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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • You can still wear glasses, and not need them.

    I live in a sunny place, so I’m never outside without wearing my sunglasses. As you’ve pointed out they’ve saved my eyes from traumatic injury at least a dozen times over the years.

    I wear safety glasses when I’m working around the house with anything that could be considered a power tool (kitchen mixer, drill, etc…) and those have saved me a few times as well.

    But not needing glasses, now that could be a lifesaver. I have a close relative who is basically blind without his glasses. He’s told me that if he’s in an unfamiliar place and is woken up by the fire alarm, there’s a good chance he can’t find his way out without his glasses.


  • That makes sense.

    The last time we had a power issue and I was at my desktop I didn’t get any GUI notifications of the outage, so that’s a miss.

    However the incessant beeping coming from every APC in the house was enough to tell me that stuff was about to go really sideways 😂 I was able to manually power down my desktop before the systemd stuff kicked in.


  • That sucks!

    I’m on Ubuntu, which I admit is not a popular option around here. But when my power goes out I use apcupsd and a network component to alert my attached or networked Ubuntu machines. When the power first goes out all of my non-essential machines automatically shut down gracefully. When the backup batteries get low enough (I have several separate APC units around the house) my essential machines also shut down automatically.

    When the power comes back up one of my machines automatically powers up and runs a few checks before turning most of my other stuff back on.

    I have very few power issues which last long enough for my batteries to run out, but when I do the only evidence is a few alerts and the fact that I have to log back into everything. All of my windows restore on my GUI machines, and no filesystem issues occur. It’s more seamless than when I ran Windows, granted that was 25 years ago.

    I’m similarly not a fan of systemd, but for backup battery and power management it seems to do the trick.







  • I’m pretty sure I didn’t mess with systemd, though that would probably be the right way to handle it.

    I was able to update a runtime config so if any storage wasn’t available it just halted the service. Then I created a short script I’d invoke manually which decrypted the luks drives and brought the dependent services up. I also added monitoring to alert me when the drives weren’t available for whatever reason.


  • I use separate disks for data storage and my OS. That way a headless system can boot and all the services like SSH can become available, and I can decrypt the data drives remotely.

    When there’s an unexpected reboot I can still get into my system and decrypt remotely which is nice. I can also move the data storage disks to another system without too much hassle.

    I did have to make sure some services were fault tolerant if an encrypted volume was unavailable when the OS booted. An example of this might be torrenting software, I needed to make sure the temporary storage was on an encrypted volume. The software had a sane fault mode when the final storage location was unavailable, but freaked out for some reason when the temp storage was missing.

    Once set up the whole thing is pretty easy to manage.



  • I’m not sure what qualifying language you took offense at, and I wasn’t intending to be condescending.

    I admitted that my experience was indeed anecdotal, but I stand by my statements. If you’re good at what you do in tech, you have a few years of experience, and you’re willing to take take positions that differ from your comfort zone you should never be without well paying work.

    I’m always in the market as you put it, even though I’m not looking to leave my current position any time soon. I did 2 interviews in the last 7 days, and I turn down offers probably once a month.

    I know this isn’t how it works for everyone in tech, but once you get your career grooved it isn’t unrealistic.


  • This hasn’t been my (anecdotal) experience, or that of anyone in my network.

    The industry is unstable no doubt about that, but we’ve never had trouble finding better places to land.

    IMO if you’ve been in tech building your skills for a few years, you really shouldn’t have trouble finding work. '01 was weird but there was still plenty of work, especially in defense. '08 was scary but turned out to be a great time to join a startup. Sometimes it’s a lateral move instead of up, sometimes it requires relocating , but if you’ve been doing good work and building your professional network you should never have to go back to driving forklifts (unless you choose to).