confusedpuppy

I used to work as an electrician in the automation industry (robots that welded the frame of automobiles) but I was only an apprentice. I worked alongside robot and PLC programmers and absorbed information through them. I lost the motivation to finish my apprenticeship due to a changed perspective on the harmful affects of too much progress. That was as close as I got to any coding.

I decided to enjoy a mid-life retirement after protesting my way into getting fired which gave me time to explore hobbies. Along the way I ended up buying a used Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 and found some joy in both self hosting and shell scripting. Fortunately shell scripting supplements self hosting. I have been slowly crafting a low resource, low maintenance, minimal server.

Both Pi’s run Alpine Linux, the Pi 4 is dedicated to HomeAssistant which controls a handful of lights and switches. The Pi 5 runs Caddy and Kiwix. Right now it just hosts a bunch of wikis and a static file server with Caddy. Eventually I plan to run a blog created only by a single Bash script.

This is all completely outside of any workplace skill and I think I’d like to keep it that way. Programming for money would likely kill the wonder I still have for computers.

Everything I have currently is pretty much working and maintaining itself. My logs are quiet and predictable. It’s been nice.

I do have two things to do. One is it switch from iptables to nftables because podman is depreciating support for iptables. I absolutely hate working with firewalls, the syntax is always awful. For some reason ufw isn’t working with nftables like I hoped so now I’m working up the energy to learn nftables itself.

The other thing to do is to update Alpine Linux to the latest release version. I’m trying to figure out how to properly update the cache of installed packages on my main computer. After that I should be able to run my upgrade script and things should take care of itself. I hope. With Alpine I usually wait a month or two after the initial release of a new version, things always seem to break if I update immediately and I don’t want to trouble shoot too many things.

Other than that, I’ve gone back to making functional scripts again. Currently I am working on a new backup script that handles logging and automated rotation of backup snapshots. It’ll be POSIX portable and easy to integrate with crontab. It’s essentially the culmination of all my POSIX shell scripting knowledge. I just have to figure out one last and huge hurdle and I’ll be happy with the script.

I too was upset with the use of Claude/AI/LLM’s in the rsync project. The maintainer received a lot of public backlash and as a result people have offered their time to help the maintainer with this project.

Since the backlash, the use of agents has been drastically reduced. That seems like a very human and overall positive response. It sucks that it happened. It’s nice that people are now doing the work again. The response could have been a lot worse. I can be forgiving in this specific situation.