ClownStatue

Virginia households have paid $573 more for gas since the U.S.–Iran war began, placing them among the citizens who have experienced the highest jump in the nation.

An Instagram post turned one California student newspaper into a free-speech flash point. The students say they were just doing their homework.

archive lilnk

After a power outage this weekend, when HASS came back up I lost all automations related to my Sonoff Orb 4-Way smart switch, and one of my GE 800 Z-Wave switches no longer responds, though it still works manually pressing the switch.

I’ve re-entered the automations, but I can’t get the switch so come back to home assistant. Is the only path forward deleting, resetting it, and re-adding it? I’ve never had this happen. I’m not 100% sure the power outage caused the issue. I updated the core this weekend also. I think that was before the outage, but I hadn’t checked to see if everything was there after the update/before the outage.

ETA: Thanks for all the help. Wound up removing, resetting, and re-adding it. Entity ID is the same, so I expect existing automations should still work.

Despite its reputation for quality hits, Apple TV swings and misses sometimes. Here are the worst-rated Apple TV shows and movies.

TL;DR:

1. The Family Plan 2
2. The Family Plan
3. Argylle
4. Before
5. The Crowded Room (article says this actually has 7.7 on IMDB)
6. Amazing Stories
7. City on Fire
8. Liaison

I can't stop laughing at Family Plan 1 & 2 being in the top spots! Argylle was bad, but i was suckered into watching it. Both Family Plans looked pretty terrible just from the trailers.

ETA: Original numbering was a countdown, which was interpretted in markdown as 1-8 top to bottom, which resulted in reverse ordering. Fixed that to listing worst to less worst.

President Donald Trump's approval rating dropped to 36%, its lowest level since his return to the White House, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Despite Trump's declining overall popularity, 38% of registered voters polled said Republicans had better stewardship of the U.S. economy, compared to 34% of voters who picked Democrats on the topic.

The GOP would have to basically destroy the world economy before the average US voter even started to think Democrats could do a slightly better job with the US economy.

I have begun the process of building a lab for my team of HPC consultants, and I'm trying to make some plans. I would like this to be as flexible as I can make it. I live 3½ hours away from the site, so the fewer trips down there to recable and/or move stuff around the better! Most of this hardware has various older InfiniBand connectivity, along with multiport LOM & OCP cards at either 1Gb or 10Gb. Most also have the option to do dedicated and shared BMC. We have 2 dedicated IPs (so far) that I'm currently using for the head node's BMC & SSH access. This will be all Linux, though we will be accessing web interfaces when testing various products. My initial thoughts:

• Identify what we want to keep and what we want to excess. There's some _very_old hardware in there! There's also some old OmniPath hardware in there. We don't see much OPA, but some team members seem to think that may change. Still this stuff is old.
• Carve out a management/provisioning network. Ideally, this will allow us to switch between dedicated and shared BMC ports at will. We use this for customer knowledge transfer when we demo our cluster management software. The share ports are usually the onboard port 1, which is usually 1gb, so this is easy enough. We can probably cable all of that up to 1 switch.
• Identify a subset of nodes to cables up the capability of accessing the campus network. These systems are behind the company VPN, and we will be controlling login access ourselves. While I'm not worried about someone on the team doing something nefarious on the company network, I don't want everything to have this capability. Still, having the option with some will give us some flexibility, and we have a handful of systems with more Ethernet ports than we would otherwise need (campus LAN access is 1Gb).
• Head node will run Proxmox to give us the flexibility to spin up temporary test heads for team member projects. The idea here is we can partition the network using VLANs to isolate what a group is doing with some systems from what anybody else is doing. The current head node has sufficient space to host shared home directories. We will also have a small IBM ESS that will be added to these racks next time I'm there.
• I had thought about running some containers in either a VM on the head node or some LXCs. Right now the only thing I'm thinking about on that front is netbox.

This is what I have off the top of my head. If there's any useful software, procedures, or if I'm on the wrong path entirely, I'd appreciate your help. We have a modest budget, but we did convince our management to at least buy us a used 1Gb switch that is at least similar hardware that we would see "in the wild." We're hoping we can use the lab to show value there and get them to approve some other, still modest, requests in the future!

Catching up on email, and found this gem. Link (NYT) if anyone's interested, but there's no snark to be found.

ETA: link

Interesting tool based on blocks to tag any document for photos you own. With app to allow access from any device. Blocks contains tags and links between them to organize all like a heap.
I haven't installed the self-hosted version yet to see how it can interact with an existing Obsidian vault. Next step.
Site: https://heaper.de/

Key Points:

• A Republican congressman is requesting a formal investigation into Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show.
• Rep. Andy Ogles described the performance as "pure smut" and claimed it featured illegal content for public airways.
• The performance was one of the most-watched halftime show in history and was performed almost entirely in Spanish.
• Other Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, also criticized the show as inappropriate.

Other Sources:

• USA Today
• Time
• The Tennesseean (Home state of this snowflake)

Saw this in Sequoia, and it looks like my fix was removed when upgrading to Tahoe.

Was seeing a strange issue w/ macOS mail. Didn't see it in iOS or iPadOS, just on the desktop client. I receive hotel receipts from travel to, e.g., a Hotmail address, and mobile phone receipts to a Gmail address. They both need to be forwarded to a work address. If I forward on from the Hotmail address, when I later try to forward my mobile receipt, after entering the work email address in the "To" line, the "From" lline will automatically change to my Hotmail address. When the forward window initially comes up, it shows my Gmail address, because that's the account that received the original email, but once I plugged in the "To" address, it changes the "From" address to the last email account that sent a message to that "To" address.

Maybe I'm alone here, but I think this is bizarre behavior! To fix it, go to Settings (⌘-,) --> Composing. Under Addressing, change "Send new messages" from "Automatically Select Best Account" to a specific email address. This will make forwards behave as expected w/o changing the From address, but all new emails will default to being from your new default "From" address.

I use Cmd-Shift all the time to highlight from cursor to beginning or end of a line. Also use Opt+Shift for word highlighting. Today I learned if you do Cmd+Shift+Delete, it will just remove from the cursor to the beginning of the line! Of course, I tested and Cmd+Opt+Del will delete the word to the left of the cursor.

Anyway, brain got a tiny bit bigger today.

Posting in case this helps anyone in the future. Not particularly difficult, I was just having this issue recently, and took some time today to work around it.

Lately, my Calibre-Web-Automated container will update eBook metadata, but will not update the book cover. I was never able to find an error, and using the CLI cover-enforce command didn't do anything either. I'm pretty sure that's all the GUI is doing, so not a surprise the CLI didn't work. Instead, it will insert a generic cover. For some lesser-known books, where it cannot find an appropriate cover, this procedure will also help.

First, ID the cover you want. If you have to manually scan the cover and get it into your container, you'll need to sort that out yourself. I was able to find decent enough covers on DDG image search. From there, drop into a shell in the CWA container, and run the following commands (Substitute variables below to meet your needs):

cd /calibre-library/${AUTHOR}/${BOOK_TITLE}  
curl "${IMAGE_URL}" > cover.jpg  
ebook-meta "${EBOOK_FILE}" --cover cover.jpg  

This assumes the image is a JPEG. Sub as necessary. Some that I found were WEBP files, and I wasn't sure they would work properly with ebook readers, so I just stuck with good old JPEG. Also, I figured the naming and placement of the cover file would scale fine for my whole library where needed. Adjust as you see fit.

ETA: Corrected a variable