I’ve had a problem with my home router for a long time - the LAN side of the set up has been falling over with frustrating regularity. For me, it means my Audio Streaming setup stops playing Spotify. For my housemates, it means lost time on Overwatch! It’s happening just enough now to be a frustrating lost 5 minutes a few times a day, so it’s time to fix. My home network has always been a pretty simple affair (apart from when I’m borrowing BTOpenzone) - just the ISP provided modem/router. I am, of course, an engineer in the Telecoms Industry. I can do better! …

I installed the Riot desktop app (for matrix) tonight on Debian Stretch (my current laptop). It’s an electron app, so it’s more or less a packaged webapp. Here’s how it went wget -qO - https://riot.im/packages/debian/repo-key.asc | sudo apt-key add - sudo vim EOF /etc/apt/sources.list.d/riot.list # Riot deb https://riot.im/packages/debian/ stretch main deb-src https://riot.im/packages/debian/ stretch main sudo apt update && sudo apt install riot-web Simple. Unfortunately, because I did SSL things tonight I don’t have access to my testbed home server, so I can’t test it. …

I’ve started using YADM, which has been entertaining. In theory, I really like the idea of managing my dotfiles in git. In practise, it’s more difficult than I figured. YADM is pretty simple software - it’s packaged for Debian and is a just a script - it’s available for FreeBSD through the mystical power of wget or curl. It’s packaged for a range of other distributions/OSes too, but they’re pretenders so I don’t care about them …

So I ran a self organised session at 33C3 - DVB-S:Pirate or Amateur Digital TV Stations I figured there wouldn’t be that much interest, so I organised to keep it around the Scottish Consulate / milliways area. I was very wrong… I had way more people than I expected, who were much more interested than I expected. I had clues of this all day, with the regular traffic of people coming and asking at the Consulate about it. …

For the last while, the website’s been running on caddy. Caddy’s a really nice piece of software - https integrated as standard with let’s encrypt, http2 support by default and a simple config file format. It’s pretty cool, I really like it. Unfortunately it’s not yet in any repos, and I don’t feel particularly secure running a server by starting it with sudo and keeping the files and configs in my home directory. …