Dom Corriveau

November 2023 Retrospective

Posted on Nov 30, 2023

Hold onto your butts, this is a long one.

We have officially wrapped our contracting season and I am now on an extended vacation. I’m both excited and nervous being off for about 2 months as I get bored easily. But, this is some much needed rest.

Number one on my list for the off season is to deal with some personal health issues. I’ve had GERD for most of my adult life and this year it started getting out of control. My throat is damaged enough that I have a hard time swallowing. This sends me into full on panic attacks when I eat because I constantly think I’m going to choke.

I’m trying not to let it keep me down. We threw a big party for WWE Survivor Series, which was a blast. I’ve never seen my wife more excited for wrestling than when Randy Orton made his reappearance during the final match.

My son and I also went on a hike through Woodard Bay Conservation Area. It has been unseasonably clear and cold for us, so it was dry on the trail. We don’t get this that often during the winter months.

Tech projects

Offline mode

I have to admit something… I’m a digital prepper and a datahoarder. More than half of my NAS is various datahoarder dumps and I actively keep them updated for the scenario in which I no longer have public internet access.

Here are some examples of my hoards:

  • With fdroidcl I download app APKs from F-Droid and archive them.
  • Using the create-USB feature, I download and archive Flatpaks.
  • Also in the archive are Docker containers using the docker save feature that produces a tarred repository that can then be installed on other systems.
  • I create zim archives of entire websites and put them into my self-hosted Kiwix server.

For the long American Thanksgiving weekend I wanted to have some extended offline time away from social media and the constant news cycle. I really wanted some time to relax and disconnect.

I also wanted to test going “offgrid”.

Now when I say I wanted to go offline what I mean is “not connected to the public internet” and still have access to my LAN.

I learned a lot while being “offline”. It was relaxing and I hardly looked at my phone. While offline I still wanted to do some hobby tech stuff, which included trying out BlendOS which was in my Linux distro archive. Its immutable and can run Android apps. This was a good test of my archive as I could still set it up and install apps without ever accessing the internet.

I’m going on for quite a while here. Is anyone interested in this? Anyone want to know more about my datahoarding habits? Maybe more about my “internet-in-a-box” project for going offgrid?

Ping me on Mastodon and let me know.

Desktop changes

Previously I mentioned that my office is in the garage/shop. Now that our contracting season is over I don’t spend much time in the shop. Its also freezing out there and using that space for my office is not feasible during the winter. It has been exceptionally cold for the Puget Sound region in November which made it even worse.

About mid-month I moved my desk inside to a corner of the living room. I’ve tried to keep everything as minimal as possible while still having room for my various projects and experiments. We don’t have a ton of room in our house with 6 other people, which is why I ended up the garage in the first place.

I used this opportunity to also re-base my desktop on Debian 12 with XFCE. I initially configured it with KDE and immediately hated it. I’ve never said I hated a desktop environment before, but I grew to hate KDE over the first couple of day. I won’t drag KDE. All I’ll say is if you enjoy KDE, good for you. Its not for me.

Initially I thought I would install an immutable operating system like Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite, but I don’t think those are right for me. I want an immutable-like setup where all apps are installed using DistroBox, Podman/Docker, and Flatpak/Snap, without being forced into a corner with the underlying OS. I want the ability to configure a base layer of applications that run on the host with that host being Debian based. So I went with Debian Stable, very few apps (mostly CLI) installed on the host, and then force myself to only use sandboxed/container-based apps.

So far it is working really well and I’m happy with this setup. I will write a separate blog post about this setup and a 1 month follow-up. Now to not touch it for all of 2024…

Searx-NG

Search engines nowadays are truly terrible. Google is cluttered and over-optimized. I switched to DuckDuckGo for a time, but the results just kept getting worse and worse. In fact, some searches only produce a handful of results and then quickly change to “food near me” links. Lately I’ve been using StartPage, which is just a privacy frontend for Google.

I had been thinking about setting up my own self-hosted instance of Searx-NG for a while and just never found the time. Searx is a metasearch engine. It combines searches from multiple sources including Google, DDG, Yahoo, Bing, and numerous other sources. I wanted to try this not to be more private, but to just have a better search experience.

Now that I’m on an extended vacation I had an evening to play with setting it up. I expected it to take a while to get going, but I was done in about 20 minutes. Set it up with the official Docker container and sent through my reverse proxy, then spent some time configuring the settings.

Its been running for a few days and so far so good. Its a little slower (instead of 1-2 seconds loading from StartPage, its ~3 seconds from my Searx-NG server), but so far the results have been much better. I’m really happy with it and I’ll report back next month with a more thorough blog post.

New hardware

I recently learned about GoodwillFinds.com which is an official Goodwill website and has a decent amount of used tech for various projects (or an excuse to get stuff to play with). I wanted to test out what its like ordering from them online, especially before the holiday season. My wife knows I would like nothing better than a big ol’ pile of various gadgets and laptops to play with during my vacation.

I ended up ordering a Lenovo Ideapad 110s and played with it for most of the month. I have it setup with Crunchbang++ and it has essentially replaced my Pinebook Pro in the emergency kit/go bag.

Redmi Note 7 + Droidian

I wrote about using Linux on an old Android phone earlier in the month. It was a fun project, but the hardware I have and the state of Linux on mobile didn’t make for a good experience.

Check it out here: The Droidian flop

Added Tor Hidden Service to this blog

I also wrote about this at the beginning of the month. Its a short recap of how this blog is now available as a Tor Hidden Service for those that want more privacy.

Here: Privacy update for this blog

Movies

  • See No Evil, Hear No Evil
    • Felt in the mood for a Pryor/Wilder comedy and this one came to mind first.
  • Under Siege 2
    • We don’t watch much Seagal, but this one is just ridiculous enough and before he got really lazy.
  • Jawan
    • We love, love, love, love Hindi action movies. The combination of over-the-top action with huge dance numbers is so much fun. We had been looking forward to this for a few months and mostly enjoyed it.
    • Warning: There is a very graphic dog death scene that was unnecessary. It was clearly only put in for shock value (which the movie uses shock scenes repeatedly throughout). If it wasn’t for this scene the movie would have been great.
    • We have been enjoying Shah Rukh Khan movies lately, but the movie we are most excited for throughout all of 2023 has been Salman Khan in Tiger 3 (which has a cameo from Shah Rukh Kahn as Pathaan). I’m so hyped for this movie since it has all three of our faves: Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Hrithik Roshan. The only way it could get better is if Tiger Shroff also made an appearance, but his character died in a previous movie in the series.
  • The Killer
    • This is the new Netflix thriller with Michael Fassbender. It has all the markings of a movie we would enjoy. The problem is it was so unbelievably boring. Huge letdown.
  • Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning
    • We don’t normally watch the Mission Impossible movies and have only seen 2 or 3 of the series.
    • I was so confused. What the hell happened in this movie?
  • The Creator
    • It was okay. Typical “escort the child” scifi/action movie that doesn’t do anything new.
    • Feels like there is a lot of potential here and I enjoyed a new story with new characters, instead of an unnecessary sequel to an existing property.
  • Blow Out
    • This is a 1981 Brian De Palma movie starring John Travolta that we had never heard of before.
    • LOVED IT.
  • Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
    • We watch this every year on Thanksgiving.
    • Interested to hear others opinions: is this the best John Hughes directed movie? He didn’t direct Pretty in Pink and most of his other stuff hasn’t aged well.
  • Die Hard/Die Hard 2: Die Harder
    • Christmas doesn’t start until Hans Gruber falls from Nakatomi Tower.
  • No Holds Barred
    • Absolutely terrible. One of our favorites!

TV

Dark Winds

Believe it or not, I actually watched a TV series. Well, I watched the first season and it was only 6 episodes. My wife started it a month ago then stopped and waited for me so we could watch it together as she knew I would like it.

Its very good and I’ll definitely be watching the second season before the end of the year. We lived in Arizona (America Southwest) and although I never fit in with conservative politics (and why we couldn’t wait to leave), I fell in love with the desert. I spent a lot of time hiking through the Superstition Mountains, camping on Mt. Lemmon, and exploring the Saguaro National Forest. This show does a great job showing how beautiful the southwest desert is.

Games

Huntdown (Switch)

One of the vendors we buy parts from for my contracting business gave me enough reward points that we could cash them in for a Nintendo Switch OLED edition. I mostly got it for the kids, but I found myself thoroughly enjoying playing from the couch.

Initially I was playing Super Mario Wonder, which the kids picked up, but then I saw Huntdown on sale. Its directly in my wheelhouse: side-scrolling retro shooter with short levels. I’ve been having fun playing it in spurts.

Splinter Cell Blacklist and PC gaming

Last month I mentioned I had been playing Blacklist after reading a Splinter Cell book.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with PC gaming for years and not because I use the Linux desktop. No matter what system I use I do not enjoy PC gaming. In fact, after dealing with issues with this game, I have completely given up on PC gaming and turned over my Steam account to my son.

After solving some issues with the game crashing every 30 minutes, I would still have issues with it occasionally causing my entire system to poweroff. Every time the game launches I have to enter my Ubisoft user info and about half the time it would recognize my gamepad.

I am so tired of dealing with PC gaming issues. I don’t want to spend time troubleshooting problems. I don’t want to have 73 different apps installed for gaming. I don’t want to deal with drivers.

So, I’m doubling down on my Xbox and the Switch. Just give me a gaming appliance. I don’t even care about the lock-in. Please just make it easy for me.

Sidenote: After reconfiguring my desktop to Debian 12, I played around with using Distrobox to install Bazzite. This is an Arch-based OCI that will install everything needed for gaming in one container. If you like to game on PC and on Linux, definitely check this out. It made installing and configuring everything easy and I didn’t notice any performance issues. It didn’t fix the overall PC gaming experience, but did make it easier and is super cool tech. If I got back into PC gaming I would start here.

Articles

This post has already been going to way to long. Here’s just a list of articles that impacted me the last month with no commentary.

That’s all for this time. Bye, pals.