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:

1

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.

When I presented my blogging bot here a couple months ago, a friend suggested I try to create generated video content - check out the linked video to see what I’ve been able to do so far:
https://youtu.be/WkfGq42OyBI

It’s not quite there - the body movements are random, the eyes aren’t focused on the camera, some of the mouth movements don’t seem to match the face. I’ve added a street scene in the background to make it a bit more interesting.

By Richard Audette, richard@hotelexistence.ca

I’ve created a blogging bot I’ve named Eliza Ng, as a sandbox for playing with generated content and tooling. Check it out!

https://www.eliza-ng.me/
Mastodon: https://botsin.space/@elizang/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/eliza_ng

Who is Eliza Ng?

One of my earliest computing experiences was interacting with a Commodore 64 version of chatbot called Eliza, a psychotherapist chatbot first developed in the mid-1960s at MIT. When I started building my bot persona, I decided to call it Eliza Next Generation, in honour of this early chatbot.

In November, I was following a news story the Washington Post broke about Trustcor, a Certificate Authority with root certificates pre-loaded in all popular browsers. A few academics identified some problematic relationships and facts about Trustcor that puts into question the process used by Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to determine which companies can issue the certificates that our browsers use to indicate a connection is secure. From the article: