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Charting my Course for a Low-Impact Web Presence With the hectic clamor of summer and fall coming to a close, it seems I can once again dream up projects that might actually come to fruition. I’ve been tossing around an idea for a while now, heavily inspired by Low<-Tech Magazine and their solar-powered website, of self-hosting my website locally on a small Kubernetes cluster. The major motivation for this project comes from a desire to reduce my impact and explore how we can exceed the value provided by turn-key solutions and profit motivated corporations.

After coming into a possession of an Early 2015 MacBook Pro, it turned out to be a perfect opportunity to install OpenBSD. This crystallized as a result of having some older, but still perfectly performant hardware, along with my recent run-ins with principles related to permacomputing. The latter deserves a future post all on its own, but in short the ideas center around resilience, sustainability, and our relationships with hardware and software.

A quick note–I’ve recently committed to restructuring the sort of content I post here. While technology is at the forefront of my interests, prepare for rambling on the many others. I’m re-reading Time Loops by Eric Wargo after a recent and particularly reinvigorating syncronicity. I would recommend this book to anyone and I’m excited to explore his relatively new book that I just found out about, Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self.

When I began working on this website about a year and a half ago, it was biased by a job hunt. At the time, I wasn’t satisfied with where I was at in my career. To advance, it was ideal to have a place to demonstrate some level of skill. As a result, I treated the content very mechanically and the authenticity I am now hunting for suffered. While I grew up with the internet in a state more or less functionally similar to what we have today, it was amorphous and I lacked context for what it represented and how it was structured; a story as old as time, not understanding what you have until it’s gone.

FreeIPA is an identity management solution combining LDAP, Kerberos, NTP, and DNS, among others. I have deployed this in production for our small business to manage users across several satellite retail and production locations. Currently I have no shared home directory set up so when a user moves to a different workstation, they must reconfigure their GNOME and Firefox settings. This has minimal impact right now as users are usually using a single workstation to complete computer-related tasks, but in preparation for business growth, as well as catering to the unique users moving across multiple facilities, I will be testing out NFS-based automounting home directories.

While it’s relatively straight forward to install FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE on the Raspberry Pi 4, I ran in to a particular issue that warrants additional visibility. A simple dd gets our extracted image on the SD card: $ sudo dd if=FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-arm64-aarch64-RPI.img of=/dev/{OUTPUT DEVICE} bs=4M status=progress $ sync After inserting the SD card and attempting to boot, however, is where the issue arose. I enabled the UART in the U-Boot config.txt within the MSDOSBOOT partition and hooked up a serial cable.

I’ve had a pair of Ubiquiti NanoStation loco M5 devices operating continually for around 5 years. They were finally decommissioned in 2020, but recently were revived for a project at work temporarily bridging two buildings while I transferred premesis equipment. I suppose it goes without saying that of course I was pressed for time and of course this would be a simple in-and-out. It also goes without saying that of course things didn’t work out as intended and of course these device decided that their previous life of working 24/7 was over and retirement was in full swing.

Having patiently been awaiting attention on the always growing list of to-dos, I’ve finally directed focus towards GIS (geographic information system). Making sense of maps has been a big component in many of my personal pursuits and merging that with the extensibility of the digital world is an obvious next step. I’m going to start with Mapbox to practice making basic requests to their API: import os import requests import urllib.

My current (and very much WIP) application is written in Python. I utilize Metrc’s API via GET requests to build a local database of facilities, packages, harvests, sales, and transfers for further data analysis and it also provides an extremely efficient way of interacting with the traceability system that isn’t a web app. Currently taking advantage of SQLite, a local database makes for a much smoother experience. As of late, I’ve been going through the Rust book and the exercises provided by Rustlings to wet my whistle, as it were.