I’m a retired Unix admin and I hate Microsoft and Apple.

In 2025, we found 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets in new public GitHub commits.

What the fuck?!?

I’ll be 60 this year - that’s looming fucking huge. For some reason 50 didn’t really bother me but 60 really sounds old. And yet half the time I still feel half my age. It’s almost like most of ageing is realising what old people mean when they say they don’t feel old.

Most of the mobile “office” use will be to view stuff that’s maintained on desktop. I hope it can handle that?

I won’t forgive the US for allowing MAGA to win until they have a full on democratic socialist president. So, unlikely in my lifetime.

I think there are some hobbies which can both > bring joy to one’s life and not cause any harm

I was thinking more of the other stuff we put in our bodies - processed food, the polluted air in most cities etc.

I enjoy good beer. I have one almost every day - I don’t believe it’s the effect alcohol has on my brain, but the taste. I found a non-alcoholic beer that I liked and drank it for months. Then the store ran out so I got some of my old favourites as a treat and from the very first sip it was just - better. So I’m back to drinking alcohol - one beer a day and a small Jägermeister once or twice a month.

I understand that it’s poison, but I feel like unless you’re living a totally subsistence lifestyle in the middle of nowhere then everything you do is a potential poison to some extent and our bodies will deal with it or not - we’re all playing Russian Roulette with everything we ingest, breath and touch.

My brother in-law was a vet and he used to say human doctors have it easy - they only have to learn one animal.

This is one of the things that frustrate me about Debian based systems. I know most distributions ship with lots of different tools to do the same job and you pick the one you like. But with something as fundamental as system timers it just feels wrong to me - when I want to change the timing of something I first need to figure out is the cron job real, or just a stub referring to the systemd timer, or visa versa.

So for a while I had removed cron from all my systems and fully committed to timers. Now I’ve decided I don’t like systemd and gone fully the other way.

I know it’s not that bad, but that’s the way my brain works - and I can remember getting really screwed up with some early Ubuntu systems.

Exactly - I’ve got a really shitty memory. I’d take a photo so that in 5 years time I’ll get a reminder from my photos app - hey, on this day 5 years ago you were in The Louvre.

Or:

shampoo -> /bin/busybox

conditioner -> /bin/busybox

I find it funny that systemd gets so much hate for trying to be all the things, but haven’t seen the same criticism directed at busybox

I get the joke, but it’s weird for me that my highest ratio is for a Debian 13.3 ISO - 767MB down, 13.85GB up

That makes sense - thanks

Shouldn’t he be in the cage? Why should she have to be inconvenienced to protect herself from him?

Everything should be edible except things that obviously are not - mussel shells for example. I feel the tomato vines fall into this category (but accept that it’s arguable). That shallot is 100% edible.

I’ve read a lot of fucked up shit in the last few years - that’s the first time I’ve thrown my phone in response!

(My phone’s fine - I just threw it onto the sofa beside me, but still…)

What are you using to ship the logs to VL?

That’s the reason I’m here asking about logging. I’m in the process of changing and wondering if I should switch it all up. I was using systemd-journal-remote, but I’m switching from Debian to Alpine so - no more systemd.

you should start excluding them before they reach VL

Now that confuses me. As I said in my original post - I had some preconceptions about centralised logging before I set it up, and having a single place to manage filters was certainly something I was hoping to get from it. Also any filtering would only be for reporting. I’d like to keep a full set of log data for potential problem analysis etc.

Yeah, I’ve been doing some more reading. Victoria Logs is doing a good job consolidating my logs and is very lightweight. It’s the visualisation that I’m missing. Grafana can do it, but I’m having trouble getting my head around it. That’s OK - it’s just my home lab and it’s mainly a learning exercise - I need to learn some more.

I’m already running a grafana instance, so I’ll look into elastic/filebeat. Thanks.

It’s fun to point at the crappy performance of current technology. But all I can think about is the amount of power and hardware the AI bros are going to burn through trying to improve their results.