2024–W52 #
I continued to do a lot of playing with hardware which has been fun: more benchmarks, including my SATA SSDs etc.
I picked up a Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+ because I would like an 10GbE switch which can be managed but doesn't cost crazy amounts of money. I wanted to try out RouterOS and SwOS. Initially I was just going to use SwOS because my needs are simple but it doesn't have a CLI which always makes something feel like a toy to me. So I set up RouterOS but I found that it's capable of so much (for real, this is a pretty feature packed device for C$200) but I would spend a bunch of time turning built-in things off and would need to be careful to not accidentally go from accelerated switching to CPU bridging. SwOS, by comparison, seems to be so simple that you basically always end up with hardware offloaded switching (i.e. you could actually get several Gbit/s out of it, not the hundreds of Mbit/s you'd get when hitting the tiny little ARM CPU).
I picked up some multi-mode fibre and two BX optics to bridge this (at 1Gbit/s) to my LAN but I needn't have bothered because the management port is bridged with the rest of the LAN by default, and it's an RJ45 1GbE port. I also needn't have bothered because I learned that my 10GbE DAC cables can operate at 1GbE speeds, but I'm sure they'll come in useful at some point and they were only like twenty dollars each.
I got BGP for IPv4 working on DN42 and BGP for IPv6-kind-of working (it was being advertised, but then the routers at the "other" end were dropping packets destined for me on the return path -- this suggests that maybe the next-hop I'm sending is wrong but it looks correct). It's cool to me that you can peer IPv4 over purely IPv6 BGP sessions since RFC4760.
I think I'll set up a v6 local-addr next-hop peering between my two private VMs so I can test this from a situation where I can control both sides. I'll also want to look at BIRD which seems popular for BGP and routing-in-general on Linux. FRR is descended from Quagga and Zebra (which I used) and is "inspired" by Cisco IOS' configuration so it's extremely familiar to use, but familiar doesn't have to mean better.
I have a few things that I could write up which would make decent blog posts so I thought about resurrecting my blog. Then I thought that I could create a new blog, and just stitch posts from that into my RSS feed. It'd be good to maybe merge these updates (from Thymesheet) in, too, so I started writing an RSS combiner. Then I remembered I'd seen one before -- it's even written in Go!
I got that working and decided I don't want to do any of that after all. I'll probably write up pages on my website and maybe link them into the RSS feed manually, like I did with https://www.insom.me.uk/24/serial.html
I wrote up https://www.insom.me.uk/24/retro.html which was an undertaking. I don't love my writing style.
Christmas happened and was pleasant. As I mostly write about technology things here, the most relevant thing is that I got an Apple Watch. Not actually as a Christmas present, it's an older Series 6 that my wife was no longer using, but it coincided with Christmas anyway.
It's kind of wild to have this much data about yourself. I'm curious about my sleep and my heart rate and my blood oxygen levels and now I have a device that will keep track of those things and tell me. I previously had a "smart watch" and I didn't enjoy it -- I don't actually want more information from the Internet, and on my wrist no less -- but if you look at this as a health device instead then I think this makes sense.
I'm not really a pundit but I can see Apple slowly turning into a full-fledged personal health device company. AirPods 4 can already function as hearing aids in some countries (where they have regulatory approval) and they got sued for the blood oxygen monitoring on the Series 9 as it infringed on dedicated devices.
It's likely that Apple can get better at health before legacy health-related devices get good at UI.
AirPods are expensive earphones, but they're incredibly cheap for hearing aids. An Apple Watch is a moderately expensive watch, but it's a cheap health monitor.