If you have multiple versions of a song, and I say, “Alexa, play $song”, please select the version that I actually purchased from you. Don’t make me say, “Alexa, play $song from my music”, especially when the title is long, like, say, “Keep your eye on the sparrow”.

Also, don’t play the newest cover version of a song, by some random nobody. Ever. Don’t make me spend ten minutes trying to find the right incantation to get you to cough up the real one. If you’re not sure, ask.

And when you can’t find the song at all and start playing something “popular” based on one of the words in the title I gave you, please ask me what you did wrong when I shout, “Alexa, stop!”.

[Sadly, Amazon Music doesn’t have the actual soundtrack for Dark Star, so all the available versions of Benson, Arizona are by some guy who gives it a good shot, but it just doesn’t work.]

ProtectHome considered harmful.

Seriously, WTF? I looked at four recently-kickstarted CentOS 7.x servers and said, “hey, /home ended up on the small partition, so I’ll move it to a bigger one”. I could not do this.

Removing this bullshit from two daemon configurations (NetworkManager? chronyd?) and rebooting managed to fix it on two of them, but not on the other two, and they were all kickstarted with the same config (not a great config, but it wasn’t done by me, and blowing them away and starting over would undo recent work by external con$ultant$).

I have cameras watching the front door. Don’t lie to me.

2/28 Update

Package actually delivered today.

Except what Woot sent me wasn’t what I ordered.

Sigh.

Second-best thing happening in April this year…

One thing I can always count on for amusement is product classification…

My attempt to figure out if you’re canonically left-handed, as shown in this picture, resulted in a severe headache due to the variety of improbable and likely painful sword-handling techniques displayed in other fan art (frequently NSFW).

However, I feel compelled to point out one thing: the fingers of your right hand will either break on impact or simply slip off the hilt the moment you start to swing.

1. The cucumber remains a stick, sprinkle with salt and rub.

2. Rinse with water and wipe off the water with a cut-down bar.

3. Put a cucumber and seasoning in a bag such as a flop. Pull out the air, Has schooled rub seasoning will go around evenly when closed.

4. Put it in the refrigerator and marinate for half a day. I maceration to see you on the way.

5. Discard the juicy and eat without washing away.

My combination stratum 1 NTP server and Pi-hole is up and running.

Notes

0. Definitely boot from Raspbian Stretch Lite, as described in the instructions. No point in having it auto-login to a graphical console, or even having the packages installed, especially since you disable video memory as part of this setup.

1. NTP first, Pi-hole second; they both want to reconfigure your machine, so you have to be careful with the canned configuration scripts, although there are no direct conflicts at this time. Also, the NTP setup script is far less complex and invasive, so it’s much easier to know what it changes (530 lines versus 2,649).

2. Pi-hole sets a static IP address in /etc/dhcpcd.conf, which is a bad idea. It prevents you from building a server on one network which will be installed elsewhere, and in a home environment without static leases, it’s only guaranteed for the uptime of the router. I commented out their change (don’t delete it; the installer greps for the current IP address to decide if you’re configured ‘correctly’), and instead uncommented the local nameserver line in /etc/resolvconf.conf.

3. I went with the Uputronics hat and external antenna, which is the solder-free, battery-free option. Purchased from their US distributor, Airspy.US. This costs basically the same as a Pi and a case, plus shipping.

4. I used the clockmaker script with only one problem: ntpsec’s configure script blew chunks. Clockmaker pulls down tip-of-tree, and the team develops directly in the main branch, so they sometimes break the build (Eric Raymond made the aes_siv library mandatory before someone else committed the supporting code). The quick fix is to cd into the ntpsec directory and run something like this to switch to the most recent release: git checkout $(git tag --list --sort -taggerdate | head -1)

5. Note: need to run the CFG-CFG command for the Uputronics board while ntpsec isn’t running.

6. Fuck Patriot, by the way. I bought a 5-pack of their Class 10 16GB MicroSD cards on Amazon about 14 months ago, and 2 of them came up read-only when I went to use them for this project. They all worked the first time…

7. I don’t know about the other GPS boards, but the Uputronics shouldn’t be put in a clear/open case, because it has a nice bright LED that flashes once a second. Really lights up a dark room.

8. I wanted some additional local dnsmasq overrides, so I put them in /etc/dnsmasq.d/00-local.conf.

9. Naturally I made a copy of my MicroSD card after I got it working…

Update

Changed /etc/ntp.conf to add a static offset for the non-PPS clock: refclock shm unit 0 refid GPS time1 +0.114. See ntpsec issue 9.

…and filed a bug on the clockmaker script.