I assume this all means they have left their website to rot in favor of an app which I will never use.

interactions with new health insurance company have gone as follows:

- I have no id card, and the web page that they say contains a "digital id card" does not contain one (but has thing at the top saying "this page contains the digital id card").

- Trying to pay them results in a cgi error along the lines of "no ID parameter".

- Trying to contact support, on today, a weekday, results in "we are not available on weekends" (ok ok, it's MLK day)

Mom's birthday hike bird.

first #sourdough bake in a long time, 50/50 whole wheat. I forgot that white flour likes a lot less water than my usual 100% hydration so this was very challenging to shape and so I'm happy it turned out this well

baked between hot coals in the woodstove at 700F-500F

so begins phase 2 of solar install

what a way to end a day.. tractor trailer driver called an hour before sunset and we decided he should not attempt even the dead-end road my driveway is on, and so I hiked to the highway with a wheelbarrow to meet him there

caught a lift back to my driveway in a pickup truck and got everything hauled as far up as makes sense until the snow melts

freaking loot boxes

half mile difficulty level

waiting around for fedex in a 8 hour delivery window, snowy driveway edition, tractor trailer pallet load expansion pack

me, cat, citrus trees, house, car, all soaking up the sun before 6 inches of snow dump on us tomorrow

eff is constitutionally incapable of making this statement

https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/113794742431836312

Mind, this is not a kneejerk reaction for me. I've been keeping track for about a decade of the extent that the EFF criticized governments vs the extent they criticized major corporations. I can take the libertarian leanings as long as good things are being accomplished. At the same time, I saw how much that tendency was leaving on the table.

But once I associate you with corporate lickspittle to the extent I now do, how do you ever come back from that?

eff eff

getting a pallet load of solar ground mounts delivered on Monday and with the snow forecast, maybe I will be able to drag them half a mile up the driveway as a sled train, rather than wheelbarrowing them. lol

up to 775000 unique ips crawling my gitweb

starting consulting on "leveraging blockchain to supercharge AI training"

$$$

... I'll just be teaching their scrapers how to tell they're crawling gitweb, and do a git clone

solar fence rules on a snow day, making plenty of power without needing any cleaning

Did some further investigation and I was wrong about the causalty here -- there was an ongoing crawl distributed amoung thousands of IP addresses before the fast crawl that I blocked.

Both crawls did start at close enough to the same time that they might be linked somehow, but blocking one didn't trigger the other one.

imagine using a botnet of 600 thousand unique ip addresses for days and all you get is a few git repositories you could have cloned in seconds

running at 200 new unique IPs per minute now, no problem, keep em coming

thing is, 80k hits is a tiny amount of hits when you're not running expensive perl scripts.. gitweb is a pig though and its load average checks are a joke when there are 500 of them all running before they are able to check load

70 thousand unique ips now

I have enough (non-ip-blocking) amelorations in place that things are working again now.

40 thousand unique IPs and still climbing

DDOS seems to be from all chinese IPs although the initial scraper was running on google cloud

the person I got thru to didn't even treat this chicken and egg problem as a problem, it was just "ok, I'll get you that information"

And I'm down with that, didn't press the issue. Let's keep Blue Cross's onboarding procedure a mess, it's a useful signal I'm sure.

blocked 2 IP addresses that were crawling gitweb with scrapy and causing a server load of > 500, and a minute later was hit by a full DDOS attack from hundreds of IP addresses all trying to access gitweb

I have disabled gitweb access unfortunately, it's too tempting a target for these asshats

37 minute estimated hold wait lol

changed health insurance to Blue Cross, and got an email saying "your membership card is digital, log into website or use app to get it"

Tried to log into the website, and to register for an account they require information from your ID card.

srsly?

My offgrid EV charge control code has gotten a bit more tuned. Yesterday it was mostly cloudy and snowy, still once the house battery charged up enough, it decided to charge the car for about an hour and a half on and off, and the day ended with the house battery at 100%, so I had plenty of power in the evening to bake some banana bread.

it's snowing and I'm thinking about a week in June

Just because every git-annex issue I've dealt with today came from that week, when I was too busy to keep up.

So many other summer weeks to catch up on this winter..

no #unicode symbol for EV charging, guess I'll go with ⚇ as close enough

what is the nethack symbol for a credit score anyway?

new level of dsytopia just dropped

That bittersweet end of the year feeling when CCC is wrapping up and I have a mountain of talks I will probably never get to watching. Tempered this year by the weirdness of having spent time roaming the underground passages adjacent to ADVENT's caves while watching the blinkenlights from afar.

the hatch

Currently experiencing a grid power outage. This is so weird compared with off grid, power out but nothing I can do to fix it and no indication in the weather when it will improve

My hardcore Linux sister's cell phone email #pine

Heading to an underground TB ward as one does on boxing day

A career in free software is a succession of hurdles. How to do something new and worthwhile? How to make any income while developing it at all? How to maintain your independant vision when working on it for hire? How to deal with burn-out? How to grow a project to be more than a one developer affair? And on and on.

How does a free software project keep paying the bills once it's feature complete? Maybe I am starting to get a glimpse of an answer.

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/the_twenty-fifth_year_of_my_free_software_career/

I've been lucky to be able to spend twenty! five! years! developing free software and making a living on it, and this was a banner year for that career.

To start with, there was the Distribits conference. There's a big ecosystem of tools and projects that are based on git-annex, especially in scientific data management, and this was the first conference focused on that. Basically every talk involved git-annex in some way. It's been a while since I was at a conference where my software was in the center like that -- reminded me of Debconf days.

I gave a talk on how git-annex was probably basically feature complete. I have been very busy ever since adding new features to it, because in mapping out git-annex's feature set, I discovered new possibilities.

Meeting people and getting a better feel for the shape of that ecosytem, both technically and funding wise, led to several big developments in funding later in the year. Going into the year, I had an ongoing source of funding from several projects at Dartmouth that use git-annex, but after 10 years, some of that was winding up.

That all came together in my essentially writing a grant proposal to the OpenNeuro project at Stanford, to spend 6 months building out a whole constellation of features. The summer became a sprint to get it all done. Signficant amounts of very productive design work were done while swimming in the river. That was great.

(Somehow in there, I ended up onstage at FOSSY in Portland, in a keynote panel on Open Source and AI. This required developing a nuanced understanding of the mess of the OSI's Open Source AI definition, but I was mostly on the panel as the unqualified guy.)

Capping off the year, I have a new maintenance contract with Forschungszentrum Jülich. This covers the typical daily grind kind of tasks, like bug triage, keeping on top of security, release preparation, and updating dependencies, which is the kind of thing I've never been able to find dedicated funding for before.

A career in free software is a succession of hurdles. How to do something new and worthwhile? How to make any income while developing it at all? How to maintain your independant vision when working on it for hire? How to deal with burn-out? How to grow a project to be more than a one developer affair? And on and on.

How does a free software project keep paying the bills once it's feature complete? Maybe I am starting to get a glimpse of an answer.

solsticed

children dueling with jetfuel coated lightsabers

"I climbed the bonfire!"

disco ball with a train set underneath it

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/aiming_at_December/ #offgrid #solar

I have been working all year on a solar upgrade aimed at December. Now here it is, midwinter, and my electric car is charging on a cloudy day from my offgrid solar fence.

I lived happily enough with 1 kilowatt of solar that I installed in 2017. Meanwhile, solar panel prices came down massively, incentives increased and everything came together: This was the year.

In the spring I started clearing forest trees that were leaning over the house, making both a firebreak and a solar field.

In June I picked up a pallet of panels in a box truck.

a porch with a a bunch of solar panels, stacked on edge leaning up against the wall. A black and white cat is sprawled in front of them.

In August I bought the EV and was able to charge it offgrid from my old solar system... a few miles per day on the most sunny days.

In September and October I built a solar fence, of my own design.

Me standing in front of the solar fence, which is 10 panels long

For the past several weeks I have been installing additional solar panels on ballasted ground mounts full of gravel. At this point I'm half way through installing my 30 panel upgrade.

The design goal of my 12 kilowatt system is to produce 1 kilowatt of power all day on a cloudy day in midwinter, which allows swapping between major loads (EV charger, hot water heater, etc) on a cloudy day and running everything on a sunny day. So the size of the battery bank doesn't matter much. Batteries are getting cheaper fast too, but they are a wear item, so it's better to oversize the solar system and minimize the battery.

A lot of this is nonstandard and experimental. And that makes sense with the price of solar panels. It costs more to mount solar panels now than the panels are worth. And non-ideal panel orientation isn't a problem when the system is massively overpaneled.

I'm hoping to finish up the install before the end of winter. I have more trees to clear, more ballasted ground mounts to install, and need to come up with something even more experimental for a half dozen or so panels. Using solar panels as mounts for solar panels? Hanging them from trees?

Soon the wan light will fade, time to head off to the solstice party to enjoy the long night, and a bonfire.

Solar fence with some ballasted ground mounts in front of it, late evening light. Old pole mounted solar panels in the foreground are from the 90's.

Installed 2 more #solar panels on ground mounts, reaching my goal of 50% installed in time for solstice.

16 down, 14 to go, but first I will need to clear some more space, and probably order more PV wire.

they sent this to email addresses which have nothing to do with my github account, just used in random commits. really spammy behavior.

hey #github, do you also sell email address lists harvested from git to other spammers?

#github spam will result in random email mentions from github going into my spam folder I suppose. I'm still flagging this as the spam it is.