The Magicians: I'd started this some years ago but got bogged down after about 4 episodes, but now I've watched it all, and it turns out it's actually pretty great! It's intentionally campy and silly often, but the characters are really well developed and interesting. It even had a reasonable ending!

I Am Not Okay With This: Hilarious and awkward and sometimes really uncomfortable, I'm laughing then cringing then on the edge of my seat. This was really great. Of course that means it got cancelled after just the first season. Grr.

Wynonna Earp: Often overly campy and silly, this started out with a pretty questionable premise but made it work really well... at first. The first few seasons were decent. The last one though... it's jumped so many sharks, I'm not sure how I'm going to finish this.

In From the Cold: Neat "former Russian spy is back" show with a bit of an interesting twist. Pretty good overall, though the magic technology and computer hacking was tedious, and the ending... that was just stupid, why'd they have to go and do that?

Legacies: I really do not know what made me watch the first few episodes of this. Typical CW crap with thin, overly dramatic plots and cardboard cut-out characters. Probably decent if you're into angsty teenage werewolves, vampires, and witches. I'm going to say avoid unless you're a teenage girl.

Bonding: This is a pretty interesting concept. I kinda like the female co-star, she's interesting and has a complicated back-story. The male co-star though just aggrivates me so much that it ruins the entire show. Though I don't think that was very hard - it's one of those concepts that could only go through a couple of episodes before running out of interesting plots, and in this case, it feels like they're just ticking off items on a checklist of fetishes. I haven't finished it.

Brand New Cherry Flavor: This is amazing. Also exceptionally disturbing and freaky and I don't even know what else. I kept finding myself wide-eyed and sitting up straight.

The Order: College werewolves and witches battle, well, mostly each other. A bunch of the charaters are quite likable, while some of them are just so clueless you end up shouting at them to not be so stupid. Ultimately it was just okay. Cancelled after 2 seasons, of course, and it's pretty clear why.

The Blacklist: I've been watching this since the begining, and I just got to the end of season 8 and honestly I'm not sure I'll bother anymore. I'm a little surprised they've kept up the whole "the princess is in another castle" thing with the secrets for so long, at this point it's just tedious, and it feels like they've done everything two or three times.

James Spader is excellent throughout though, it's often worth watching just for him.

Jupiter's Legacy: Classic 1950s superheroes in modern times, but also their origin story set in the 1950s. Extremely over-the-top - way too much, really. And there's a twist at the end that's just, okay whatever, sure, why not. If they actually make a second season I'm sure I won't bother.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: I finally made it through all of this, and in retrospect I probably shouldn't have, they jumped the shark in like, season 2. The most recent ones were really just uninteresting and tedious.. and then involved time travel. And then they ramped up the drama. Ugh.

Cowboy Bebop: We're re-watching the original in anticipation of the live-action series being released. It's fantstic of course, but I always forget just how much (excellent) drama there is amongst the action and antics.

Space Sweepers: Campy and silly, in the vein of The Fifth Element - wow this was awesome!

Cosmic Sin: Seriously, is Bruce Willis washed up enough to star in something this bad? Typical alien first contact then they kill us movie, with a bit of zombies mixed in.

Beyond Skyline and Skylines: I started with Skylines because I didn't realize it was part of a series. There are a lot of concepts I really liked so I went back and watched the prequel once I realized it existed. Overall, these aren't very good movies, but they fit in that category of movies I'll watch even when I know they're not going to be great.

The Vault: Genious engineer plans a heist. Formulaic and predictable, there's nothing new here. Go watch The Italian Job instead. Either one.

Gunpowder Milkshake: Pretty basic premise, a campy "assassin screwed up and now everyone's out to get her" kind of thing. To pull it off they needed great acting and believeable action. This had neither.

How I Became a Superhero: It seems superhero movies are popular these days, but I really enjoyed this one! I really liked how it's got a bit of the feel of the original Watchmen comic.

Code 8: Yet another "average guy with superpowers" movie. Nothing really new here, and not executed well.

Project Power: And another superpowers movie. It's based on a clever idea. Just okay.

The Midnight Sky: Half this movie is a typical "manufactured crisis after crisis in a space ship" movie, but not done well at all. The George Clooney half... it's just boring.

ARQ: A time loop movie, ala Groundhog Day, but a post-apocalyptic. Neat concept, but ultimately not a great movie.

TAU: Girl gets kidnapped and imprisioned by a jerk who invented an AI, then makes friends with the AI. A bit slow, and none of the characters are all that likable. They kinda phoned in the end.

I saw this great article the other day: Operations is not Developer IT. It's so true, I suggest anyone who works in the industry read it.

📉 Monitoring is for running and understanding other people's code (aka "your infrastructure")

📈 Observability is for running and understanding your code -- the code you write, change and ship every day; the code that solves your core business problems.

That's 2021 for me right there. How about you?

(Quote from Charity Majors)

Right so regarding my previous post - I looked at a few options and I've decided that I'm just not going to play this game, and so I pulled down a bunch of the Instagram posts manually and hacked this up a bunch. At least it won't go away this way, but doing this manually isn't ideal.

I guess I should consider what to do with that. Maybe there's some other reasonable thing I could cross-post to or even just do an instagram-style post via my phone. Maybe I should build an app for that.

Isn't the web such a better place now that we all need Facebook accounts? Grr.

related, related, related.

Well I guess Instagram finally shut down the API I was using to pull my posts for the sidebar on right of this website.

So my choices are now:

1. Jump through ridiculous hoops getting a Facebook developer account setup and using the Basic Display API - which means getting an actual Facebook account, something I've been actively avoiding for years.
2. Just remove the sidebar.

As I discussed in my previous post, everyone should be running SSL now... but the hacks I talked about were a bit annoying. So I'm trying out something new: Caddy.

Over the years I've changed my web sites from entirely dynamically-generated template-based stuff in Perl and Python, into this one, which is completely static, generated by Hugo. So I don't really run anything overly-complicated in my Nginx config anymore.

I spent some time over this weekend converting this and my other sites to use Caddy, which handles 100% of the SSL certificate generation, and otherwise works just like a web server.

I also converted both of the web servers fronting my Home Assistant servers, one of which runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Now I'm going to have a beer, instead of manually renewing three certificates. Cheers.

These days, everyone should be using SSL to secure, well, everything. It used to be that SSL certificates were really expensive, but with free providers like Let's Encrypt, there's not much excuse anymore.

Well... sorta.

In theory this is really easy to do, and easy to automate. In practice, well, a lot of the tools just plain suck, or they're designed for the most basic use-case and the most commonly used DNS providers. Or, they expect you use the certificate for a public website.

In my case, I have a number of private websites in addition to this one, and Postfix and Dovecot for my email. So I have to generate a few certificates, and then copy them to several machines and restart a bunch of daemons.

Also, for various reasons, I'm still using djbdns for my DNS, and so I've got to do things a little manually.

Here's my renew script, simply just call it with a list of domain names:

#!/bin/bash

function join {
    for arg in $*; do
        echo -n "-d $arg "
    done
    echo
}
domains=$(join $*)

certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges=dns \
                 --manual-auth-hook ~/bin/certbot-auth.sh \
                 --manual-public-ip-logging-ok --agree-tos \
                 $domains

That join function is a bit of a hack, but hey, it works.

Here's the auth-hook script - it generates a record suitable for import into djbdns and copies that to my server into the right place.

#!/bin/bash

rec="_acme-challenge.${CERTBOT_DOMAIN}"
echo "'${rec}:${CERTBOT_VALIDATION}:300" > /tmp/${rec}
scp -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa /tmp/${rec} dns@myserver:/var/dns/extdns/root/dynamic/

sleep 30

That sleep there gives me 30 seconds to go manually run the "regenrate" process there, but this is better than nothing.

Do you use Vim and Powerline? If so, you may have got this error message at some point, when using a Virtualenv:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 4, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'powerline'
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 9, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'powerline'
An error occurred while importing powerline module.
This could be caused by invalid sys.path setting,
or by an incompatible Python version (powerline requires
Python 2.6, 2.7 or 3.2 and later to work). Please consult
the troubleshooting section in the documentation for
possible solutions.
Unable to import powerline, is it installed?

I know how to solve this! Put this in your .vimrc:

" workaround issue with powerline + virtualenv
" https://github.com/powerline/powerline/issues/1908
python3 << EOF
import sys
path = "/usr/lib/python{}.{}/site-packages/".format(
    sys.version_info.major, sys.version_info.minor)
sys.path.append(path)
EOF