So the best cell phone I ever owned with the Note 3. What made this phone stand out? For starters, it had an accessible and replaceable battery, so you could have two batteries and swap them out, days worth of power without a charger, it was sweet. It also had an IR port, and a growing pool of apps that let you replace every remote in the house with the phone you were carrying around anyways. Lastly it had a micro SD card for ample storage, this is the latest convenience that they have killed off. My S20 Galaxy could handle a micro SD card up to a terabyte of data, that’s every song I own, my top 25 favorite movies and enough books on tape to last me a jog from sea to shining sea and still only take up 512GB. My new S22 Galaxy Ultra doesn’t have this, only 256 GB and I have to select what I want and make sure it doesn’t overload it. One step forward and two steps back…

The older I get the less I need to keep up with the latest and greatest. This does however lead to a confluence where I sometimes get my tech upgraded all at once. This is happening with my phone and watch within the next week.

My watch was bought in September 2020 when we went up to Colorado and even then the Galaxy Watch was a generation behind. It’s getting upgraded to a Galaxy Watch 5 Pro so the sensors and everything should be much better than I’m used to.

My phone is about a year and a half old? I think… It was old also when I bought it (Galaxy S20 5G) but it was through Fi and I was hoping that the dual-band would help with the signal when there wasn’t much to be had (aka David Masons) but that didn’t turn out to be the case. In any case at the time the note was dead and I talked myself into going cheaper with a good camera. Now I get to upgrade to the Galaxy 22 Ultra which gives me my stylus back and a better camera.

These two hardware updates are setting me back around $700 I believe when it’s all said and done. One of the things I insist on doing is trading in my old hardware instead of letting it sit around collecting dust. I’ll own everything outright and can switch providers whenever the fancy strikes me. Won’t have to upgrade that tech until the truck is paid off.

I run a development desktop with 6 monitors, a RHEL server, a desktop Mint with 4 monitors, and a Synology NAS and they are all tied together with a 16-port gig switch. I bought a UPS several years ago and hooked everything up to it. Needless to say the batteries are long since passed and to the point where a slight loss was taking everything down. So I blew $400 on 2 new UPS’s and bought new batteries for the old one. Now everything is evenly distributed across the battery backups and it’s exciting to have everything running on smooth power.

I have always been interested in the last meal protocol for death row inmates. To pick a last meal knowing it will be the last food you ever have before death has to be a hard choice. So when I do run across this in the media I like to document it and with that, I finally found something that Twitter could be useful for. Welcome to @LastMealMenu on Twitter. For those times I run across something of this nature in the news I have someplace to put it.

We’ve discovered that you can, by following some really archaic directions, use R in Jupyter Notebooks. So the next step of my educational journey seems to consist of the R programming language which is done (not surprisingly) in R-Studio.

As I work through the micro degree on my way to the full size one, I’m having to learn R-language, and I must say I’m impressed with how easy it is to pick up and the things you can do from a graphing capability. It’s just 2 credits worth of class but a neat little language

So for whatever reason, I didn’t remember Google’s DNS addresses right and I set them up wrong on the actual server. Once the server was reliably able to communicate properly with DNS we seem to be golden and everything is working the way it should and is pretty fast. So I guess I can start addressing the email to the database I was talking about, and figure out what the hell to do with docker, or podman, or whatever it is that allows that mechanism to work. More on that to come.

I believe I’m happy to announce that all services are back including asberry.org photos and news feeds. Now that we have that taken care of, we’re moving on to putting the mail connection stuff into a database, not sure which one yet but I’ll figure it out. Then it’s desperate that we figure out the docker situation or podman or whatever they want to call it. I do need to get that working. Also we can spin up some VM’s to see what’s going on with those. Super excited to be working with RHEL, it’s all that and a bag of chips so far.

I’m still sometimes baffled about what I can do when I set my mind to it. The email server is back up and running as well as it was before. Oddly enough this was fixed basically by overwriting what was already there from a default install with backups. I used Meld on my Mint desktop to connect in and compare files in the live RHEL vs the legacy Fedora that it replaced. I’m still not sure how it all comes together but even the TLS is working. Now I can get around to moving the users to a DB so things like changing passwords will work properly. Still need to speed up WP but I’ve got leads and am working on it.

Well I did get the server RAM upgraded to 64GB and I’ve seen some impressive speed increases when it comes to Cockpit but that’s about it, I’m still seeing some major lag on the WordPress sites. I’ll need to figure out what is going to with WordPress and I still need to get email up and running. I had hoped it would be just a drop in but I just haven’t had a chance to pay attention to get it running properly. Missing saslauthd or something like that. Oh well, it’s okay, I’m happy with the drives and memory upgrade, it’ll last me another 5 years as the home-based Linux server.

I’m all by myself this weekend, that’s a good thing, gives me a chance to just chill by myself and geek out. I got the 64 GB of ram for my T30 server and it works!!! Still didn’t speed up my word press instances but quadrupling the ram is never a bad thing. This will allow for the use of virtual machines and pods/dockers if I can ever figure that out. I speced out a new T40 and they come with 8GB of ram and you can add another 8 for $200 more, so it’s $1400 to get to 64GB, it cost me $333 and I was pissed about that. Oh well, it’s upgraded and I probably won’t have to do anything more for another 5 years hopefully.