I went to Nvidia's GTC conference in March, which as expected for a conference about graphics processing units, had nothing to do with graphics. Instead everyone was very excited about AI. I was assured that AI would sove this and that, and better than I can. Even accepting this very low bar, it is hard to deny that it has reached a stage where it can do some things significantly better than…
Declarative Flowchart Making on the Command Line 16-October-2024 Sooner or later, you will find yourself making a flowchart. Obviously, this is already a very unfortunate circumstance, but it gets worse, because now you're going to research all the big players in the flowchart-making space only to find that they all involve a lot of clicking and dragging and are generally very tedious. This…
OpenBSD and High DPI Displays 11-May-2024 I put OpenBSD back on the 4k X1 Carbon and realized that I forgot how I made X11 usable on a high DPI display last time. So I followed standard X11 troubleshooting procedures of changing the same config file name at all 947 possible paths that X11 will search for it until something looked different on the screen. If you're reading this, you probably are in…
Cloning a System with Ansible 16-Feb-2023 I've wanted a tool to take an existing system and create an Ansible playbook that will duplicate it. This would let me set up a laptop how I want it, and then quickly reproduce that setup on a different laptop without having to remember what I did. As far as I know, there's nothing out there that does this. Since the only way to find out is to spend hours…
A Commented Arch Linux Setup on the 9th Gen X1 Carbon 19-May-2022 I pulled out the X1 Carbon today for the first time in a while, and evidently I had put Arch Linux on it, though I can't remember when or why. This post will cover my setup on here and explain what is going on in each file, mainly so that if I ever do this again I can refer back to it. Hopefully others will find it useful too. If…
Year: 2020 CPU: 4 3.2 GHz Firestorm cores, 4 2.0 GHz Icestorm cores (arm64) Graphics: 7 core 1.28 GHz integrated Apple GPU RAM: 8 GB integrated 4266 MHz Storage: 256 GB integrated (yes this too) NVMe Apple AP0256 "But can it run Chrome?": yes dmesg Because I hate myself, I buy Apple hardware solely to run OpenBSD on it. I was following the ongoing work to get OpenBSD running on Apple's new arm64…
Quieting a Supermicro E300-8D 21-April-2022 I use a Supermicro E300-8D as a router/gateway, mainly for two reasons: it has IPMI, and its 2.2 GHz Xeon D-1518 can do gigabit NAT with OpenBSD without any trouble. The downside has always been noise. While it's not the vaccuum cleaner hum of a Sun T5220, or the ludicrous jet engine howl of a T1000, it is whiny, and even though it lives in the basement,…
I've been using a pair of 9th Gen X1 Carbons for roughly 8 months now. One of them was issued to me by my employer and has been running Linux. The other was one that I bought for myself, which runs OpenBSD. This will be my thoughts on these two after 8 months of daily use, and some of the progress and problems that I have seen in that span. The work X1 has been running either Ubuntu 21.04 or…
OpenBSD on the HiFive Unmatched 23-Oct-2021 Year: 2021 CPU: 4 core, 1200 MHz SiFive Freedom U740 64 bit RISC-V Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 270 2 GB RAM: 16 GB Storage: 512 GB Western Digital SN730 NVMe "But can it run Chrome?": No dmesg My desktop's power supply died, and rather than replace the ill-fated PSU I decided to go with something different. OpenBSD's new riscv64 port looked interesting, so I…
A recent post by thfr@ compared the compilation time of godot between several different systems. I thought the idea was interesting, so I decided to compare the compile time of OpenBSD's userland on 3 ThinkPads: a 9th Gen X1 Carbon, a T14 AMD, and a T470p. Relevant specs of the test machines are below: X1 Carbon: 4 core, 8 thread i7-1165G7, 16G RAM, 256G Toshiba KXG6AZNV256G NVMe SSD T14 AMD: 8…
The week is over, so here are some closing thoughts on the Old Computer Challenge . Part 1 is here I spent the past week using nothing but a DEC AlphaStation and the experience was interesting and mostly enjoyable. This particular AlphaStation runs OpenBSD -current, which lacks X11 support on alpha, so I use a VT220 terminal with it. It has 128 MB of RAM, and a 266 MHz Alpha-based DECchip 21030…
This will be a weird post. I don't know if anyone else has thought this way, and I could be completely alone in here, but here goes. Over the last year or so, I have become more and more aware of a growing impatience in myself. I have difficulty focusing on things that take a long time, and the amount of time I can remain attentive to just one thing has dropped considerably. I find it difficult to…
High Availability In Practice With OpenBSD 24-June-2021 Previously I talked about setting up OpenBGPD on OpenBSD to provide high availability by taking advantage of Vultr's BGP feature and reserved IPs. This post will cover some practical considerations to bear in mind when doing so, and some of the ways I have dealt with various problems posed by this setup. This is not a how-to guide for a full…
High Availability With OpenBGPD on OpenBSD 6.9 19-June-2021 Before beginning, it is important to note that this post does not replace any documentation. My setup below is the minimum necessary to get this going, but there are a lot of factors I won't cover. Check the latest docs, especially if you are reading this long in The Future. I host this site on Vultr and one of the platform's features is…
Rolling Back OpenBSD PF Changes 05-June-2021 If you have ever done something dumb in a firewall config and locked yourself out of a machine, you will appreciate the ability to automatically roll a configuration back to a previous version after a timeout period. This is something that commercial routers and firewall devices from Cisco, Juniper, and others have implemented, though their solutions…
Safely Broadcasting All With Terminator 03-June-2021 This won't be a long post, but hopefully will save someone out there from a disaster. I wrote before about how I am a fan of Terminator and its "broadcast all" feature, which allows you to send a command to multiple Terminator panes or windows simultaneously. When combined with the pane splitting feature, this can be a tremendous time saver when…
OpenBSD 6.9 veb vs bridge Benchmarks 29-May-2021 OpenBSD recently introduced a new virtual ethernet bridge, called veb(4) that can replace bridge(4) for use as a layer 2 switch. David Gwynne's email introducing veb(4) explains the differences far better than I could, but I was interested in testing the forwarding performance of veb(4) when compared with bridge(4). For testing this, I used the…
OpenBSD 6.9 Router Benchmarks 21-May-2021 I've been using OpenBSD for my home router/gateway for years, and have run it on a number of different types of hardware. I recently got Verizon's gigabit service which is advertised at up to 940 Mb/s download and 880 Mb/s upload speeds, so I decided to benchmark some of the routers I have laying around. The contestants are: Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite: dual…
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 9th Gen 14-May-2021 Year: 2021 CPU: 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7-1165G7 (4 physical cores, 8 logical cores with SMT) Graphics: Intel Xe (Tiger Lake) RAM: 16 GB Storage: 256 GB Toshiba KXG6AZNV256G NVMe SSD "But can it run Chrome?": Yes dmesg My employer recently issued me a new 9th Gen X1 Carbon and I liked it enough to buy one for myself. This post will compare the two side by…
Web Rendering Proxy Server with Wireguard 8-May-2021 The modern web is a catastrophe, as we know . Older computers increasingly find it harder and harder to handle the modern website's insatiable desire to hand you Javascript, popups, autoplaying videos, ads, malware, more Javascript, downloadable fonts, libraries, full size background images, cryptominers, and gifs. Web browsers used to be…
The IBM ThinkPad T23 07-May-2021 Year: 2002 CPU: 1.13 GHz Pentium III Mobile Graphics: 16 MB S3 Super Savage IX RAM: 1024 MB PC133 Storage: 40 GB Hitachi HTS541640J9AT00 "But can it run Chrome?": No For many years, if you closed your eyes and imagined "laptop", I bet you'd think of something pretty much exactly like the T23: an enormous, all black, 4:3 shaped brick with a million ports. I like to…
Gitea on OpenBSD 29-April-2021 I wanted a self-hosted Git service, but saw how many frameworks it takes to get Gitlab up and running and immediately shut off my laptop in terror. Fortunately, there's Gitea . Gitea is a self-hosted Git service that is fairly easy to setup, and provides a significantly simpler alternative to other self-hosted Git web interfaces such as Gitlab. It's written in Go and…
Broadcast Commands in tmux 23-April-2021 I am a big fan of the Terminator terminal emulator because of its ability to both act as a multiplexer and broadcast a command to all panes simultaneously. This drastically speeds up executing the same task on multiple servers simultaneously (starting a Puppet run on a bunch of servers at once, for example). However, one problem with Terminator is that it…
The DEC AlphaStation 250 4/266 17-April-2021 Year: 1995 CPU: 266 MHz Alpha 21064A Graphics: DECchip 21030, 1280x1024, 8 bpp RAM: 128 MB Storage: IBM DDRS-34560 4.5GB 7.2K RPM 3.5" 50-Pin SCSI hard drive "But can it run Chrome?": Of couse not In a society that constantly implores us to upgrade to the newest thing, it can be refreshing to see how much you can do without. One of the better ways to do…
The Titanium PowerBook G4 15-April-2021 Year: 2002 CPU: 1.0 GHz PowerPC 7455 Graphics: Mobility Radeon 9000 64 MB RAM: 512 MB PC133 Storage: 60 GB 4200 RPM 2.5" IDE HDD "But can it run Chrome?": No The last titanium PowerBook, released in 2002, is my favorite laptop. It is still a modern design, with thin bezels and a relatively streamlined profile, but was built when you were still allowed to put…
Lazy Configuration Management 10-April-2021 I have a bad habit of buying old computers, and part of the tedium associated with this is setting up each one exactly how I want it, or applying a config that I already know I like on a new machine. Of course, there are many configuration management tools for automating configuration, such as Puppet, Ansible, Chef, and others, but they all suffer from…
Varnish on OpenBSD 6.8 with httpd 09-April-2021 I spent today setting up the server for this website and decided to use Varnish as an HTTP cache with OpenBSD's built-in web server, httpd. The internet has very little information about using Varnish on OpenBSD specifically, so this post can serve to document the steps. For a simple site like this, Varnish is quite unnecessary and kind of…