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Richard Audette's Projects, Problems, Solutions, Articles on Computing and Security

Starting rootless containers at boot with Podman

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.

Python gps / gpsd KeyError

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.

Creating Generated Video

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.

Introducing Eliza Ng, my generated content sandbox and blogging bot

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.

Who watches the certificate authorities?

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:

Hours of Fun Creating Visual Art with Prompts

“koala bear eating eggs benedict in a bistro” is the prompt I entered into OpenAI’s DALL·E system to generate this image. I have been reading articles about AI image generation since DALL·E 2 launched earlier this year, and have been experimenting with it hands-on since I received access earlier this week. It is lots of fun, but doesn’t always generate the results you might expect. I’ve been trying to describe to it artist Henri Julien’s Chasse-gallerie, a drawing of 8 voyageurs flying in a canoe at night, and DALL·E struggles with the flying canoe. For each prompt, DALL·E initially creates 4 image variations - I’ve selected the most interesting one for each below.