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So I had this old Google Pixelbook Go i5 kicking around and didn’t have much to do with it. It’s got an open UEFIUnified Extensible Firmware Interface A specification or implementation of a standard firmware architecture for computing devices. implementation on it, but previous Linux installs have been unsuccessful for a variety of reasons — mostly relating to the fit with the hardware. The Pixelbook has some interesting hardware choices (a completely wonky ALSAAdvanced Linux Sound Architecture A specification and implementation of an audio API and functionality on Linux. architecture as well as some sensors that I wasn’t able to disable, the “search” key on the keyboard doesn’t remap easily, and so forth), so I just didn’t have time to figure out the system modifications necessary to make things work.

The good news is that so far, Ubuntu 24.10 seems to work. It’s a little slow at times, but this isn’t super new hardware — an i5-8200Y and 16GB of LPDDR3Low-Power Double Data Rate 3 memory Random access memory that conforms to the DDR3 standard but uses less energy than standard DDR RAM. with eMMCEmbedded Multimedia Card A storage solution that uses memory similar to a memory card, but is typically soldered permanently to the motherboard. as storage. Also good is that the Spectre/Meltdown checker runs clear.

This means I finally have a system aside from my work system. Yay!

For my personal mailserver, I’ve chosen to exclude problematic netblocks via the firewall, rather than trying to keep up with the domain names or individual IPs. Let’s face it — there are just some netblocks that are rife with abuse, and if we don’t need potential mail from there, it doesn’t hurt to just splat them and move on. Besides, I’m quite sure that no one I want to hear from is running their mailserver at VPS ACE (URL yanked from RDAP, nice of them to keep their website operational!) or similarly-unsophisticated operations. (Yeah, VPS ACE — you’ve got spammers hawking classes on AI right now. It’s about as charming as the NFT and crypto scammers of the past. Clean it up.)

It’s been a while since I’ve been sharing anything online. Honestly, I haven’t really felt like it. It’s time to get back to it, though.

I’ve been doing regular sweeps for inappropriate traffic at work due to bot swarms. It almost takes me back to the bot-bingo days. At work, I have to be fairly conservative in what I block. Personally, I don’t have to be — so AWS, DO, Chinanet/Unicom, etc. are getting splatted on sight on this server.

I’ve had the urge to get on social media recently, but the problem with that is the ease of replies. If it’s too easy to reply, people do it without thinking. I don’t have time or energy for dealing with knee-jerk reactions from random people.

Server-wise, I’m entirely on an ARM cloud at the moment. If I can’t have a dedicated server, I’d rather use minimal resources. I don’t need 5GHz — 3GHz is fine for now. 32GB of RAM feels tight (I’m used to 128GB), but without argus running, it should be more than enough.