friendica server updates


I've gone through the upgrade process again, this time I went through the extra effort to automate the process with ansible. Future updates should be as simple as running the ansible playbook.

At some point I want to switch to a containerized friendica but last I checked the available docker images weren't great. Back to the bottom of the list for now though.

ham radio stuff


I passed the exam for a Amateur Technician license back in June. Since then I haven't done much of anything with it. Instead I have been continuing to learn what I can and piece together different kit to try and get up and running. So far I just have a BFTECH tri band and a couple of antennae. The most recent thing I've worked on is putting together a quick reference chart that has the local repeaters on it and program my radio with some pre-defined memory channels so that I will have at least some rudimentary capability. Once I have something a little more well put together I'd like to write up something a bit more long form about it.

Going down the vscode rabbit hole...


I haven't really been motivated to use an IDE on windows since 2008-ish when I did some VB.net coding for a prior job. These days I mostly do django work for the dayjob and I had been using pycharm for that. At home I mostly just use vim in a shell.

vscode seems like a lot of work to set up...

The stakes have been raised


Seems that CloudFlare has upped the ante; now "dns.cloudflare.com" shares the same IPs as "cdnjs.cloudflare.com"; thus blocking one by IP effectively blocks the other. And since the service I'm trying to block is on HTTPS, a block by IP will no longer work. I'll have to insert a layer 7 proxy to filter requests, just like with the Google endpoints.

Here's hoping my network doesn't get sacked with malware or some other nefarious actors bypassing my local DNS resolver before I can get an appropriate implementation in place.

On Web Browsers


There are no good web browsers any more. Firefox keeps introducing new & improved ways to aggravate users with each patch. The latest item being an obnoxious "what's new" notification-style button on the toolbar, which pops up a panel on the right side of the browser window. Chrome has all sorts of phone-home attacks built-in, including the auto-log-in-to-chrome "feature" they added a couple releases back. Edge is now just re-badged Chrome, though I wonder if it might be a reasonable alternative. I suspect not, as Microsoft has its own issues with phone-home attacks (also called "telemetry").