Ok, let’s all take a deep breath.

With “Net Neutrality” being repealed, we’re precisely in the same place we were before 2015.

This actually means relatively little, and it is not very feasible for a provider to remove your ability to visit websites that they do not have an “agreement” with, or to charge you more for “sites not on the list”. It’d certainly gain them no favor, and in fact, with the free market which this is set to further promote, they’d be replaced by another option, possibly at a cut-rate price.

This is not going to stop you from watching cat videos or playing Minecraft. I pinky-promise.

This should be a pretty transparent migration for anyone who happens upon this, but I can’t justify the expense of dedicated machines to serve my pointless websites and services, so I’m migrating everything to cheaper, VPS-based hosting.

We’re now running on a handful of virtualized services, with far lower specifications than the old system, and saving nearly half of the cost. Also, We’re live in Russia, as well as in Germany, to celebrate heritage- and domain names that cost less than $1/yr. For now, all still link to the main site due to a limitation in my blogging software, but I’ll rebuild that functionality.

I’m going to change this design to a simpler, less 2003-styled theme, so things may be broken occasionally while I work on this at my leisure.

It’s been over a decade since I registered my first MX donation to Project HoneyPot- and they’ve noticed that I removed a link because the last few times I tried to register changes, the site was not working.

Well, I’ve figured it out. Their token system for activation is not IPv6 compatible. It’s a pity, but it wasn’t all that difficult to figure out after digging through the code (it is nothing changeable on the client side- and modifying the code will make the client fail it’s internal heuristics, making it trivially more difficult to diagnose).

On the sideline, I’ve been interested in their Http:BL system, which is similar to DNS blocklists, but is designated for HTTP use. This enables a user to decide if they want to block a visitor’s traffic due to it being a harvester/spammer/et al..

I’ll probably dig into existing implementations, and build a TextPattern extension for it (Yep, I’m still using TXP over a decade later, too- after giving up my homegrown CMS that I built with no real design ideology in 2003.)

Sure, the fact that Prime is now double what it was a couple years ago, but has a neat $11/mo option probably eases the expense for many. But this isn’t about Prime.

Amazon’s products have taken a steep decline since they’ve started processing for Chinese-based companies. In fact, Amazon removed my reviews when I refused to let them not do something about a Chinese vendor who was selling cloned hardware with STOLEN software. It took nearly a week of phone calls to support, and finally an email to elJeffe before anyone would even own the problem. Then, they removed the complainant. Smooth.

This Consumer Protection Safety Commission link on recalled products will show you just how many “Amazon Exclusive” products have been recalled in 2017 alone, compared to 5 years ago (there was one).

Amazon doesn’t care. Jeff certainly doesn’t- he’s making bank. This is because we’ve become too lazy to shop for our own products, even at the prospect that those purchased through Amazon have not been properly tested before being put up for sale in our market.

Thanks but no thanks.

I’ve let the site fall to the wayside, because I’ve been trying to get my life back together, and I’ve finally realized this is probably as good as it will be until I can make my way forward.

One of the things that I do to try to keep myself “somewhat current” is by repairing and rebuilding hardware for charity. I’ve got a batch of lower-end laptops that I’ve got rebuilt to donate to the local Veterans’ Family Assistance program, and now, a wireless router.

I took a chance on a WNDR4300 router that would turn on, but just wouldn’t work. After ensuring they hadn’t undervolted it by using the wrong power supply (which happens quite often), I connected via Ethernet, and was able to see the ethernet switch, so I knew that was usable. I did the infamous 30-30-30 reset to try to get it back to life.

The power button began flickering when it finally came up, but it refused to take anything from TFTP. Could it be dead?

Upon opening the case and tracking down the 4 TTL pins (common for a full-fledged serial device over three pins, and power), I connected my PL303HX based USB serial adapter, loaded up Minicom, and- we’re off to the races!

It went from Uboot straight into a kernel panic. That’s not a great thing. I tried TFTP again, and it absolutely refused, even with a signed image.

The Uboot build on this device is rather featureful, offering to accept files sent via YModem and Kermit. So, I tracked down some code for the YModem protocol, hacked it up a little, and sent off the binary.

The next morning (it was nearly 10MB, and being sent at 15200 baud. That isn’t all tha tfast these days), I had it boot from the RAM image, and I got a functioning TFTP service! I sent the LEDE 17.01.3 (freshly brewed this morning) image to it, and it’s now working!

Was it worth that much time? I guess that depends on what you value- this was a great learning experience for me, seeing just how much I am learning, and am capable of doing just a few years after my life-altering incident (even if it is with a bit of liberal Google use).