Blog/May 2021/May 28th
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Happy birthday to Naomi and Gabriel! And happy birthday to Eliyahu as well! And congratulations to my nephew Chaim for completing his degree! And congratulations to Sarah, we hope, for keeping her job!
Sarah’s job was supposed to run through September, since she’s filling in for a woman on maternity-leave. But that woman decided to return to work much earlier, so Sarah was up for the chop. Fortunately, they offered her two other positions; at present, I don’t know which she’ll take, but either is better than not having a job.
Since we ran out of wine this past shabbat, we made a trip this week to the liquor store to refill our stock. I’m embarrassed to say, the owner was very happy to see us and greeted us with gusto. We hadn’t been there since before pesaḥ, so he wondered what had become of us. Fortunately, he hadn’t run out of wine.
A friend in need, is a friend indeed.
I spent considerable effort his week on two main projects. First, resuscitating Esther’s old laptop. Second, migrating my web and email server to new hardware.
Esther’s laptop suddenly stopped working about a year ago now, and we sent it in for repairs. The repair person returned the laptop claiming it was fixed, but it was in fact, “not fixed”. So though I was mightily displeased, I decided to find alternatives. I spoke with someone I knew, who led me through some diagnostics and eventually came to the conclusion that the charger and battery were the actual problems. So I asked, “how much?”, and decided I could do better ordering on-line.
Due to the COVID hysteria of this past year, we didn’t have the opportunity to get the parts, so we took advantage of our recent US trip to get them (for much, much, less than the repair person quoted). I put the parts in the laptop this week (in about 20 minutes), and voilà! the machine works like a champ. If you want an anti-recommendation for a repair-person in Jerusalem, you can ask me privately…
The second task was a lot longer and more difficult. My previous server was an old laptop with a broken screen, which I repurposed as a server quite a long time ago. The new server is a ROCKPro64 which was given to me, with a 500Gb NVMe disk attached to it. No moving parts, and uses much less electricity.
I’ll spare you all the details, but since the new machine is running a very new OS (the Armbian hardware-specific port of Ubuntu 20.04.2 “Focal”) and the old one had started out on Ubuntu 12.04 and been migrated up over the years, there were a lot of things which were done in an obsolete way, so I had to do some retooling.
That’s one reason why the blog email this time is a direct email, and not from an email-list. That’s the way it’ll be going forward. This is the way.
Bits and pieces:
- A long thread highlighting recent antisemitic attacks in America and Europe.
- The mayor of Chicago is an overt racist. As “Dumpster Fire” says, everything about this is bad.
- The considerable (if circumstantial) evidence of a Wuhan lab leak. Even Fauci doesn't rule it out. Likewise this science reporter. It can no longer be dismissed as solely a “conspiracy theory”. Consequences? Unlikely, for the PRC, anyway.
- New tech might give us Mach-17 aircraft. TL;DR: that means possibly sub-thirty-minute flights from NY to LA. Of course, you'd still end up in LA…
- Another tech advance gives electric motors which don't need magnets. TL;DR: less dependence on China for “rare-earth” materials, and more reliable motors.
- Cloudflare wants to kill the “CAPTCHA”. Who doesn’t? But their solution involves “security keys”, which can then be used to determine who (of a group, at least) is using the browser. This is a bad, bad, idea (because: privacy).
- And: scientists reliably predict age by measuring blood proteins. The rest of us will have to rely on birth-certificates.
The weather will be hot and not-hot for shabbat, becoming very hot during the week. Summertime, and the living is roasting…
Because Esther is toodling off to Tel Aviv this morning to engage in public-knitting, it’s up to me to make the shabbat food. caveat eator.
My shabbat menu highlights:
homemade ḥalla (Esther’s, from the freezer),
potato-leek soup,
fesenjan,
Persian rice (tahdig),
roasted peppers,
roasted sweet potato salad,
cabbage salad,
various salatim,
and cupcakes (also from the freezer).
Until next time,
shabbat shalom!
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