busybee fluffy rambles

So, I found out that my wildcard SSL certificates weren’t being renewed, which in turn was because certbot needed to be able to edit DNS records in order to do so. In investigating that I found that I couldn’t install the latest version of certbot and its Linode plugin, which led me to discover that my server was actually running the i386 ubuntu core with amd64 grafted onto it, instead of being actual amd64, which was in turn because this server had been provisioned years ago and i386 was the supported configuration.

So I went through the exercise of trying to switch over to amd64, found that the best path forward was to back up all my data (which was already done since I keep incremental backups every night) and just reimage. Which seemed like a pain. But the alternative for a more graceful transition was to set up a new VPS, migrate stuff across, and then decommission the old VPS, which would have also been a pain.

So anyway I decided that since my server was still basically running 32-bit and would be stuck there forever if I didn’t rip off the band-aid, I’d rip off the band-aid.

While I was at it, I’d been meaning to switch to nginx for years, and this was a good enough excuse as any.

I wonder how many things are going to break on November 20, 2286.

Three nice things happened today:

1. It turns out my favorite dress has pockets which I somehow didn’t realize at all and now it’s my even more favorite dress

2. first day at work went well

3. Hacked my camera to make it Better

So let’s see. It’s been a few days since I decided to stop going to social media (specifically, Twitter and Mastodon) and things are feeling pretty okay. I’m still getting plenty of chatter, but it’s with groups of friends instead of the entire Internet. All of the bad news still manages to make its way to me but I’m not, like, immersing myself in it, and when I have conversations about stuff it’s with actual people and not a gigantic abyss of torment.

It’s helpful that right now Song Fight!’s chat is being fairly active due to the not-quite-live stuff taking place, and it’s nice having real conversations with these people I’ve known for so long. In some ways I feel like the pandemic is the best thing to happen to Song Fight!; the in-person live events were starting to feel like we were all just going through the motions, for the most part.

Yesterday I decided to take a break from social media. This was for a number of reasons, but they all boil down to my increasing frustration with how interactions occur in rapid-fire quick-sharing spaces, and this has been growing for quite some time.

The microblog format significantly changes the way people interact. Every post is short and taken out of context (while everyone expects everyone else to have the full context already), which makes it impossible to have a as meaningful conversation especially when a short notion spreads far and wide. I feel that it is a big part of what’s dividing everyone in a never-ending search for clout that devolves into a shouting match.

I remember around 15 years ago being impressed with the fact that the total amount of hard drives in my home had crossed the 1TB threshold.

Nowadays I have around 25TB worth of spare hard drives just sitting in a box. And quite a lot of capacity actually in use, too. Jeeze.