Dear FutureMe,
Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.
How is your personal life going?
How is your work life going?
How is your Volunteer Service life going?
Future Me
Personal Life
Changed Linux distribution to Debian on my main machine
This has been, so far, the smoothest change from one distribution of Linux to another that I can remember. I went from Fedora 43 to Debian 13.4.
Part of the magic is that my /home directory is on a separate disk. During the Debian install, there is an option for that – it asks for which disk /home is on, and the disk partitioner runs with it.
I didn’t move away from KDE yet. But pretty much all the KDE apps I had on Fedora just ran just fine with the configuration files stored in /home.
The few things I did have to mess with:
- zenstates.py
lpstat -p -dfollowed bylpoptions -dsudo apt update && sudo apt install pavucontrol-qtsudo apt install -y pipewire-audio pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse wireplumber- And a reinstall of Steam.
I have had to reassign the multiaccount containers for all my browser logins and log in again. But that happens every time, and I know to expect it.
The only one that caused me any consternation was the adding of pipewire-audio pipewire-alsa pipewire-pulse wireplumber. Audio in Firefox tabs wasn’t playing, but adding these programs fixed that.
Mostly, I wanted to change because I want to do some Music Player Demon wrangling with Perl, and Fedora doesn’t have those programs as easily installable. I’ve configured Kate with the code-checking server, so when I edit my Perl scripts, Kate is barking at me that the dependencies cannot be met.
The only thing I miss is that Firefox on Fedora showed a video progress bar on some sites, while Firefox on Debian doesn’t. I liked being able to skip to the end of routine videos instead of wasting five minutes watching them.
Down with TurboTax
My mom had a horrific experience with TurboTax technical support. It wouldn’t let her log in, and it failed every time she tried to jump through their 3D biometrics data collection1. Worse, she spent three hours waiting on hold for a human being to help, and when they finally answered the phone, they refused to help.
I’ve been annoyed with them anyway because they want to force me to upgrade to Windows 11. There is absolutely nothing in Windows 11 that is an upgrade from Windows 10 that TurboTax needs to rely on. I’ve got my previous returns on a Windows 10 machine (that I back up with Nextcloud). Why can’t I run this program there? It is completely stupid that they added that requirement.
I’d bought a copy from Costco, but I’d never peeled back the registration code. So I asked Costco for a refund, and of course, they are great about taking care of customers.
MercyMe concert
I was given the gift of a ticket to the MercyMe concert in Fresno on April 17. The concert was great. One can tell that the band and the audience are having fun. Singing along was encouraged, and sometimes the songs were old-fashioned gospel songs and hymns from way back when. The beauty of that is that if you are the kind of person who would go to a MercyMe concert, you probably already know It Is Well with My Soul and Amazing Grace. The band keeps working on new songs, and many of them have an upbeat tempo. The whole show was fun.
Mom in a nursing home
My mom fell several times in the past few weeks, which is troubling. One of her doctors let her know that if she refused to get a pacemaker, she would be refusing treatment, and therefore the doctor wouldn’t be providing treatment for her going forward. She reluctantly agreed to the surgery, although it filled her with massive amounts of dread and some panic. The evening after the surgery, she was in the worst state I’ve ever seen her in: confusion, tremors, and shortness of breath. The next morning she insisted on going to the emergency room. It took them three days to provide a list of nursing homes she could be moved to.
As an aside, this is one of the few times I miss getting rid of my Facebook account: it would have been a good resource to find out which nursing home to move her to. But without Facebook, I had to go on personal experience. My brother’s experience and my experience are quite limited here. Without that, I get to rely on … Yelp. Oof. I know how Yelp can be gamed, so that was less than comforting.
The facility in Yelp with the high score (and that would take her) was where we moved her to. My brother and I did a tour of the place too. It did seem to earn the good score it got in Yelp – but what do I know?
Since then, my mom is getting better. The only thing she dislikes is that the facility is quite full and all the staff are at 100% capacity. My mom hits the little “request service” button, and it takes hours for someone to be able to show up. The physical therapy work they are doing is good, so I’m grateful for that.
Let’s Encrypt changed the root certificate
I wrote a separate post on this. The short story is that my wildcard SSL certificate was automatically renewed, but Let’s Encrypt changed which root certificate the chain of trust resolves to. Bam, Thunderbird and Nextcloud File Sync are broken. This could have been avoided if Let’s Encrypt had waited until their new root certificate was included in the standard ca-certificates bundle that is used in all distributions. I should clarify: Thunderbird Address Book sync was broken – all other functions of Thunderbird continued to work fine.
Work Life
Not fun: April started with a mailbomb
For a day and a quarter, my cortisol levels were elevated, and I probably burned a few days off my life expectancy. It was from an event outside my control, but the stress comes from a thousand (or more) people not getting the email they need.
A firewall appliance started sending out alerts, and the box it sent them to relayed them to our IIS SMTP box that forwards to the Microsoft cloud. The timing was perfect: 6 PM on a Friday night, so no one was paying attention until Monday morning. 30 minutes after it started, the cloud began rejecting. The box that relays to the cloud started moving things to the Badmail folder. Are 1.6 million files in the Badmail folder a bit much?
Even after getting rid of them, IIS SMTP was not happy, but that is likely because Defender antivirus was in a “Why does this happen to me?” wailing state.
Fun: I got a Perl Dancer2 app to use SAML Single Sign-On with Entra ID
I’ve always wanted to make an internal website that can identify who is visiting. I finally got it working, and it is beautiful. SuSE Linux with Apache as the front-end handling the SSL, and Perl Dancer2 on the back-end.
Motivation to retire: Intune won’t warn you about rebooting 5,000+ PCs.
I was in the middle of a 14 hour file copy job when this hit. I’m so happy I’m going to retire soon. Although I feel bad for my co-worker who triggered it, I won’t mind at all walking away from the disaster that is a Microsoft environment.
Volunteer Service Life
I did get to attend a Unity Day in Hanford in April. It was nice, and I got to meet some new people outside my normal locale.
I got to attend the Tri-State Roundup in Laughlin, Nevada. It was good, and I met plenty of nice people.
Our Founders’ Day Picnic fed 270 people. We’re thankful for the turnout, especially since it was rather hot.
- Can you say “Make Orwell Fiction Again” ? I knew you could. ↩︎