ForgotAboutTed @ForgotAboutTed@social.sociopathic.ca

Nearly a year of lurking in the fediverse since my last Toot; I only logged into the web interface to update Mastodon to v3.5.3 at which point I accidentally clicked on my Toot history.

The return of international tournament football feels like a striking return to pre-COVID normalcy.

Slowly chipping away at my to-do list; washed the floors, scrubbed the sinks, and polished the silverware. Wait, what century is this?

I need another gin and tonic.

My solar inverter is finally fixed; it took a seasoned solar technician 4.5hrs (and $500) to figure out it was a software issue that needed to be righted by the inverter manufacturer’s support team remotely. I’m speechless. Nearly 8 weeks of downtime during the sunniest part of the year, and the manufacturer’s installer support wouldn’t even talk to me when I contacted them because I wasn’t an electrician. Ugh.

Why is it so hard to find a Solar professional to service my inverter?

Getting a professional to spray around the outside of the house for wasps was a brilliant idea and well-worth the investment; I can actually enjoy the balcony in peace this year.

Ugh, my solar inverter isn’t working properly so my entire solar array is offline. Sigh, right when the weather was getting nice and the days longer.

It’s a nice sunny day, and 12C. Pancakes with fresh whipped cream and strawberries for breakfast, to be followed up by a nice stroll with a cigar.

Oh my, it has been a busy couple of months. Thankfully summer weather is nearly upon us and, with it, hopefully a return to a more leisurely pace with time to devote to the mountain of personal/tech projects I have piling up.

Narrowly escaped catastrophe as I attempted to upgrade the production Mastodon instance to v3.3.0; didn't realize the new dependencies would pull in at almost 2GB, which forced my hand at migrating to a higher-capacity allocated partition in the VM when the installation failed half-way through for lack of space. All good now, though!

I was delighted to find that the 5-disk RAID 0 and 2-disk RAID 1 hardware raids I had setup years ago in an old server with a RocketRAID 2720SGL card easily survived a complete OS wipe and transition from macOS to Ubuntu. After installing the open source Linux driver, the volumes mounted fine with all data still fully intact (albeit on HFS+ volumes). Pretty impressed!

Also, extremely pleased that I finally got Grub bootloader working correctly with my Arch Linux install. Turns out, the issue was that my motherboard can bizarrely only recognize bootx64.efi files and not the standard grubx64.efi, so was refusing to boot from disk.

Happy new year! Kicked the year off well with some much needed post-holiday madness cleaning. Bags of rubbish going to the curb tomorrow.

Last ones for tonight, also spun up bots to mirror @gizmodo and @appleinsider Twitter feeds for those who like to follow tech news.

Also spun up @AJENews.

Spun up the @hkfp newsbot. Slowly moving all my public-interest Twitter follows over as bots.

At first, I was just spinning up bots for feeds that I couldn't find in the Fediverse, but I'm observing that many of the existing bots seem to rely on Twitter > RSS feeds, which leads to lengthy delays in their posting, and their dumping a bunch of Toots in a batch. Also, some of their hosting seems unreliable where we don't see any posts for 8-10hrs at a time... so I need to spin up some of my own.

Spun up a few more public interest newsbots that I couldn't already find mirrors for in the Fediverse: @citynews_bot and @nhkworld_news_bot.

Got the cronjobs working properly, so @cbc_news should now actually update every 30m.

Also, setup @globeandmail to mirror the @globeandmail@twitter.com account.

I have historically followed a number of news outlets on Twitter, which has been my favourite means of consuming the daily news for many years now. However, the more I explore the Fediverse, the more I hope to leave Twitter behind entirely, but the lack of these news outlets' content is a problem for me.

As such, I'll set up some bots myself to mirror the content.

First up: @cbc_news. It'll mirror CBC News' Twitter account, updated every 30m.