A few weeks ago, I had occasion to find out how Docker overlay networks could be created manually, which led me to learn more about network namespaces in Linux. I already knew the concepts behind various namespaces (user, PID, mount, etc.), but this was the first time in a long time that I had occasion to set one up myself. In the process, I came up on one solution to a problem that I’d been having recently: applying a VPN only to some applications.

Over a year ago, I got a Raspberry Pi 3B. Yahoo! JAPAN has this nice system called TechUP for buying stuff (gadgets, books, subscriptions, etc.) to improve your technical skills. A Pi is perfect — it’s well within the budget, and you have lots of people using it for various projects, so there’s a lot of material online that you can learn from. And the models are always increasing in power — just look at the recently released Pi 4: a max of 4 GB of RAM (potentially more), USB 3, and Gigabit Ethernet that doesn’t share buses with the USB ports. Today, though, I’ll be talking about the Pi 3B and my experiments with it.

So, it’s been half a year since I got the Alienware Aurora R7, and I have had my fair share of bugs and annoyances. Today, I’ll talk about a few of those.

It’s been 4½ years since I bought my System76 laptop, and it is showing its age. Back in 2013, an NVIDIA GT670 MX was a pretty decent laptop graphics card (which meant it couldn’t hold a candle to the desktop graphics cards). But I was able to play Hitman: Absolution, the various Mass Effect games, Tomb Raider and so on on it, and with OK graphics levels and resolutions. Fast forward to 2017, and we have HITMAN, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and the 670MX really struggled with them (I don’t have Origins, but it struggled with Unity). And so I decided to upgrade. After casting my net far and wide, I decided against going for a laptop again. My current laptop is functioning pretty much as a desktop¹, so I might as well get another desktop.

So, it’s been around a year and a half since I set up this site. At the time I shifted to Github pages and got a custom domain, I had thought about setting up HTTPS. For several reasons, I’m a proponent of an HTTPS-only web. Where I can, I try to make it so.

I’m not sure why, but Ubuntu takes a hell of a long time to start. The best I could get was 59s - and on occasion it even went to 1:15! If you think this isn’t a cause for concern, this might tell you why it is.

I got the high-end Linux laptop available in the market: the System76 Bonobo Extreme. It is certainly my prized possession, way more awesome than anything I have ever owned, and anything I am likely to own in the next few years. I am not a professional reviewer by a long shot, but after two weeks of using the bonx6, I thought I’d post some of my observations.