucking hate the idea! Oh well, Christmas is coming, and I’ve been pretty good.
Anyway, they arrived last week I think, or maybe the week before, it’s been a bit of a blur between this and work. I’m still experimenting with a control scheme, and the ali-express-tier mounts I bought to go with them need some more fabrication work to improve things, but they’re pretty dang great. I bought the “enhanced” stick for the right one, and an “omni throttle” for the left one, which is really just the enhanced stick with an angled grip as far as I can tell.
I love ’em, for zooming around an asteroid field blowing up pirates, the feeling is excellent.
Complaints?
- The knob on the upper POV hat sucks arse, it’s really rough on the thumb, and I use it for navigating the menus. People 3D print replacements, including ones that are supposed to look like those on an F-15/F-18, so I’ll probably buy some of those.
- The throttle knob (I don’t use it as a throttle, I tried to use it for sensor distance but threw that away for the encoder wheel instead) seems really bad. This might just need calibration, but 50% of the knob is not 50%. I have to hook it up to my Windows laptop and run their software (it won’t run through WINE/Proton, or it’ll run but will never find the device) and see if calibration fixes it.
- The 8-way POV analog stick’s sensitivity is also kinda bad, but again calibration may fix that.
- There’s a couple small sharp bits, and my autistic fingers instinctively go looking for them. A nail file to round them off fixes it. This is probably more an issue with me than the sticks.
That’s it, definitely way more good than bad, if you can afford a set, I would 100% recommend them at this stage.
Update: 2024-10-13: I mentioned earlier that I wished I could afford the rudder pedals at the same time. In retrospect, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise! Yakking with some folks on the Anti-Xeno Initiative discord, they mentioned how rudder pedals are basically the last thing you want for E:D, because basically for a regular flight sim the yaw is not super important, you make small adjustments to it at certain times but that’s it… but for E:D in combat, you use yaw a lot, and using rudder pedals is tantamount to playing Xbox with your feet.
I wasn’t necessarily convinced, but then I realized that I basically tried “twist for Z axis” on the original Microsoft Sidewinder in like 1999, or 2000, or somewhere thereabouts, decided I hated it, and have hated it ever since. So I resolved to give it another go - I took the screws locking the Z-axis out, calibrated it, and set it up. This let me put the lateral thrust on the X axis of the throttle instead, and now that I’m used it it it’s actually substantially better, and hasn’t caused my any RSI.
So I might still look at getting rudder pedals in case I want to play something else, but for E:D it doesn’t seem like they’re required. Now what to do with the Z axis on the throttle? 🤔
I’ve made no secret of the fact that over the last ten years or so, I’ve grown to hate lawns. The very idea of them (this is a stretch of land I’m rich enough to not need for anything productive), the absolute ecological disaster of a monoculture, I hit all the main talking points and don’t interrogate any of them.
The only reason we have grass in the back yard is to give the dog something to run on, and in my view that is productive. See? I’m not a hipocrite!
Anyway, the front yard didn’t have a lawn. It had white gravel (Granite? Quartz? No idea). When we moved in, I liked this… it seemed like less work. That, in retrospect, was an absolute load of dogs bollocks - it is significantly more work to keep it tidy than simply mowing it would be.
The only thing I hate more than weeding is using things like Glysophate, but we even tried that too. It never failed, you take your eyes off it for a couple of weeks and you’ve got a lovely crop of weeds that’ll take a couple of hours to pull.
Anyway, Sabriena got sick of this too, and put forth the idea of “this would be easier if it was just grass”. Fucken oath it would, it’d take me longer to get the mower out the gate than it would to mow that tiny patch of grass. Let’s do it.
So I priced out having a dump truck of the local loam delivered and it was cheap enough where I decided it was happening. I reasoned that we’d live with the weeds through winter, then at the very end right before spring gets here we’d rip all the rocks out, get a truckload of soil, spread some seed, and see what happens. Honestly, even if it’s full of weeds and multiple breeds of grasses and other shit, I’ll just run the lawn mower over it and at least it won’t look terrible.
So end of September rolls around, and I get cracking… for about two hours. Reader, I hack on computers for a living, and when I’m done at work I don’t even move from my desk before playing more video games. I walk the dog daily, but that’s about as strenuous as it gets. I was not cut out for digging up all those rocks.
One of the couples in the neighbourhood was walking by and graciously offered me an excuse to stop by talking, and in the process the guy said “why don’t you just call up the local earthmoving mob, it won’t be that expensive”. I figured it was probably more than I could afford and he insisted, it’ll take them two hours in a bobcat, it’ll definitely be cheaper than you’re thinking if you’re out here doing it by hand.
On the Monday morning I did, and someone came out in about 45 minutes to quote on it (how’s that for service), and yeah… by the time you factor in the cost of a load of dirt, carting away the rocks, carting away the cement wall, renting a bobcat, the fact that I don’t know how to drive a bobcat (I could learn, but I wouldn’t be doing the job in two hours), the price was cheap enough that I’d be silly not to.
Anyway, today they surprised us - they had an opening, and since I said I work from home they just turned up. No problem, I’m just surprised to see ya’ll! And they got it done, almost entirely without drama.
The one issue? For some reason, there’s a storm water drain that crosses our yard. It makes no sense why it’d be there, there are two outlets in the gutters, one for each side of the house. I verified with a hose they go where I expect them to. But for some reason, there’s this pipe which joins the two in a sort of “H” configuration, possibly for redundancy? No idea why.
Anyway, no fault of the guy doing the earth-moving, just bad luck: when they put the cement wall in, they wanted it to stay put. It’s a dividing wall, doesn’t protrude above ground level, it’s about a 100mm wide strip of cement, no biggie right? Until I realized how tremendously unfit I was, I had illusions of taking it out with a sledgehammer.
No, this fucker was 300mm deep, with re-bar and everything. It didn’t enclose the pipe, but it was close enough that moving the cement smashed the pipe up. Honestly, I’d have smashed it with the crowbar when the sledgehammer didn’t work.
So at the time of writing, we have a nice flat dirt area with seed on it, a small pile of dirt, and a rather large ditch while I wait for a plumber to come and fix it.
But it’ll be a lawn one day, and it’ll be 10 minutes a month of maintenance instead of several hours.
Update: 2024-09-16: We finally got a plumber out (I can’t legally fix a stormwater pipe in Australia, which arguably makes sense, but is still irritating with how long it took to find a plumber able and willing to do what amounts to less than an hour’s labour where the hole’s already dug), and I’ve covered up and seeded that area too. So we have a large, flat, weed-ridden patch of sand for a front yard now, but it’ll be a lawn one day.
Way back at the start of last year, I started “scaling out” our K8s cluster, and used NFS where possible to provide a filesystem for containers. The plan is to switch most of these out for Longhorn, but I’ll still need some of it… like Plex for instance, I am not buying enough SSDs to have longhorn be the storage backend for the media (though I probably will put the SQLite database on it).
This has presented a single nagging issue: every so often, I’ll try to schedule a pod (usually due to an upgrade or whatever) and it’ll just sit there “pending” with the error message in the log something to the effect of connection refused, which is really odd because the NFS server is up and functioning fine.
It finally did it the other morning before work, and I managed to think to look at syslog at the time, and found something slightly more helpful:
svc: failed to register lockdv1 RPC service (errno 111).
That’s still a pretty shit error message, but it’s a slightly more helpful Google-snack than the previous one. I spent a stupid amount of time trying to work out what was wrong with the RPC daemon on the NFS server to no avail, and I thought it was weird because in the past, if I drained+rebooted the client node, it would typically work fine after that.
It was only after a shameful amount of screwing around that I realized what I actually seem to need is the rpcbind service on each of the client nodes. This raises questions like “why?” (I am not an expert in NFS by a long shot, I do not know how the different pieces interact with each other) and more importantly “how did it ever work without it?”
My best guess is that it works fine when there’s only one mounted directory for each NFS export, and what’s probably happening is something is not cleaning up after itself and a directory is still mounted in another namespace, which is why rebooting the client node fixed it? Complete guess though.
After the disk server upgrades, but which also somewhat underscored the need for it, I decided to finally “shit or get off the pot” on looking at some durable storage for things. Because at the moment when the disk server goes down, pretty much everything else does too. Some things, like Plex, this is unavoidable. For others, like Home Assistant, it’s very avoidable, I’m just lazy.
But so I pointed the latest version of my “Put Kubernetes on the Thing” Ansible playbook at the first two compute nodes, then one at a time drained them, powered them off, and fitted a 500GB SSD to them (one Samsung Evo 850 and one 860), and fired them back up.
I installed Longhorn to the cluster, deleted the default disks (I don’t want them on the boot SSDs), created new ext4 partitions, pointed the two compute nodes at them, and then for completeness I created a ZFS dataset on the disk server and pointed Longhorn at it too. My theory was that if I used taint to keep things on the compute nodes, but a third extra replica on the disk machine, I should be fine.
To test things out, I figured Traefik is probably a good candidate: it’s needs for persistant storage are just to stop it from needing to get a new ACME certificate on every start-up, so the consequences for shit going wrong are not particularly dire. So I reasoned that I’d add a second volumeMount to it, and I could copy the acme.json file across - this was not to be because I got the error message:
code = Unknown desc = file extent is unsupported: operation not supported
A quick check of old Googs showed a pretty obvious explanation: ZFS-backed data is not supported. Ahh well. So I deleted that disk, set the replicas to 2, and off it went.
I then struggled on a restart because my Traefik pod is rootless with an immutable root partition, and the permissions were coming up wrong. I can use fsGroup to set the mount point of the volume to the gid that the container runs as, and that lets it create acme.json once, before it fails to do anything because it complains that the permissions are too wide - 0660 instead of 0600, which makes sense as the file and dir are owned by root.
I ended up giving up for the night by relaxing the policy on that namespace and just running Traefik as root. I was able to point Longhorn at the former dataset on the disk server, via NFS, for backups though, so that’s nice.
So yeah, I think this will do the job, I just really need a third SSD for the other compute node. I have a 240GB one out of Sabriena’s desktop but I’d kinda like to try find another 500GB… I just don’t want to pay the price of it.
