Terry Poulin

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Revisiting one of my favorite anime, I’m again saddened that we’ll likely never see translations of the original Light Novels. I tend to enjoy stories that take tropes, and turn them on their ear, and Maoyu is one of those. But more than that, I think it takes a more unique tack than most stories.

The Hero goes to slay the Demon Lord, and it quickly derails when he’s trying to slice down the archnemesis and she keeps side-stepping the sword and saying hello in greeting, 🤣. It’s kind of a classic trope for a confrontation to the death to erupt from two such forces meeting. But it quickly flips over when faced with two key problems: if the war suddenly ends, it’ll be calamity for all and if either side wins, it spells doom for the other. Rather than fighting, they pledge each other to the other and seek the other side of the hill, that undiscovered country where both their dreams may be found–peace.

Thus the Demon Lord becomes the Crimson Scholar, finding ways for humanity to avoid the starvation and economic collapse the war’s end would cause; and the Hero becomes the Black Knight, cutting down foul human and demon alike to create a world where both sides may come together. But of course since peace isn’t challenging enough they must also face forces that would see the war continue in perpetuity for the sake of lining their own pockets.

I think that tropes are tropes for a reason. Like romantic comedies and action movies, both genres are full of tropes. The couple will end up together. The good guy will triumph over the villain. Yada, yada. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes tropes make for a nice cheesy goodness; there are reasons why the patterns repeat themselves, because we enjoy the journey not just the results. Yet that also means deviating from those established patterns in amusing ways, can be quite a pleasant result.

A roux makes it better

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One of the banes of my cooking experience has always been macaroni and cheese. It’s something that I’ve never been able to make the way that my mother did, and generally don’t make because I suck at it.

In Googling recipes, I encountered an interesting idea for one for a baked macaroni and cheese: using a roux as the foundation of the cheese sauce. That’s definitely nothing like how my mother used to make it, and we didn’t bake it either. I didn’t opt to try the recipe, nor bake it, but I wanted to try the concept. Because it makes sense even if it’s not how I was taught.

Result? Well, a light roux of salted butter and flour meets milk and cheese equals the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever made. Ordinarily, I always find the results lacking or calling for lethal doses when I try to replicate my mother’s methods. Well, a roux isn’t how she did it but it sure makes for a good meal 😋

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One of the past year’s many changes, has seen my shifting from my cast irons to a pair of slightly more conventional skillets. 10″ and 12″ CAROTEs with similar finish to the tamagoyaki pan I’ve enjoyed using, have quite literally become my goto cookware.

A funny side effect, oddly enough is that I’m more inclined to make a roux when it’s convenient. E.g., I might toss a batch of stir fry meat in the skillet, set aside, and then reach for the butter and flour. Combined with the greater use of beef stock in my cooking, this seems to make for a good sauce to cook some macaroni and accompaniments in, and then just reduce until delicious and saucy.

Working off the theory that the various non-stick skillets my mother favored lasted considerably past their recommended service lives, I figure however well the granite style coating lasts, I will have gotten my money’s worth many years before they need replacement. Plus, there is the benefit that when I really need a larger skillet, these fuckers are light enough to one hand the 12″ skillet just fine. As opposed to the hefty weight of the cast irons and risk of making like Barf with a flattened foot largely makes Monstro unwieldy as a 12″ skillet, even with two hands. I love the cast iron, but in practice Geppetto the 10″ is the largest cast-iron that’s practical. Which meant that as a side affect, many times I’ve ended up using my stainless steel pots where a skillet would be more convenient, because my favorite skillets are so damn heavy, lol.

A nice gander at the Apple Lisa

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While the video might be a tad boring by contemporary standards, unless like me, you have an interest in such ancient technologies 😛. I think that this does make a nice demonstration of the system.

Since the guy is using actual hardware, it is also slow as crap by modern standards. Let’s just say that the world has come a long way since a Moto 68k and a meg of RAM was plenty. But I think it’s fairly impressive and innovative a system for its day.

I kind of like the more Electronic Desktop metaphor than the conventional Files and Applications approach that the typical Windows 9x PC functioned as some decades later. I love the document centric rather than application centric view as a concept. Seems like it was a good attempt at creating an environment for office workers, who weren’t computer people. The ability to have files with the same name is odd, but interesting if likely impractical for software developers. The natural saving and manipulation of content is nice.

In addition to the UI design, its relationship to the early Mac seems fairly apparent. In particular, one of the odd things that I encountered digging into 1990s PowerBooks and System 7 is how the classic Mac OS treats placing files on the desktop (basically a flag saying its on the desktop) and handling of floppy diskettes. Both rather different than modern systems of any sort. The Lisa looks like a lot of its concepts made their way into the original Macintosh and later system versions.

It’s kind of a shame that the Lisa was insanely expensive and (IMHO) rather slow, like $10,000 for a basic system. While I’m not convinced that the original Mac could be a good idea without at least a second floppy, its base price of $2,500 was at least less comical than the Lisa. Or should we say, a 512k and way more storage would probably have been worth every penny and still way cheaper than the Lisa.

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Well, that’s surprisingly neat…kind of makes me have to remember that I don’t need another clock, in unusually tempting ways.

Random things

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Powered on Stark to test a boot stick, and figured I’d let the system go update itself. Went downstairs to wash out my coffee cup, and coming back, the line of sight from down the hall to where I left it on my desk reminds me of one of the things I don’t miss about the old Latitude: the screen!

Stark was from a transient era. One in which more consumer oriented laptops began to adapt Intel’s concept of an “Ultrabook” and more business oriented laptops refused to give up their ports until you pry’em from their cold dead motherboards. But almost universally, they all agreed on having a shitty screen compared to basically everything else in computing at the time.

As such, while the laptop served me very well it wasn’t without compromises. The typical 1366×768 pixel screen was basically trash, but it did support external displays and that’s how I tended to use Stark. Onboard was a VGA port (ha!) and the size (mini)HDMI port that nothing else really adapted, but as it got older docking stations able to drive a pair of DisplayPort/HDMI outputs were cheaper than having one shipped off eBay, and the Intel chips back then maxed out at three display pipelines anyway. Ditto irksome things like having an eSATA at the price of a super speed port, having to dedicated a USB port to a Bluetooth dongle, and needing a fanny-pack type battery to get runtime that wasn’t a joke, and weighing almost a kilogram more than I wanted to lug around every day.

But the machine also had its upsides. Like a TPM for encryption, a modular slot that could be fitted with an OEM optical drive or a replacement fitting for a second 2.5″ SATA, and a Core i5 that actually served well up until the rise of Electron applications like Teams and Slack. It also helped that I had enough Latitude D/E series compatible chargers around to never worry, except when working away from an outlet.

All in all, Stark has the unique position of being a computer that managed to not piss me off more often than not. That’s not something many computers can say. So, I think Stark was a successful machine, even if it’s going to stay retired, lol.

Network evolutions

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Thus far, this is looking to be the evilicious plan.

  1. The ns1 VM on zeta will be converted from primary name server that is authoritative for home.arpa and forwards to external DNS, to being only authoritative for my LAN and providing nothing else.
  2. Cream will be unretired and converted into infrastructure.
    • DHCP services (v4/v6)
    • DNS services ala ns2: secondary for my LAN and forwarding to external DNS.
    • Add CNAME aliases for ns3 and dhcp because I’m silly that way.
  3. Reconfigure Eero to use my Raspberry Pi zero ns2 and Cream as its name servers.

The reasoning for this is while Zeta could provide DHCP services easily and the VM running name services has been effective, Zeta not a machine that I want as a single point of failure—but as a single point of truth, it’s convenient.

Notion here being if Zeta sees downtime, as long as it is less than ns2/ns3 take to expire the local zone information, the impact across my household is just the inconvenience of fixing a computer. That is to say, either transient enough of a failure not to cripple things, or epic enough to convert ns2 over into the authoritive using the already in place ready to swap over into master mode setup that I have. And that simply put, Cream wouldn’t be intended to be fucked with or rebooted, and would in tern have a similar failover of moving to Eero’s DHCPv4 and re-enabling forwarding on ns1.

Except for two pains in my ass:

  1. Cream’s CMOS battery has died in storage since its retirement.
  2. Cream is refusing to boot the install media.

Actually, I should probably just see if Magic (my old Raspberry Pi 2) is still laying around somewhere or donate Victory (my Raspberry Pi 3/8G) to the mission. I had intended to load RHEL9, but Debian and I are still on friendly terms :).

Plus, Cream’s tenor as my previous file server included a history of the NUC being a pain in my ass!

The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy

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Nice video giving an overview of the classic handheld’s architecture. The opening may be a little bit harsh IMHO, but also not unwarranted. At least, the way that I look at it the hardware is closer to what a microcomputer could have passed for just over a decade prior, and devices like the Apple II or TRS-80 were hardly portable and battery friendly devices.

That’s a trend that I think largely tends to continue with really portable devices. I remember looking at data about the first Raspberry Pi, and decided it would likely be on par with a ten year old PC — except closer in size to a credit card than a microwave oven, and pretty darn cheap. Likewise, while I find the Steam Deck’s graphics very unimpressive, I find it amazing that someone crammed an Xbox One level of horse power into such a portable package.

It’s pretty darn cool how that sort of evolution plays out, even if my wrist watch literally has an order of magnitude more computing power than my first Personal Computer….

A Rough Network Plan

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Now that the great network migration phase two is pretty stable, where I have the new Eero providing the backbone and a pair of name servers providing DNS with a hand managed zone, it’s time for planning the next phase of the operation. That is to say, DHCP services.

For the most part, I stick to IPv6 addresses now with an IPv6 Unique-Local providing the internal definition of my home.arpa environment. Eero seems to let clients SLAAC away but at some point, I need to snoop closer on its IPv6 support to see if it is doing any kind of goodness like RDNSS/DNSS, but it mostly does DHCPv4.

So, I’m seeing two points of interest here for my DNS arrangements.

Option A.) Ignore the IPv4 world totally and setup DHCPv6 services for my dynamic updates needs. After all, I mostly want AAAA-records not A-records.

Option B.) Set Eero to the good ol’ you’re on your own pal mode and setup both DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 services.

Perhaps I will start with option A, since it is closer to DWIW and should get me what I want; which is IPv6 with dynamic updates to my local domain. But here’s a little thought for option B using Eeero’s default /22 network as a point of reference for the addressing scheme.

192.168.4.0/22      -> 192.168.4.1 - 192.168.7.254
192.168.4.1/22       -> gateway.home.arpa
192.168.7.255/22  -> broadcast
192.168.4.1-16       -> range for routing services; e.g. eero/ap.
192.168.4.17-254  -> deprecated, reserved for fallback to eero.
192.168.5.0-254    -> range for network services; e.g., dns, dhcp
192.168.6.0-255    -> DHCPv4 pool
192.168.7.0-254    -> | ~512 addresses, half the space.

This would effectively give a static space equal to the first /24 worth of the network that’s intended to be hands of for the oh-shit plan. While the DHCPv4 leasing is pretty aggressive on the Eero, I don’t think I’ve see any devices allocated higher than the first octet. The idea being nothing that’s not a router, an access point, or something getting a lease from switching from my server back to the Eero’s DHCP server should land in this portion of the network.

Following that would be a static space equal to the second /24 worth of the network, intended to be allocated for services. Either by static allocation or just making a static reservation. Let’s just say, as much as I like technology, I’ve managed long enough with a lone /24 for my entire household that I’m sure I’m not going to pull 254 static IPv4 addresses out of my ass anytime soon.

Meanwhile the portion of the network roughly equal to the last /23 of the network, effectively the back half of the network and least likely to be interfered with if the Eero ever happens to ‘forget’ its in static mode, would be client addresses. Which are very much intended to be “Don’t give a fuck about” addresses in the sense that the only IPv4 addresses I use are cases like using dig to poke one of my name servers and not wanting to type its IPv6.

One of the food for thought items on my plate is whether or not I want to ‘unretire’ my old file server, Cream, and turn it into a replacement for ns2. Right now, ns2 is running off a Raspberry Pi Zero W that was originally intended to be a RaSCSI drive for my PowerBook.

Ahh, well, I’ve got other things to do for the moment.