Quick shoutouts to various interesting stuff I came across these past few weeks. Thought I should capture them somewhere.
- This series of Ansible 101 YouTube sessions by Jeff Geerling.
- A Japanese/ British TV show Giri/Haji which is primarily in Japanese so you got to follow along with subtitles, but is worth it.
- The first time I tried watching a foreign language movie with subtitles was the original version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. I gave up after 10 or so minutes. Recently I saw “Parasite” and loved it, so I have now been trying to watch more Korean/ Asian stuff with subtitles. I realized I am now ok with subtitles. Another great Korean TV show is Kingdom. This is a zombie show set in a Korean kingdom (in the Joseon period if that means anything to you) and is amazing.
- As the director of Parasite Bong Joon Ho said “Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.“
- This 791st episode of TWIT. A great panel and a very funny episode. Lots of laughs!
- I discovered Tailscale and have now started using it. You too should discover it. Check out this page on how Tailscale works and this one where they explain NAT traversal. Even if you don’t use it the pages are worth a read as they explain things very clearly. Think Cloudflare blog posts… I have learnt so much stuff from their (Cloudflare’s) posts where they explain SSL and such.
- I am assuming everyone knows Wireguard, the new VPN protocol that has been around for a while and was recently added to the Linux kernel (and is also part of OpenBSD now if I remember correctly). Tailscale builds upon Wireguard. While traditional VPNs are of a hub-spoke nature – i.e. all clients connect to a hub – Tailscale changes it into a mesh network with all clients connecting to one another. So that means if you have 5 machines spread over the Internet you can create Wireguard VPN tunnels between them so they talk to each other directly rather than through a central hub. That’s the problem Tailscale solves beautifully!
- Hiding an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. I mentioned this book in a previous post and I’ll do so again. I have learnt so much from this book. It’s basically two books in one. The first part is historical and the second part changes to show the benefits the world has had from the American empire. I love both parts, and especially the second part … while reading a recent chapter on standards and such that were introduced due to the second World War you can’t but help think some goodness too has come out of all these wars. Highly recommended book if you are into a bit of history!
- One thing I hadn’t realized about until I read this book was maps. I always thought Antarctica as this huge continent that stretched the entirety of the world, and that Greenland was a pretty big country. While reading the book I realized these are because of the challenges of showing a 3-dimensional world in 2D. While looking at a 2D world map we brought for my daughter recently I now noticed how its shows the North and South poles separately in addition to the 2D layout – just to try and workaround the above limitations. Here’s a link to a North and South pole map on Pinterest to give you an idea. When look at that you get a better idea of Antarctica’s size and why they had to show it all stretched out on a 2D map.
- I haven’t checked these out but thought I should mention. CoreDNS is a DNS server written in Go. Seems interesting. NextDHCP is similar but for DHCP. And of course there’s Caddy, a web server written in Go. You get the idea… Go Lola Go!