Recent content on hollenback.net
Here’s my current resume: 
 
 HTML 
 PDF 
 Markdown source 
 
 The Markdown is the source of truth. The HTML and PDF are
generated from it by pandoc as part of this
site’s CI pipeline. 
 For more on my background, also see my LinkedIn
profile . 
 For the why and how this resume is built, see Write Your Resume In
Markdown Already .
This is a Purple Air air quality monitor inside my house: 
 Loading PurpleAir Widget... 

I recently signed up for Suddenlink internet service in a house that previously had only DSL. I was pretty excited to go from 5mbit/s to 400mbit/s - DSL just isn’t great for supporting multiple video sessions at once. 
 Suddenlink is the cable company in this town, and they offer 400mbit/s for a reasonable price of $58/mo. They charge $10/mo to rent a modem, so it makes no financial…
My most important Goodreads book review:
 Kindle Paperwhite User’s Guide by Amazon 
My rating: 5 of 5 stars 
Rarely has a book moved me as much as this masterpiece did. I laughed, I cried, I learned how to operate my Kindle Paperwhite.
 
 View all my reviews (Goodreads requires login)
Introduction 
 I’ve been meaning to design and build a makeup battlestation for Liz for a while. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a battlestation is what makeup junkies call the area where they apply their makeup. 
 Liz prefers to do her makeup standing up at a wall mirror, so I figured I would start with that. I just had a basic door hang mirror with a wooden frame (like…
We went to Hawaii for 10 days in July 2016. Here is my travelogue. 
 Day One (July 6) 
 
 This was the day we landed on the island, so I didn’t write too much originally. 
 Day 2 (July 7) 
 Hawaii trip day two update: we did some amazing snorkeling today in the ocean. It was like being inside an aquarium.
I also ate waaay too much shave ice. No regrets.
The boys…
Mars Mars Mars Mars 
 In April I was fortunate to be selected a NASA Social attendee for the CRS-8 launch at Kennedy Space Center. NASA spent two days ferrying 50 of social media users around the complex, culminating in the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket on a resupply of the International Space Station. It was an amazing experience. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say it was a once…
Overview 
 I am a long-time owner of a Roku Soundbridge M500 internet radio. You may have never heard of these devices - the Soundbridge was Roku’s first foray in to streaming before they moved to video streaming. While the M500 was discontinued many years ago, it still works and in fact I use mine daily to listen to the radio. This post covers my attempts to understand how to control…
How to Turn a Worn Out Old Console In To An Amazing Game Machine 
 Intro 
 The Nintendo Wii is a completely obsolete ‘7th generation’ game console. Nintendo stopped selling the original version of the Wii all the way back in 2013 in the US. So, why bother with a Wii in 2019? Well, there are a number of reasons: 
 
 It’s cheap! You can pick up an entire system on…
Overview 
 I’ve been running Hue Smart Lightbulbs in my house for a couple of years. The basic idea is there’s a hub that connects to your home network and then communicates with light bulbs or other devices over some sort of wireless protocol. Prior to 2018, Hue used an older variant of the Zigbee protocol called ZLL or Zigbee Light Link. While some bulbs from other manufacturers…
I’m MattJhsn . 
 Before today, Wed Apr 10 2019, I last edited this page on February 9, 2008. That was 4078 days ago, some time in my mind. How’s everyone doing? Alrighty then. 
 my uname -a is: 
 
 Linux T410 4.15.0-47-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Wed Mar 13 10:40:37 UTC 2019 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux 
 
 
 This is my first (ever) Wiki post. Wow. 
 I’m a…
A Tutorial for Reprogramming Approach Lighting on a 2018 Ford Transit Connect 
 Introduction 
 I recently purchased a brand new 2018 Ford Transit Connect Wagon. I love this vehicle: it’s basically the only minimal minivan you can currently buy in the US. Seats 7, plenty of cargo space, and a complete lack of the ridiculous features you find on the Odyssey or the Sienna. 
…

 
 

 Ah, seltzer water . The finest drink in the finest of restaurants. Refreshment of kings. There are just two problems with selter water, if you are as frugal as I am. 
 
 It’s expensive for what you get 
 It’s wasteful, what with all those bottles or cans
There must be a better way to do things, right? I knew about the Sodastream system , so that…
I’ve been getting back in to cycling over the last couple of years. Currently I do a weekly group ride of 20-25 miles and I ride to the train every day for work. 
 I’ve been doing this all on a 20 year old Dawes triathlon bike. It’s treated me well, but it’s very heavy (33 lbs) and too small for me - I’m 6'6" and it’s only something like a 58cm frame.
Phil’s Public PGP Key 
 You could use this to securely email me. 
 -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG…
So maybe you’ve noticed that there’s some really crazy shit going on in this presidential election. If you have young kids, you might be wondering how to keep them educated about world events and at the same time deal with the uncomfortable questions that will come up. Here are my thoughts on the matter, and my general advice on 
 How To Talk To Your Kids About Trump 
…
Let’s Encrypt is a free certificate authority that was launched earlier this year. What that means is you no longer have to choose between self-signed certificates or buying certificates to secure your web site and other services. Buying certificates could cost $20-$50 per domain, and it was always a hassle to renew them. Now, you can use the Let’s Encrypt tools to create certificates…
By default, Artifactory sends it’s log messages to $ARTIFACTORY_HOME/logs/artifactory.log . This is fine, but it’s handy to also send the log files to the system log. This is especially true if you use a modern linux that runs systemd, as systemd provides the journalctl utility to display and filter logs. 
 Jfrog has this page about logging to syslog, and the information there is…
Overview 
 This is an online study group dedicated to learning the Clojure language. The target audience is people who have done some programming in other languages and want to learn Clojure. 
 The study group will meet online for one hour every other week. The first meeting will be at 9pm on Thursday 9/8/16. Please obtain the book and finish the first chapter by that time. 
 My goal…
Greetings 
 Bash 4.x has associative arrays (hashes if you are an old perl user like me). The existing examples of how to use them on the internet are not very well documented, so I thought I would write up my experience from a recent real world project. 
 Note this only works for bash 4.x. 
 First Example 
 Use a while/read loop to process a file line by line. Here is a sample…

 I took this picture in February of 2009 and I want to tell you about what was going with my mental state on when I took it. 
 2009 was the beginning of the end for me in a lot of ways. I had moved back to California from NYC in July of 2008 and taken a job at Yahoo, largely as a last-ditch effort to appease my then wife. After a few months it became clear that things were not getting…
The Problem With Words 
 One big issue in my professional world (computer operations) is a lack of introspection about how our language affects people. I know I’ve been guilty of this many times. I used to not think it was a big deal, but I’ve come to realize that my attitude was wrong, and I needed to change the way that I think and talk. This post is my attempt to explain my…
So What’s the Deal With Your Career, Phil? 
 As some of you may know, I’ve been at my current job for just over a year. I’ve learned a lot of interesting new technology and worked with some really cool people. 
 However, I had to make a choice, and it was a tough one - I was forced to start looking for a new position. Today I started that search in earnest.
What sort of job do I want? 
 Corner case problem solving 
 Interesting projects that don’t necessarily use the standard tools 
 What are my life goals? 
 Travel (duh) 
 Spend time with family 
 Self-education 
 Learn more computer languages 
 Learn Clojure 
 Amplifier repair 
 Bicycles 
 Learn to play the Banjo 
 Do Karaoke
How to connect a cheap chinese camera like the dahua ips-4300 to your network, save the output stream, send to camcloud, etc.
Overview 
 Artifactory is a binary repository manager. Basically it’s an equivalent to using something like git, except for built artifacts. 
 If that sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, you can stop reading. 
 I recently had to figure out how to set up monitoring of Artifactory. The available documentation isn’t very good, so here are my notes on how to get…
This one is for the sysadmins out there. If you use this, you will never have to worry about losing long-running commands when you get disconnected from a remote server. 
 tl;dr: you should be automatically starting screen when you ssh to remote hosts. This has saved my butt many times. My script below either forces a reconnect to an existing screen session, or starts a new session if one…
is the point to torture or punish wrongdoers? 
 how else to explain the barbaric methods we use? 
 lethal injection, gas, electric chair, hanging, firing squad 
 all require elaborate mechanisms 
 all have many ways they can fail 
 you can execute someone simply and painlessly with nitrogen 
 inert gas asphyxia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
women should be allowed to open carry in SF — B.T. Stephens, Esq. (@LusciousPear) April 27, 2016 
 This tweet got me thinking. What would the world be like if only women were allowed to carry guns in our society. Let’s assume this only applies to civilians and the police and military would continue to function as normal. Let’s also assume that the regular caveats for who can…
To keep my homepage shorter, I’ve moved some of my older geek links to this page. 
 
 I say that Devops means Don’t be an A-Hole 
 I had the honor of taking part in a Software Packaging Panel at Devopsdays 2011 . 
 I presented a BayLISA talk about Release Management . 
 My brain dump about web hosting vs VPS providers . 
 A couple of ways I’ve recently…
To keep my homepage clean, I’ve moved some of my older general interest links to this page. 
 
 Three great music blogs . 
 We survived the blackout of 2003 ! 
 You might enjoy my notes about the experience of moving to New York City . 
 Bored with unemployment? Maybe you should think about FindingAJob ! Or, you could just play biznatch , Steve Ocepek’s…
Introduction 
 I had a java / tomcat app (Artifactory) that was configured to use LDAP for user authentication, and I was asked to make it use LDAP over SSL with a self-signed certificate. That turned out to be not very well documented, so here are my notes on how to do it. 
 First of all, you need to understand how java applications use security certificates. There’s a certificate…
Viking Designer 1 Repair Manuals 
 I have a Viking Designer 1 sewing machine. It’s one heck of an amazing machine that automates just about everything. It has a touchscreen and it does embroidery. There’s a usb port so you can upload embroidery designs to it. 
 The touchscreen on my machine recently broke, so I ordered a replacement one. I went searching on the internet for the…
Bundler Timeouts 
 After an Artifactory upgrade at work, users began complaining that bundler (the ruby package management tool) was timing out trying to fetch dependencies. Bundler wold try 4 times to download the dependencies for a gem, and then give up. After that it would just download the gemspec for every gem, which would take many, many times longer than retrieving the index. 
 I…
Vince and I went out in Oakland:
 

 
 
 

 Guess what I went as: 


 
 
 

 Scary, huh? 


 This photo album is structured as a series of paths . A path is a series of photos I have arranged to tell a particular story or illustrate a particular event. For example, the DogsAndCats path contains pictures of both dogs and cats (duh). 
 Pictures may be included in more than one path, depending on how hypertexty I’m feeling. 
 Oh, yeah, all pictures on this site are…
A couple of snaps from Halloween, 2002. R and Hannah: 
 

 
 
 

 


 
 

 That’s the end of NewYears2002 , back to the beginning . 
 
 

We went to a big warehouse party for New Year’s 2002. Here are a few pics. 
 Swingers: 


 
 
 

 
 


 
 

 
 

Kim Smith, R, and Randy. 


 
 
 

 That’s the end of JaimeBirthdayParty . Back to the beginning . 
 
 

I’m working on setting up the Dahue IPC-HFW-4300s Camera. It’s a wired high def outdoor IP camera with night vision that supports power over ethernet. It’s also only $85 on Amazon right now. 
 Of course, this camera is typical Chinese garbage. The hardware appears ok, but the software is a mess. My goal is to get this camera sending images to sensr.net, but so far that…
Me and Brett Hendrickson in front of the Warden’s house, another casualty of the indian occupation. 


 
 
 

 and here’s R and Katie Hendrickson: 


 
 
 

 
 

The Artship hosts a number of art exhibits such as this family: 


 
 
 

 Kent, R, and the curator Slobodan in the dance studio aboard the Artship: 


 
 
 

 The studio space was created by opening up one of the main cargo holds down three levels. 
 
 

R’s twin brothers Michael and Stephen, with their twin cousins Kyle and Dana. 


 
 
 

 The sets are interlaced. 
 
 

Annie and Xando in the midst of some sort of daemonic entanglement. 


 
 
 

 
 

Every year R’s aunt and uncle serve as the doctor and nurse on the ship TS Golden Bear , which is part of the California Maritime Academy . Students of CMA spend two semesters on the ship as it travels around the world. On the ship the students attend regular classes and learn how to run a 500-foot vessel. 
 You can learn more about the current Golden Bear on the GoldenBear path. The old…
We end the Artship path with a view of R, Kent, and Paula leaving the scene. 


 
 
 

 Choices: 
 
 
 Back to the beginning or 
 
 
 Continue on to see the new GoldenBear . 
 
 
 
 

R pauses on the Artship to take in the view. 


 
 
 

 
 

This path contains pictures of my friends and family doing various interesting things. 
 First, our good friend Aaron relaxing on our deck: 


 
 
 

 I just started with Aaron because he’s always at the top of everyone’s cellphone phonebooks.