Are you a Meshtastic user in North Toronto? Reach out and I will invite you to a local Meshtastic Discord group.

Background

A mesh network is a network where all participants can communicate with each other, with each participant cooperating with the transmission of information.

I love the idea of mesh networks, where anyone who wants to take part can just jump in, and there’s no dependency on a communications provider for service. In 2016, I attempted to build out a mesh built with wifi technology in my neighbourhood but I was unable to generate interest.

I have Ubuntu Livepatch running on one of my PCs, and I was getting the following error:

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*** System restart required. Kernel SRU period has ended ***

It was clear that I needed to update the kernel to continue to receive patches, but an apt-get upgrade wasn’t installing a new one. It wasn’t clear to me how to identify and update to the latest supported kernel, and it took some searching around.

On October 18th 2023, I migrated this website from WordPress hosted on an AWS EC2 VM, to a static website built with Hugo, now hosted on AWS S3. And this morning (October 21st), I just shut down the VM. I spun up the first version of this VM on February 5th, 2014 - so this setup has served me well for 9 years. It was rebuilt 3 times, starting with Ubuntu 13.04, ending with 20.04. The featured image is a capture of the last time it served up a page.

I work on a web based product which supports hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. Our servers were first built out in 2014, before I joined the team. By 2018, our environments were starting to look dated, with some components approaching end of life. I submitted an intake request with our shared-services infrastructure team to modernize it, and assess a move to Azure, but as everything was still supported, and as we had no new requirements, we were unable to make a case, as other lines of business had much more pressing concerns.

I’m building out a new server at home, and decided to try out Podman instead of Docker for running containers. Everything is a bit different. I wanted some containers to start on boot, as I had previously setup with Docker. I found an article that got me most of the way there, but it was missing a few key things for rootless containers. Here’s how I got a Vaultwarden container I setup, named vaultwarden, booting for user username and group groupname, on an Ubuntu / systemd based system.

I have been adding GPS logging to my Bicycle Dashcam. All of the example Python code (eg: https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/gpsd-client-example-code.html) I’ve found online throws this error after about a minute:

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Exception has occurred: KeyError'el'File "example2.py", line 12, inwhile 0 == session.read():KeyError: 'el'

I’m not sure if this is a problem unique to my GPS receiver, but it regularly sends data that is not “class”:“TPV” (eg: “class”:“SKY”) - TPV is the data with coordinates, and whenever that happens, all the sample code throws a KeyError.