World Readable: a personal blog about anything that comes to mind for anybody who cares to read it.
Seems like everyone is playing around with ChatGPT from Open AI. Earlier this month when I was working on my NAS re-org I actually tried using it to help me write some firewall rules and this is what I got:
Not too shabby. It’s been in the news lately because all sorts of people (students, bloggers, even lawyers) are using it to write stuff for them. So I figured, why not turn my blogging activities over to the AI? Well, here’s what I got.
During my recent switch from LastPass to Vaultwarden I was planning on using Docker but then discovered my old (2014) Synology NAS didn’t have the CPU architecture to support it. I was already in the middle of one big winter break project, why not add another? Time for a NAS upgrade!
My DS214 started out with two 3TB drives, which I then upgraded to 6TB in 2018 and then 8TB in 2020 (after one of the 6TB drives started exhibiting bad sectors). I didn’t need a capacity increase again, just a hardware upgrade so I started looking at the newer 2-bay DiskStations. The end result was my purchasing the DiskStation DS720+.
Unless you’re not interested in tech news or have been under a rock for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard about the latest LastPass breach debacle. Two days before Christmas, every LastPass customer like myself received an e-mail informing us that, in a nutshell, back in August 2022 an unauthorized third-party had acquired LastPass vault backups from a cloud service. But don’t worry, they said! As long as you’ve got a strong master password, you should be fine. But not everything in your LastPass vault is encrypted, specifically URLs and now that this unknown threat actor has a list of LastPass customers, their vaults, and the URLs in those vaults, let the phishing attempts begin! Not to mention they have time to brute force the encryption on those vaults with poor master passwords. Even worse, since the initial announcement, there has been zero further details provided by LastPass, even on their own support forums (which are now full of message threads with other angry customers also leaving) and no mention of the breach at all on their homepage!
So yeah, after 12 years as a LastPass Premium/Families customer, I’ve switched.
The calendar shows October which means it’s about that time for my fall sports update and an Ubuntu upgrade!
In their first season (after a late start due to the lockout) as the Guardians, my Cleveland baseball team (the youngest in the league) ended up winning 92 games and the Central Division. They then knocked out my Tampa Bay Rays in the wildcard round (sweeping them in two games in the new best-of-three format) and introduced the baseball world to SpongeBob (aka, rookie Oscar Gonzalez). Unfortunately, they lost to the New York Yankees in the ALDS, but it did take all five games (and then, thankfully, the Yankees were swept out of the ALCS by the Astros, so that was satisfying).
The Bucs (with Brady back for one more year?) and the Browns (despite the departure of Baker Mayfield and the Deshaun Watson controversy) both started out with promise of good seasons, but currently sit at 2-5 and 3-4 respectively (and yet even with a losing record, the Bucs are tied for first in the NFC South). Tom Brady may be regretting not retiring last year, both on the field and at home. Basketball and hockey are just ramping up with the Cavs at 2-1 and the Lightning off to a slow start at 3-4 like the Bucs.
On to Linux: Canonical released Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) last week so it was time to upgrade. It took about 45 minutes for the do-release-upgrade to download and install all the updated packages, then I re-applied my customizations to some affected config files and rebooted.
The first problem I had was that I couldn’t SSH back into the server. Luckily I also have a monitor and keyboard hooked up to the NUC in the closet, so I was able to confirm the server was up and running. Doing my normal Google research, I found that a change in the openssh-server was now using socket-based activation. I had been overriding the default port in sshd_config and supposedly my changes should have been carried forward by the change, but it wasn’t. Once I figured that out I was able to SSH in on the default port of 22 (and then removed my customizations from the config file). The second issue was a lack of outbound internet connectivity which turned out to be related to systemd and resolv.conf. Once I added my Pi-Hole to the DNS line in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf, the server was able to resolve and connect to external sites. Finally, I had to re-upgrade to Calibre 6.7.1 since the Ubuntu “upgrade” actually downgraded it to 6.3. But hey, no PHP issues this time! 😉
Seeya back here in April for spring sports (hopefully spring training!) and Ubuntu 23.04, the Lunar Lobster.
“Even with my tendency to tinker, adding yet another system on top of Homebridge seemed like too much to me.” – me, two months ago
Yeah, I said that back in late May (in reference to Scrypted) after getting Homebridge set up and integrated with my HomeSeer home automation system. But here I am, two months later writing about another integration to my system. This time, it’s Node-Red.
NR is “a flow-based programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways.” I had read about it on the HomeSeer forums (back when I was re-organizing my home automation setup and switched to Ring from ADT Pulse), and made some notes to look into it later as it seemed like a lot of people were using it to extend and integrate their automations with other systems. Last weekend I had some free time and decided to poke around and tinker with it.
Back in March when we replaced my Highlander with the RAV4 Prime, we figured that would buy us (literally) some time for the Ford Mustang Mach-E we had on order to arrive before the late summer/early fall when we would again require two vehicles. But as the weeks passed it became apparent that the Mach-E was not going into production any time soon so we were also started looking around for my wife’s second choice, the Kia EV6.
Again, it’s not a great time to be buying a car (new or used) and we were casting a wide net, talking to local dealerships and ones as far away as Michigan looking for a) an available EV6 GT-Line, and b) the lowest over-MSRP dealer markup we could find. Luck turned out to be on our side again when one Friday evening I found a new Urban Yellow First Edition just a few miles north of where we found the RAV4 (the person who had originally placed the order for the FE apparently didn’t want it after all). We drove out first thing Saturday morning, test drove it, and decided to buy it (and we had to decide quick because when we got back from our test drive, another couple was waiting to check it out, sorry folks!). Actually finding the car notwithstanding, this was our easiest, smoothest car purchase ever, spending just under three hours total at the dealership before driving my wife’s sweet new ride home.
A few weeks ago while browsing the Homeseer forums (which have been inundated with Insteon users lately, after the sudden shutdown of the service), I came across a thread about integrating Homeseer with Apple’s HomeKit using Homebridge. Everything in my home automation setup has been working fine, but I’m always looking for new ways to tinker and expand. I use HSBuddy on my iPhone to control my HS devices, but I thought it would be cool if I could use Apple’s Home app instead, which would also make it easier for my wife to use.
Back in early 2020 (pre-pandemic!) when I left TiVo and cut the cord, I switched to YouTube TV and Amazon Fire TV Sticks as my media streamers. They’ve been working fine, but recently I’ve tinkering with integrating HomeKit into my Homeseer setup (using Homebridge, a post will be coming soon on that) and wanted to try using an Apple TV as a HomeKit hub. Thus, I’ve replaced the 4K Fire Stick in the family room with a 32gb Apple TV 4K.
Hanging out in the RAV4 Prime forums over on RAV4World is dangerous: people are always posting the cool accessories and customizations they’ve made to their vehicles. Based on some threads there (and in the Facebook group), I decided to try installing a dash cam!
The recommended model was the Fitcamx Dash Cam but according to their web site (and the item page on Amazon) the current model wasn’t compatible with the 2022 RAV4. The photo they had showing the incompatible camera housing didn’t match mine though (it had vents, mine has no vents) so I sent them some photos asking if it would indeed work. They said it would, so I ordered one.
Tomorrow It’s “gonna be May” which means it’s time for my annual spring sports update and Ubuntu upgrade!
Now on to the latest Ubuntu release, 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), which came out last week.