My RSI prevention strategy involves change: I use three different keyboards, four or five pointing devices, and move around to different places. On my main desktop, I mostly use a thumb trackball, with a mouse in second place and a drawing pad in distant third.

On Friday the trackball died in a peculiar way.

koreader is an open source ebook reader application originally designed to replace the firmware on Kobo E-Ink reading tablets, and then ported to run on Amazon Kindle, Android, PocketBook, and Remarkable devices. Under Android it runs as a normal application. It also runs as an application in Linux and (reportedly) in MacOS. It reads basically all non-DRM book formats. It is highly configurable and featureful, though not infinitely so.

If you have an OPDS-speaking book server, it can search and download from that. If you want to run a tiny sync server for keeping track of which page you are on across multiple koreaders, that’s pretty easy.

If it ran smoothly on MacOS and I could get it to work on my semi-antiquated Chromebook, it would be even closer to perfect. Sadly, it doesn’t – yet.

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People use tools to get things done. Tools vary in capabilities. Using a perfect or great tool is more comfortable, takes less time, or does a better job than using a good-enough tool. Using a poor tool incurs penalties in time, comfort and/or quality.

Minimalism is, in the current parlance, a “flex”. Minimalism is a statement that you can afford to prefer a non-optimal set of tools in order to satisfy an aesthetic fad.

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What’s running on the firewall? A big list follows, with discussion.

Today I replaced the last spinning root disk in the house. The media server still has 4x3TB spinning disks, but the old 120GB spinning boot disk has been replaced by a cheap 1 TB SSD. Boot times improved dramatically, and the database access for various things now feels instantaneous.

Process follows, but it’s nothing extraordinary.

One of my kids wanted a new computer badly enough to pay for most of it, and I have been wanting to upgrade the main house server for a year or so. Parts for both arrived this week.

Via Rick Thomas on the Debian Users mailing list:

It’s 2019. How much RAM do you need?

The HP Envy 13z is a lightweight, reasonably high-performance laptop with a relatively low price tag - under $600 for the 1080P 13” touchscreen, flip-hinge to tablet, backlit keyboard, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD, Ryzen 2300U four-core system weighing a little over two pounds.

Several people have asked me recently what hardware I would buy today for use as a home firewall.

• Partaker N3050 B5
  • $121
  • N3050 CPU
  • no RAM (1 slot DDR3L up to 8GB)
  • no SSD (room for mSATA + 2.5” SATA disk)
  • 2 x gigE + wifi 802.11 b/g/n
• 2GB DDR3L RAM
  • $15
  • 2GB RAM
• Kingston 120GB mSATA SSD
  • $40
  • 120GB mSATA SSD

for a total of $176, including shipping. Links were accurate as of October 22, 2018.

This gets you a tiny box, similar in size to random commercial house router/firewall/wifi access points, which can run a standard Linux operating system with a complex firewall running at 1 Gb/s in and out, more RAM than strictly necessary, and an SSD which is both very large (and therefore can last a very long time) and boot the system quickly enough that you can do a reboot without losing TCP sessions.

I would also recommend a medium-sized USB thumb drive to set up as an emergency booting and backup device. Call it another $15 or so.

Someone on the debian-user list just discovered that gpt partitioning allows you to put 128 partitions on a disk. They got really excited at the granularity that would allow. They weren’t thinking about the exciting maintenance procedures that would inevitably follow – not enough space here, too much space there, backups all over the place.

Useful tip (for me): any time ZFS emits internal error: Invalid argument, what it probably means is that the DKMS module and the userland utilities are different versions.

Wireguard is a new open source VPN system being initially developed on Linux. I have two major use cases for such a thing: site-to-site protection, and backhauling traffic from a laptop or phone to my house.

In farming, monoculture is the practice of raising a single crop over and over again. You can figure out exactly what fertilizers it needs, how much water, and predict your yield accurately, year after year.

Back in the DOS era of personal computing, the default prompt was the letter name of the current drive, followed by a colon and a >. So A:> or C:> if you were wealthy enough to afford a hard disk. DOS really had only one shell for a great many years: COMMAND.COM.