I’ve managed to do quite a bit over the last few months- getting up to date with CentOS, Ubuntu, the various BSDs, and of course, discovering Void.

Although it’s rather inexpensive, I no longer require more than a handful of rented servers for my personal use- so I’m dropping back to a couple dedicated hosts for my important tasks, and VPS for backup and emergency failover services.

For being spring, it feels more like winter than last month did!

OK, so it’s not that exciting-

I made my first commit to Void Linux, updating the Adobe Pepper Flash component to the latest build available, completely built on the framework of another user who didn’t commit their work (for whatever reason).

Been working out bugs and other issues today, but nothing really interesting enough to note here.

You might notice that I missed yesterdays’ update- my network was down until about 9pm due to poor weather finally eroding my cable (both signal and coax) to the point of being useless. It’s snowing today.

Not a lot to note since I can’t work on the cars- but I’m working on adding keepassxc to Void. I spent this morning migrating all of my data out of LastPass, rebuilding their poorly-constructed CSV (with embedded JavaScript parsing, which their system offered into a Keepass v1 XML format. I forgot just how annoying PHP can be for higher level functions such as generating non-colliding UUID v4 compatible numerics.

Why? LastPass is one of the most polished and convenient looking password managers!? That’s precisely why.

They’ve had security issues before, and their browser interface is very poorly written, allowing not only password theft once, but twice. While this is on the interface between LP and the Browser, and not the underlying system- it does not give me faith in their abilities, even though they patched these issues in under 24 hours.

I really love Void, but I keep running into odd issues. Trying to compile my build of keepassxc, the installer segfaults- but stops doing so when I change the installation to pipe debugging information to the console.

This fails:

        $XBPS_INSTALL_XCMD -Ayd "$pkg" > $tmplogf 2>&1

This doesn’t:

        $XBPS_INSTALL_XCMD -Avyd "$pkg" | tee $tmplogf 2>&1

GM, in their overtime-penny-pinching wisdom, left the cabin air intake (this is what goes through your heater, and your AC) open in the 2006-2013 Impala.

It’s nearly directly exposed to the weather. This cover (which was not designed to be completely watertight) will not keep water from pooling on the filter (which may mold- certainly will annoy allergies), so they decided to stick another piece of plastic over the filter itself- beneath the now-top cover to assist with mold prevention. It does nothing to prevent the filter from getting wet, except for ‘dribble through’ prevention. What about other allergens, such as dust?

The pictured filters were new in 2014. Obviously an open-exposed filter will degrade faster- but this is the worst “not original” filter I’ve seen in a car that didn’t have something BROKEN in order for the dirt to get to it. It’s always a good plan to replace these yearly- more often if you are in a harsh climate. This is still no excuse for poor design.

The “Former Known As” Police Impalas are shaping up!

New fluids, bulbs, buffed out headlamps, and a preliminary rub of the paint- they don’t look all that bad. Oh, and I cleaned the engine compartment. I don’t understand why so many people let them stay filthy. They don’t need to be this clean, but it serves a secondary purpose so I can identify and fix any issues before they find their way home.

Also, got the headlamps done on the Dodge- it’s going to need some paint touchup.