I used to work at the University of Cincinnati and whenever I got frustrated at staff meetings, I’d threaten to move to Australia. After a $300 application fee and a surprisingly short approval process, I had holiday work visa which allowed me to live and work in Australia for a full year. My manager led me to our director’s office. With my resignation letter on his desk, my director simply asked, “Do you want more money?” to which I responded, “I’m moving to Australia.” There were confused looks from the two of them, awkward silence and finally, “No, really … I’m moving to Australia.” It was the first time I had left the relative security of a full-time position, and it wouldn’t be the last.
In recent months, there has been considerable debate by videos creators on YouTube about the future of generating revenue through Google’s extremely popular streaming video service. Advertisers are backing away from more controversial content and YouTube has begun to demonetize several types of videos. Services like Flattr, which attempted to allow content consumers to fill the tip jars of creators, have slowly fizzled. Yet out of those ashes has come a new service known as Patreon, which allows fans to directly contribute to the continual production of many varieties of art.
Update: Patreon is a corrupt service that has engaged in big tech censorship, and removed many independent journalists from their platform. I still believe in crowdfunding creators, but Patreon should no longer be used by anyone.(Updated: 2020-09-30)
When I lived in Australia, sending money to an individual or business was as simple as knowing their Bank State Branch (BSB) number and account number. I could go through a web interface, or a phone app, and send $50 to a friend. It would show up the next morning in their account (or potentially the same day if we used the same bank). This transfer went through a government system known as the Australian Payments Clearing House (APCA), was completely free of fees for individuals and worked with all banks in Australia. Many countries have similar systems, some adding additional security with one-time use Transaction Authentication Numbers (TANs).
Although America has a means of electronic transfers between banks, it’s not available for individual person-to-person transfers. Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfers are only available to certain businesses and the means for verifying identity and exchanging money via it are slow and convoluted. I honestly hadn’t realized how far behind the American banking system was until I spent several years exposed to various foreign banking systems.
For the past couple of years, we’ve seen a substantial amount of research committed by the tech and auto industry into self driving vehicles. Billions of dollars are being spent on a solved problem; depending on how you view the problem. If the domain of the problem is transportation and increasing populations within metropolitan areas, automated driverless trains have been a reality for quite some time. I’d argue that solving the domain space of individual automated cars, while contributing significantly to the fields of machine learning and computer vision, is a wasted effort when it comes to sustainable transportation solutions for the planet.
Earlier this year, I decided to build a development desktop. It’s the first PC I’ve fully built in at least four years. While I was backpacking, I relied solely on my laptop for development work. Prior to that I had used desktops people were giving away, or systems I had build years ago and had just continually upgraded. Since this would be a Linux workstation aimed primarily at development, the hardware was focused on performance. It would be built with 32GB of DDR4 memory, a 6700K i7 processor and dual M.2 solid state NVME drives connected to the PCI-E bus in a software RAID0 (striped) configuration for performance.
Mesosphere DC/OS is a data center operating system, based on Apache Mesos and Marathon. It’s designed to run tasks and containers on a distributed architecture. It can be provisioned either on bare metal machines, within virtual machines or on a hosting provider (what some people like to call “the cloud.”). I wanted to see what was involved in setting up my own DC/OS instance, both locally and with a provider, for running some of my own projects in containers. I wanted to keep this cluster as low cost as possible, and ran into some issues with the Terraform installation in the DC/OS documentation. The following is a brief look at setting up a minimal DC/OS cluster on Digital Ocean.
I had been using a Banana Pi BPI-R1 as my router. Due to some reliability issues, I attempted to replace it with a ClearFog Pro, which also met with unfavorable results. Many hobbyist tend to use old PCs as routers, as I have in the past. Due to some scaling down, I no longer have a bucket of spare parts to build a low powered Linux box. Instead of going with another ARM solution, I decided to build a custom x86_64 system based on the Thin-ITX form factor. I discovered that a x86/Thin-ITX solution was more reliable than the ARM alternatives I have tried, and ran the same cost as a high end home router.
Back in February, I decided to use a Banana Pi BPI-R1 as my primary router. There wasn’t a lot of documentation on setting up the R1 as a router, and understanding the port/vlan mapping was a little complicated, so I wrote a tutorial. The BPI-R1 only has one Gigabit Ethernet controller, shared between the WAN and LAN ports and configured via vlans, which I found could result in potential security issues. Due to stability and security issues, I decided to purchase a ClearFog Pro, which featured separate Ethernet adapters for its switch, primary and SFP port. However, what I soon found was a disappointing mess of hardware and software. The manufacturer has refused my request for a return, leaving me with a $240 USD worthless brick.
Previously I had written a guide to using a Banana Pi BPI-R1 as a router. As I write this, I’ve been running the BPI-R1 as my home gateway/firewall for approximately nine months. Initially I had problems with the router freezing and needing to be power-cycled every few weeks. Although this is somewhat commonplace and accepted on consumer commodity routers, it shouldn’t be necessary on a piece of hardware designed for hobbyists. Furthermore, there were other stability and hardware issues that could cause the BPI-R1 to reboot as a switch, with public IPs being assigned to internal machines. This effectively disabled the firewall, leaving internal machines in a potentially vulnerable state.
Newer