Category Archives: Work

Holidays, Life, Work

Welcome to 2022

Well, its been a nice break over christmas. I can’t complain really.

I’ve managed to get a few bike rides in, which is nice. And really its been pretty good over the christmas and new year period.

I’m getting ready for the onslaught of 2022 – its hard to know what to expect. But an overloaded health care system is pretty likely once we open the borders. I think the next few weeks will be a revelation for how the health care systems will cope (or perhaps won’t cope) and a marker for things to come.

So the work side of things will be fairly interesting over the next few weeks. We shall see.

Life, Work

The Covid Bubble Bursts

February 5 2022 – The bubble bursts.

Although – with Omicron variant doubling in numbers every 2-3 days, its going to be an interesting race to see what the rest of the country is like by then. Or possibly it will have breached the state borders anyway by then.

I guess we will see.

Either way, its the last normal Christmas for a little while

Life, Work

COVID data from NSW

I think this real world data from NSW Health says it all about vaccines:

Essentially, you are far, far less likely to get covid if you are vaccinated – about 1/12 the rate of getting COVID.

Similarly your risk of ending up in ICU or dying is amazingly low with vaccinations. Its about 1.6% of vaccinated people who get COVID. In comparison, its 2.8% of unvaccinated people who end up in ICU or die.

Overall, that is a 17x reduction of serious illness or death with vaccination.

Life, Technology, Work

Reconfiguring the network

This weekend has been a tough one, but hopefully now the network (and therefore this blog site amongst other things) should run more smoothly. I’ve been having worsening failures with the Linksys Velop mesh system. Rather than trying to fix that, I’ve gone and bought a dedicated ubiquity router and put that into the network as the main router.

This means that the server now connects directly to the internet via the router, and isn’t dependent on the Linksys devices at all. If they fail, only the wifi around the house will go down.

More importantly, it lets me put the Linksys Velop devices into bridge mode. Interestingly, only two of the five Linksys devices can do that – the ones I got more recently from the UK amazon sale. The ones that have UK plugs. But even with two of them the coverage around the house seems ok. I would note that the device that failed constantly as the parent node was not one of these two, so maybe that will improve things.

Also, I’ve been able to move the wifi out of the server space (and therefore the heat) so they might well do better in the rooms at room temperature.

We will see…

Life, Technology, Work

Optimising Mac Storage

Discovered that optimising storage is not a good thing for the server. Basically fills my SSD up for no good reason.

Recovered over 100GB of space by turning this off. Its not like I even keep anything useful on this account in terms of photos, etc.

Technology, Work

Proxy server Fix

Just worked out (yes – I’m that slow..) that all I needed to so was change the $_SERVER environment variable so that I can properly record the IP address of incoming requests.

Since I set up the proxy server a while ago to split out the websites onto different virtual machines, all my site stats recorded the proxy server as the originating site of the web page requests. Which was sort of true – everything was coming via the proxy server – but I do like to know where in the world people are coming from looking at this site.

For the record the fix just required this entry in the wp-config.php file. I basically rewrite the REMOTE_ADDR variable to look into where the proxy has forwarded it from.

/* By MGV on 20200607 - New entry to handle proxy server
     - this will allow us to see the real IP of the client
     - rather than the proxy server IP */

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=$_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] ;

I guess this could blow up if the site goes to a different server, but for now, its getting the right Internet address for site stats.

Holidays, Life, Technology, Work

Mac Mini

Just spent the weekend configuring my Mac mini that’s arrived – its a 2020 model (ie the 2018 model with the feature bump):

  • 1 TB SSD
  • 16 GB ram (I know I could have got 8GB and expanded up for less)
  • Core i7 with 6 cores/12 threads.

Its a nice little server, and not a bad desktop. So I’m ready for when/if my 2012 Mac mini server fails… Amazingly its going strong to this day.

But this is a nice desktop, with room to grow. Interestingly, I noticed that my 500 GB server is actually doing ok now that I’ve pruned the snapshots of the virtual machines. So I have enough space for a while yet despite the emails that are filling it up. Still, ready for when that time comes, which will no doubt be fairly soon.