On My Mind…

Thoughts and Technical How-Tos

Your Terminal Emulator Is Wrong

Introduction At this point, there are hundreds of graphical terminal emulators out there. Every single one that I have run into pretends like it is some varient of a hardware terminal made by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from their Video Terminal (VT) line of products, from 1978’s VT100 through 1993’s VT525. A reader might chime in here and say, no MY TERMINAL thinks it is an xterm, but alas xterm pretends to be a VT420 (xterm can actually pretend it is many different terminals, so even if you DO use THE xterm software I doubt your computer is actually set up to most efficiently talk to it, I’ll talk about that later )....

21 Sep 2023 · 10 min · Gary Allen Vollink

The Anime I Like

Why I Won’t Admit to Liking Anime When talking to someone who likes Anime, the first thing to come up is usually a show like Dragonball Z or Baruto. Some fighting is fine if the story requires it, but I don’t want to watch a single fight that lasts most of an episode. I want story to develop in every episode, not just exposition hidden in re-used fight sequences. At worst, I might stick with something that has a long fight in one or two episodes within a ten plus episode season....

23 Aug 2022 · 6 min · Gary Allen Vollink

VM Server Upgrades?

Computer prices are just starting to normalize. I walked into a MicroCenter store the other day, and they have stopped rationing video cards (and have plenty in stock, without crazy markups). I’ve also been thinking a lot about upgrading my servers… Current Server Setup Back in February of 2018, I started running my home websites on some used Rackmount servers. When I bought these, I really wanted to experience running enterprise level hardware and building up microservices on Docker with full failover, and freinds, that all works, and I learned a lot....

17 Jun 2022 · 4 min · Gary Allen Vollink

RPM Spec

I’ve been working through updating a fair number of Perl Modules on an older RedHat based distribution. As I’m trying to do various things, I’ve run into a number of weird issues. Enough so, I though, I should write down the things I’ve found in a blog so I can easily find it later. Then, I looked around, and found hundreds of blogs by folks who wrote down the bare basics of what it takes to write an RPM spec file, or only the things that THAT PERSON needed for THAT PROJECT....

6 Jun 2022 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink