Steve Joerger

Rsync vs Rclone

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:15:47 -0500

Just gonna leave myself a link to this post from @geerlingguy on the speed difference between Rsync and Rclone. You know, for future reference.

Books Read in 2025

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 23:59:59 -0600

Completed Books

Flag In Exile by David Weber
Honor Among Enemies by David Weber
In Enemy Hands by David Weber
The Initial Fold by Nick Adams
The Andromedan Fold by Nick Adams
The Messier Fold by Nick Adams
The Cygnus Fold by Nick Adams
The Acheron Fold by Nick Adams
The Medusa Fold by Nick Adams
The Halo Fold by Nick Adams
Artifact by Joshua James
Cascade by Joshua James
Lineage by Joshua James
Awakened by Joshua James
The Aspirant by Nick Adams
The Recruit by Nick Adams
Entanglement by Gerald Kilby
Entropy by Gerald Kilby
Evolution by Gerald Kilby
Enigma by Gerald Kilby
Exodus by Gerald Kilby

Certainly a theme in my books this year. Most of these were new authors for me (which I discovered via Facebook). Not necessarily the greatest of reads, but they are entertaining enough. I prefer the Bache Loftt series over The Fold series by Nick Adams but again both are enjoyable reads and I’m already two and a half books into both of these series in 2026 already.

Note To Self: Thunderbird with external Openpgp+Yubikey

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 18:00:05 -0400

I was trying out the latest Thunderbird release today and having issues getting my OpenPGP key working via my Yubikey. I had already enable the use of external GnuPG and set the path appropriately to the gnupg binary. After delving into the Thunderbird developer console I discovered an error “request to use external GnuPG key, but GPGME isn’t working”.

Turns out that GPGMe is not installed by default when installing GnuPG via Homebrew on MacOS. After installing the separate GPGMe package I was able to use my OpenPGP key stored on my Yubikey without issue, or so I thought. I was able to send an encrypted email no problem but receiving one didn’t work. Everything looked good, but Thunderbird couldn’t find the associated private key. Until I unplugged and re-inserted the Yubikey. Then everything was happy again… until next time I suspect.

Notes on Openpgp WKD

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 20:37:51 -0400

Recently I’ve been working with OpenPGP and configuring my gpg keys to work on my Yubikeys. I’ve also been testing out some of the new (to me anyways) secure email providers like Proton and Tuta. I quickly gave up on Tuta, it isn’t my cup of tea. Proton on the otherhand seems to be something interesting. During this whole process I’ve learned about the Web Key Directory and this intrigued me enough to get it working for my own domains.

I did have a few setup issues along the way, so here are some notes that may help me remember how I got this working in the future:

The site webkeydirectory.com has a much more useful testing and results page than some of the other test site I was using
Some email providers (looking at you Proton) seem to only use the Advanced key lookup method and not the easier to setup Direct method. I found this tidbit referenced in an old Reddit thread
The policy file needs to exist in your web tree. This tells requesters that you have WKD setup apparently
The policy file needs to be present in both the Advanced and Direct web paths. At a top-level is not good enough it seems
The .htaccess file also needs to be present in both paths
The public key files need to be in binary format and not ascii armored. I didn’t see this documented anywhere else besides the test site linked above and one refernce in the gnupg-users mailing list (in a very long thread).
Another tibdit is if you are using the same public key for multiple domains, the key data must have a matching uid for the domain. Example: security@example.com and security@example.net using the same keypair. Both uids must be represented in the binary key blob.

Interesting to set this up and get it working. I think I’ve come up with a better way to host the Advanced style for my domains. I’ve already created the structure and it is working, except for the missing uid’s. Maybe I’ll post about my hosting setup next.

Bye Bye SSD

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 13:54:52 -0400

You ever spent a significant chunk of time configuring a computer just so? I’ve been doing a bit of that recently during my recuperation period. Got it all nicely configured, even have some online backups going and then BAM! Bye bye ssd ☹️

Now this computer is not critical to me in any way. This is just a playground built upon a cheap-ish Lenovo IdeaPad. I had a dual boot Ubuntu/Windows setup on there and used it for mostly testing out various software that I found interesting and that doesn’t run on MacOS. So at the end of yesterday I went to stop my streaming music from playing and Gnome was unresponsive. Clicky clicky, nothing. Ctrl-alt-backspace.. nothing.. OK fine I’ll power cycle.

I don’t know what happened to that SSD, but like Doc Bones always said “It’s dead, Jim”. Completely. I do know that I had experienced some significant i/o wait times but I thought that was just due to this not being a particularly fast PC. Could that have been a harbringer of doom?

For those that are curious the SSD in question was a Crucial BX500 480gb. I don’t recall exactly when it was purchased, likely within the last 5 years and was lightly utilized.

Don’t Automount Disks in MacOS

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:25:53 -0600

I’ve found this tip quite useful. With my new Macbook Pro I now have more disks attached consistently then I did previously. Not having these disks automatically mount when I come back to my desk is quite helpful. Extra tip: make sure you put the correct filesystem type in the fstab. I have a spinning disk formatted as HFS+ and missed that when copying/pasting the first go around.

Read the story -> Quick Tip: Prevent a disk from auto-mounting

Previously, I kept a USB disk attached to my Mac Studio at all times. Once a day, Carbon Copy Cloner would launch and clone the disk. But now, if I attach that USB drive to the hub my MacBook Pro will be connected to, I get a bad bit of behavior: the disk mounts the moment my Mac is attached, and then if I want to unplug my Mac, it’ll yell at me for unmounting that disk improperly.

From sixcolors.com

Space Selfie

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 22:31:45 -0600

Mark Rober sure does come up with some interesting ideas. The question is will my Tweet (are they still called tweets after switching to X?) make it to the satellite to be displayed and captured over the Earth? Time will tell.

Read the story -> Space Selfies from Crunchlabs

Since his early days at NASA, Mark Rober has been blasting stuff into space, and now he wants to do it with one of your photos! So, he got a satellite called SAT GUS* and it’s being launched into orbit to take the most epic selfies in the universe.

To prove to you that we didn’t fake the landing of your Space Selfie, we’ll take a picture of the phone displaying your image with Earth in the background. Boom - you get a selfie with the Earth. A Space Selfie!

Interesting Backup Reading

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 22:42:52 -0600

I came across this lengthy article on backing up your computer which I found interesting. I’ve read thru it twice now and I am still working on digesting the strategy employed. I can see how some of this could be relevant for a project I’m undertaking but running my own NAS in my current environment may not be feasible.

Read the story -> Backup Your Computer Data! 3-2-1

Have you ever thought about how valuable your data is? Or how catastrophic it would be to lose all your computer files, pictures, videos, and other media? Most people don’t think about these things until it’s too late. And guess what? Less than 10% of people back up their data! Services such as One Drive or iCloud are popular today. I use iCloud and like it. Apple’s iCloud is a cool service that syncs your stuff across devices, but it’s not a backup strategy

Books Read in 2024

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 13:00:00 -0400

This year I did a better job of tracking my reading but still not using any specific tool like Goodreads. My wife started reading the Dresden Files series so I paused my reading while she caught up to where I was in the series.

I really like the Cinder Spires series which I read for the first time in late 2023 as well. The Warriorborn novella was a good quick read that fleshed out a little bit of the characters. I hope the author continues writing this series and comes out with another book soon.

The Silo series was a different kind of read for me. I of course learned about it from the TV show which I enjoyed the first season but it is different from the books. Will be interesting to see how they adapt the other books into the TV show. As I write this the second season is about to start airing and I am looking forward to it.

As for the Honor Harrington series, I started this many years ago and read the first two books and then got sidetracked. So I’m trying it again. The first book went quicker than I thought and was different than I remembered but still a good read.

Completed Books

The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Ghost Story by Jim Butcher
Cold Days by Jim Butcher
Skin Game by Jim Butcher
Peace Talks by Jim Butcher
Battle Ground by Jim Butcher
The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher
Wool by Hugh Howey
Shift by Hugh Howey
Dust by Hugh Howey
Warriorborn by Jim Butcher (Cinder Spires Novella)
On Basilisk Station by David Weber
The Honor of the Queen by David Weber
The Short Victorious War by David Weber
Field of Dishonor by David Weber
Flag In Exile by David Weber (still reading)

Books Read in 2023

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 10:00:00 -0400

As I’m writing this in mid-October of 2024 these are the books I recall reading in 2023:

Completed Books

Changes by Jim Butcher (took a while longer to get this finished)
Ghost Story by Jim Butcher (I have a tough time reading this book. It is IMO quite different from the rest of the series)
The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
The Olympian Affair by Jim Butcher
The Naken Sun by Isaac Asimov (I finally finished this book. Not sure I’ll continue the series, but maybe after the next season of Foundation airs I’ll be more inclined)

Git Submobules

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 18:33:18 -0500

Being relatively new to using Hugo one of the neat things about setting up my site was using the git submodule command to add the theme for the site. While I’m not new to using git, this is my first experience with using submodules.

Today while perusing Hacker News I spotted a link to Chris Jean’s post on working with git submodules and found it to be a quite good yet simple overview of exactly what I needed to know. It seems this post has been around for quite some time (at least 11 years based on the comments) so hopefully some of the quirks of submodules has been “fixed”.

Surface Pro 8 Initial Thoughts

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Until recently I had been using a 10+ year old Dell laptop as a “server” running Ubuntu with several Docker containers for various apps. I woke up one morning to a powered off laptop. Nothing I did would revive my “server”. So to get back up and running, I removed the internal SSD from said dead laptop and copied the needed files over to another laptop that already had Ubuntu loaded on it in a dual boot setup with Windows. A bit of cp here and there and my “server” was back up and running without too much fuss.

I had been contemplating replacing my dead “server” with an Intel NUC, but while walking through the electronics section of a local store I spotted the latest Microsoft Surface Pro 9 was on sale. Looking further online later I found that the Surface Pro 8 was on sale for an even better deal, so I decided to give one a try. The model I have is the Core i7 with 16GB RAM and 512GB of SSD storage running Windows 11 22H2.

The first day of Surface ownership was getting the initial setup completed, applying all the missing Windows Updates and then downloading the apps that I want to use. Nothing out of the ordinary here but there is some getting used to the way Microsoft has done things with Windows 11 and the Edge browser.

The package deal I bought came with the Signature Type Cover and Surface Pen. I haven’t spent much time with the pen input other than to know that it works. Typing this post has all been done with the Type Cover and the keyboard works quite well. There is a bit of bounce but nothing objectionable to me. The touchpad I am finding to be a bit over sensitive with how close I am accustomed to hovering my fingers over the trackpad. I keep right clicking in random places or selecting links, etc. I adjusted the sensitivity in the control panel settings but it doesn’t seem to have helped much. A bit of retraining my brain will likely fix the annoyance.

Overall I am happy with the Surface experience and the speed of the system so far has been quite good. Battery life from what I’ve seen in limited use has been also been satisfactory. I’ll provide updates as I continue to use the system more.

Books Read in 2022

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It is not uncommon for me to read the same books multiple times and this year was no different. In truth I failed to finish reading a few book series that I meant to read this year (the honorable mentions). Either way, I still did plenty of reading this year with mostly re-reads, but I did get a couple of new books in. So here we go, the list as I remember it.

Completed Books

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
Peace Talks by Jim Butcher (first time reading)
Battle Ground by Jim Butcher (first time reading)
Storm Front by Jim Butcher (yep, here I have started the Dresden Files series over again)
Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
Grave Peril by Jim Butcher
Summer Knight by Jim Butcher
Death Masks by Jim Butcher
Blood Rites by Jim Butcher
Dead Beat by Jim Butcher
Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher
White Knight by Jim Butcher
Small Favor by Jim Butcher
Turn Coat by Jim Butcher
Changes by Jim Butcher (still reading this one, but almost done!)

Honorable Mentions:

The Naken Sun by Isaac Asimov (got about half way through this one)
Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn (probably only about 10% read. Need to go back to this series so I can get to the new book)

Perhaps next year I’ll go back to using something like GoodReads to keep track of my reading successes. Or maybe there is something easier to use with less friction.

First Post

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A new website must mean a new era. Setting up my Hugo based static website. Need some basic content to get started, so here is my first post.