Was in the shack this morning enjoying the cool weather (49F) with all the windows cranked wide-open when suddenly a transformer on a power pole about 200 yards from here let go. I saw a shower of sparks then recoiled from the loud explosion. Some neighbor(s) must surely be without power after that ruckus though we are somehow unaffected. I’m guessing the folly of squirrels…

Now hacking away at the command line on my server cleaning up some lingering shrapnel from a distribution upgrade last night.

The latest LTS version of Ubuntu Server. LTS stands for long-term support — which means five years of free security and maintenance updates.

This upgrade wasn’t necessary for any particular reason other than a desire to remain up to date. Probably a risky move as this was performed via SSH, but I’ve done this before in the same manner without much drama so I was reasonably confident in the outcome. I had, however, forgotten that some of the fallout was disabled packages and a few broken dependencies. If you’re reading this then the cleanup is finished and things must have gone as planned.

Administration of the web server hasn’t required much of my attention, Processing occasional updates, checking that the back-up scripts continue to run, and trimming log files comprises most of my work. It’s not a bad trade-off to to run my own independent publishing empire without consideration for tech oligarchs responsible for much of the mischief on this planet - and above it.

Technical Details ⁍ The site is powered by Linode running a recent version of Ubuntu. All of the content is written using plain-text formatted with Markdown and processed using Jekyll, a static site generator that outputs HTML. Light CSS styling provides a common look and feel between various pages and components. A full RSS feed is provided and tech-savvy readers will make good use of it.