Category: Topslakr

Posts by Topslakr

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MacOS Catalina and Beyond – Updating $PATH in ZSH (2020)

I’ve just moved from Fedora on my primary work laptop, to MacOS. It’s a change I’m pretty happy about, not because I had any trouble with Fedora, but the quality of my hardware has been upgraded in a big way. This transition has been pretty smooth overall, but I have needed to solve a few small details to make sure I’m not losing any features.

One of those has been adding the tool MTR back to my machine. This was pretty straight forward, as it’s a part of Brew, a sort of package manager for MacOS. The only issue was that once MTR was installed, it’s location wasn’t in my $PATH for the default terminal emulator used in MacOS Catalina, called Z Shell, or zsh.… Click here to read more!

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Backup Hosted Email – OfflineIMAP with Fastmail

A few years ago I finally let go and started using a hosted email provider. Running a secure email platform is something I’ve done or years, both professionally and personally, but I was tired of power outages at home taking my email offline and it’s far less expensive to move to hosted email than convert my home into a redundant datacenter.

After some research, I landed on Fastmail. Pricing is very reasonable and they allow me to use all of the domains I have in my one account. To date, and it’s been a couple of years now, I’ve never lost access to my email due to their back-end going down.… Click here to read more!

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Books Read: 2019

As I did last year, below is a listing of all the books I read in the previous year, and my thoughts on them. For the first time, all of the books I read last year were in digital form.

I began the year finishing Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. I read this as part of a collection of his Christmas stories.

In keeping with my love of murder mysteries, I read Introducing Agatha Raisin: The Quiche of Death/The Vicious Vet, the first of the Agatha Raisin books by M. C. Beaton. We’ve watched the TV series and they seemed like some light reading after the holidays.… Click here to read more!

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Switching from Nikon to Olympus: Part 3 – Trading Up.

As I’ve been writing about over these past posts, I’ve decided to make the move from Nikon to Olympus. I spent about a week with some rental equipment, and while I didn’t love all of the gear I rented, I did love the micro four third system.

I spent some time evaluating my Nikon gear, to figure out how much money I would get for it’s sale. I used KEH for this process, since it’s a lot easier and a lot less work than trying to get it all listed for sale myself on eBay.

As I began this process I was initially considering selling off just my Nikon digital gear, and holding onto some of my well loved film cameras and lenses.… Click here to read more!

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Switching from Nikon to Olympus: Part 2 – Before I make the jump, I’ll test out the system

With a decision made to seriously consider Olympus, as I wrote about previously, it was time to rent some gear and give it a whirl. I looked over my calendar for a period of time that would give me a chance to use the system in a variety of situations and settled on a 6 day period around Christmas. This allowed me to shoot some event photography, some family gatherings, as well as some shooting while hiking.

I placed my order with a local rental company, BorrowLenses. Their website is really slow to return search results, but they had a deal going so I ordered an Olympus OM-D E-M5, and a lens kit that would replace the lenses I used with my Nikon gear.… Click here to read more!

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Centos 7 – NextCloud-Client Installation Issues (September 2019)

Quick post, which will hopefully be helpful to someone..

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been unable to update one of my Centos 7 servers. I chased it down this AM to the Nextcloud-Client software I use on that machine.

Long story short, there is a qt update in EPEL that isn’t compatible with Centos 7.6.1810. Upstream (RedHat) has already released RHEL 7.7, but Centos has not yet caught up. EPEL is tracking upstream, and this qt update will work once Centos 7.7 is released.

In the meantime, I stumbled across this page on CentosFAQ.org: Nextcloud-client Currently Not Installable From EPEL In CentOS7

If you already have the Nextcloud-client installed, simply exclude the qt package from updates by adding ‘exclude=qt5-qtwebkit’ as a new line to your /etc/yum.conf… Click here to read more!

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Switching from Nikon to Olympus: Part 1 – Isn’t Micro Four Thirds a Toy format?

Though I’ve not been a very regular blogger, I have done a decent job of documenting my various photography gear related changes here since my first DSLR, a Nikon D40, back in 2006. From that first DSLR, through my foray into 35mm film cameras, medium format, and the various other DSLRs I moved to along the way, those milestones have been written about here. And, with the exception of the medium format gear, all of that equipment has always been from Nikon.

Perhaps to my detriment, I’ve always been 100% loyal to Nikon. SLRs, DSLRs, lenses and accessories, I always bought Nikon gear.… Click here to read more!

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Books Read: 2018

Using my (now aged) Kindle, I do a fair bit of reading. For some reason, whenever I finish a book I put it into a folder on my Kindle named for the current year. These folders exist only on the Kindle itself, so I thought I might start to keep track of them here on the blog.

At the end of 2017 I was reading a lot of memoirs of people who moved into the wilderness, both in recent years and in centuries past. That continued into 2018 and the first book I read was:

Winds of Skilak, by Bonnie Ward
This was an excellent book, written by Bonnie, about her and her husband’s journey leaving Ohio and moving to an isolated island on Skilak Lake in Alaska.… Click here to read more!

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Setting Up Nagios – Working with Cisco’s CIMC

This was far more challenging than it needed to be. Cisco makes some SDK’s available for use with Nagios but I was totally unable to make the system see them. They are just Python packages so I didn’t expect much trouble, but I was totally at a loss. I thought, initially, that the issue was that the installer dumped the files into /usr/lib/python/site-packages/ instead of the 64bit path /usr/lib64/python/site-packages/ but no amount of copying and permissions changes made the system able to see the dependencies. For those interested, here is a link to the Cisco Nagios tools (from 09/2017) Nagios Plug-Ins for Cisco UCS.… Click here to read more!

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Setting Up Nagios – Installing on Centos 7

Long story short, I changed jobs about 6 months ago and found myself in a new position without any appreciable monitoring of the hardware for which I’m responsible. That needed to change as soon as I started to have time to put some hours into it. I did a little testing and poking around with some other monitoring tools but kept coming back to Nagios as the right choice, despite the mountain of work involved in setting it up. There is such a large community of help and plugins available for it, plus it’s a tool I’ve used at other jobs for many years.… Click here to read more!