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The Church of Sysadministry

2020-03-29 :: Al Min
#system administration  #NAS  #NFS  #raspberry pi  #raspberry pi 4  #mStream  #Ampache  #Subsonic  #DSub 

Not so long ago I decided to switch from Google Play Music (where I’ve uploaded most of my library and which is soon to be subsumed under Youtube Music) to running my own open-source streaming service from my home server (an early 2011 Macbook Pro upgraded with SSD and an old Dell Desktop that crapped out recently). I initially ran mStream because I liked the idea of running a Node app, and it wasn’t too bad, but I could never get the Android app to work.

Lately, I’ve switched to Ampache, which is unfortunately PHP/MySQL-based, but it has a whole host of configuration options and is compatible with the well-supported Subsonic API, which means I can use DSub, the open-source Android app. Minus the usual hullabaloo getting that stack working on Ubuntu, it works great. I can even connect our Roku TV to it’s DLNA service to stream the library there.

Work let me take home an ancient Netgear ReadyNAS NV+, which I figured I’d use to hold the music and mount via NFS on the server. It sorta worked, but the Android app would crap out on random songs, which I’m guessing is due to the NAS throughput? So I dug up an old 2TB WD Passport Ultra (USB 3.0) and decided to format it to ext4 (took almost 5 hours!) and decided to connect it to my Raspberry Pi 4 (the Macbook is only USB 2.0). Incidentally, I decided to try out Pi-hole on the Pi and discovered that it blocks the Zelle functionality on my TDBank app so had to whitelist a bunch of URLs that I had to discover by trial and error via the logs. Here’s the list of URLs:

  • api.leanplum.com
  • cdn.branch.io
  • identity.mparticle.com
  • mediation.adnxs.com
  • mpsnare.iesnare.com
  • nativesdks.mparticle.com
  • nexus.ensighten.com
  • nym1-ib.adnxs.com

Anyway, the Pi is running NFS and the Pi-hole like a champ, and just running ls on the share vs. the NAS is infinitely faster. As for the NAS, probably best to relegate it to backup duties.

The New Abnormal

2020-03-29 :: Al Min
#covid-19  #pandemic  #coronavirus  #quarantine 
If youth up through my college years felt lonely and empty, and thereafter through the thirties (mostly in NYC) felt a little less lonely and empty, then these days my psychic space feels cramped and short on time. It’s strange that so many posting online mention boredom or having extra time. I feel oddly suffocated by the outside world, even as we’re all set apart from it at the moment. Everywhere we’re inundated with “content” but (to my mind) less meaning. Maybe because so much of it has been abstracted away from the body. Something about the visceral is missing.

Pandemic Spring

2020-03-27 :: Al Min
#covid-19  #spring  #pandemic  #coronavirus  #quarantine 

Are we really ever unemcumbered though? The psychic bubbling from endless bad news and nonstop content is the undercurrent to the spring day’s ending over Harlem Meer. In meditation we train the mind to sit with these currents above, below, and engulfing us, but the endless nameless leaves us murky adrift after the occasional brief clarity. Is that the joy in contrast to mere happiness?

Nameless Strange

2020-03-22 :: Al Min
#isolation  #covid-19  #pandemic  #coronavirus  #quarantine 

I can’t help but be struck by an aura of eeriness in all that I see lately… or maybe it’s that I’m only seeing what strikes me as eerie. All the spring warmth is humming with tension and anxiety of uknowables. And yet continues the mapping of expectation against actual, but if not that act of projection then what is there to do but numbly go through it in dumb animal mime? Meditation lately feels sisyphean, clarity that fogs too soon, and my body itself betrays me with its diseased, unfathomable inertia to entropy. The space of possibility seems to be shrinking.

Tomorrow’s Today

2020-03-03 :: Al Min
#stuck 

Overwrought and overwritten, far from first-thought-best-thought, I move this morning in words barely held. A 5am start for reasons still stalled in a small circle wound close-but-not-too-close. Here goes, still too early for heavy shadows.

Ayeres

2020-02-25 :: Al Min
#español 
Hoy no es hoy. Si sumo los ayeres aun no es hoy. ¿Que es un día en la vida? ¿Que es la vida en un día? Sin duda no hay la vida. Se llena los grises. Los ruidos de los pájaros se mezclan con el sonido de la lluvia. Hoy no es solo un día. Hoy es los días perdidos.

Entropy

2020-02-24 :: Al Min
#entropy  #fragmentation 
Daydream warm again sitting on a bench at the southwest corner of AMNH thinking of entropy and fragmentation. At some moment of aging the momentum shifts from wanting to get a handle on it all to just hoping for a few fragments of understanding, though the vestigial holist desire continues to worry its prayer-bead tail—body of the animal, self as fractal, periodic Mandelbrot palimpsest, masked entropy.

Sunday Morningside Sun

2020-02-23 :: Al Min
#moments 
Noon sunbeams on my back and hatless head. I’m waiting for C. Southwest corner of Morningside Park, warming a stone step, warm with a looming spring that keeps poking it’s head impatiently into this winter’s mostly snowless days.

My Islandora

2020-02-22 :: Al Min
#islandora 8  #music  #covers  #Pearl Jam  #Footsteps 

As I’m starting to post to this blog, I’m realizing that I need some way to manage my content, e.g. images, audio, video. I could just add the files to the static asset folders, but as I’m wont to do I decided to overly complicate matters and host my own digital library. At the museum where I work, we use an open source project called islandora to manage our digital library collections. Islandora 8 is still being developed, and the first production-ready release is due any day now, but there’s a rad development version that runs in a vagrant box, which is sufficient for my purposes here. Anyway, it’s up and running, though I don’t really understand how it all works yet. But here’s a recording I made ages ago of me covering a Pearl Jam b-side called “Footsteps” (please excuse the bad reverb and histrionics):

EDIT: Islandora is pretty much defunct, but here’s my Archipelago:

How It’s Made

2020-02-21 :: Al Min
#hugo  #golang  #markor  #termux  #inotify  #lunr.js  #bash  #open source 

This blog is built using an open-source static site generator called Hugo, which is built with an open-source programming language called Go, and it’s hosted on my home server, which is an early 2011 MacBook Pro running Ubuntu. I’m right now writing this in an Android app called Markor (a document editor with Markdown preview capability), and once saved, I’ll run a Bash script with a terminal emulator (Termux) widget (which sits on my Pixel 3 home screen) that will copy that file via ssh to the server. The server then runs an inotify script that updates the static site and re-indexes the lunr.js module index.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what any of the above meant. But I guess this is my life now.

this is fine meme

About My 2013 New Year’s Resolution

2020-02-10 :: Al Min
#2013 New Year's Resolution 
In 2013 I resolved to create one complete artwork and one poem for every day of the year. I recorded this work in a tumblr blog called postmortemism (which I may delete at some point, now that I’ve transferred the contents here). The quality of the work is expectedly uneven, but it taught me the valuable lesson (one that should be emphasized more often in creativity) that discipline (which often means working when not in the mood or right frame of mind or whatever) not infrequently produces the most interesting/surprising/energizing/inertial results.

a crud year to come uppance rudderless boat

2013-12-31 :: Al Min
#2013 New Year's Resolution  #my work 
a crud year
to come-
uppance
rudderless
boat
shoes
both of us
floating in

oliver wendell holmes

2013-12-31 :: Al Min
#2013 New Year's Resolution  #my work 

Oliver Wendell Holmes

All Teh Taaaaaaaags