Today, I encountered a service that uses passkeys again, and I wondered, “wtf, this can’t be”. The browser (Firefox, Vanadium) always showed an error and did nothing.

So, I checked Settings > Passwords, Passkeys and accounts > Preferred service, and indeed it said “KeePassDX”. So I checked KeePassDX settings - nothing said “enable passkey support” in particular. So… I set the preferred service to None, reset it to KeePassDX, and… suddenly, passkeys worked.

Yeah. Whatever. Introducing new features to software can break things, I know this from my own job. No idea if the bug lies in KeePassDX, or GrapheneOS (passkeys were a new feature there as well?). But now, apparently, I could use passkeys.

Aside, personally, I find storing passkeys in a password database no different to storing secure randomly generated ~20 character passwords. But I am no security expert, so don’t count on my opinion.

I actually went to this page to find my new mail provider(s).

Aside: I find it funny that there are mail provider that offer you cheap plans which limit the number of mails you can send/receive per day. Which is funny, since I fucked something up when upgrading my servers, which resulted in me getting a “cronjob failed” mail every five minutes, and I only noticed that in the evening.

I have like 5 VPS, all running Debian. Still running Bookworm until recently. So over the past two weeks, I upgraded the servers step by step, going with the “least problematic” servers first. (Gut feeling).

Turns out, my intuition was relatively right. What confused me extremely is that the upgrade notes appear to have moved to a readthedocs look like page. Previously, iirc, it was always a chapter in the Debian Handbook.

So, the pain points of Debian updates, for me, always is the config file updates. Usually, I want to keep my changes, but use some of the package maintainers changes. It’s frustrating for me that Debian asks me for a decision in the middle of an upgrade. I’d actually like an option, “just continue with the upgrade, keeping my config, for now”. Which could be problematic for major upgrades with option deprecations I guess? There probably is even some option for this (dpkg-reconfigure debconf?), and I just haven’t RTFM. As it happened in the past.

The actual major pain point was indeed the last server. I’ve been accumulating various questionable packages on this one, for some reason, I installed ffmpeg in the past, which means there were lot of X-related libraries pulled in. During the cleanup, I unwisely must’ve fired off some purge command¹… Which I acknowledged without looking properly. The result was that my entire /etc/letsencrypt directory was erased, as I used the distro-supplied certbot in the past. I just removed the package at some point and installed certbot via pip. So Debian/dpkg still thought that directory needed cleanup. Ooops. So I spent yesterday evening, extremely frustrated, fiddling with the nginx config manually, adding temporary fake certs/keys, so that nginx would start at all, so that certbot could work, and I could re-add the certificates again.

The second biggest pain point is Python virtual environments. Since Debian upgrades always(?) update the Python minor version, all existing venv’s stop working, since a) they are created with a pointer to, e.g. /usr/bin/python3.11, and b) packages/modules go into a version-specific site-packages subdirectory. So, the procedure always is go through all of them, recreate the venv, reinstall all packages, hope it still works. In my case, even the Python script that triggers buildbot builds didn’t work anymore, because from future.utils import itertools² didn’t work anymore, and needed to be replaced by dict.items(). And my looking glass didn’t work no more because apparently Python stopped shipping the cgi module. The current “replacement” seems to be legacy-cgi. I have no “proper” solution for this yet.

Lesson learned: Read the fucking output before you hit enter.

I actually even thought about writing an assembler for the “machine” (2). But then again, I only tested the CPU and the Verilog modules in test benches so far. I haven’t loaded anything of that on my dev board, nor did I think about how I can “properly” simulate the CPU, including “loading” a program and viewing its state.

I think I need to play around with Verilator for that, which allows translating Verilog code to C++. This way, I should be able to control the CPU and also view its state. I’ll take a look at nand2tetris, which, to my knowledge, also contains a section about that topic. Its architecture is similar, though it uses a different instruction set.

Even playing Nandgame the first time - way back then - gave me a good insight on how CPUs work. Implementing one in Verilog makes things click further. Well, at least for simple architectures. I still have no idea how pipelining works, and all the details that entails, nor how multi-cycle-instructions work. That’s probably for another time.

You can view the code I wrote so far in my git repository.

(1) Tools that helped me were Icarus Verilog, Verilator and GTKwave, which are all contained on the OSS CAD Suite. That is, both linting and test benches.

(2) So I started with writing a disassembler first. I wanted to develop a nice syntax first, because I don’t like the syntax nand2tetris introduces. That’s not “proper assembler” for me. One of the special things of the architecture is that you can have multiple “destinations” for an operation, though - or none at all. To my shame, I used an LLM to get inspiration how the language could look like.

As COVID hit me for this years’ Christmas, I had a lot of time. And also boredom. By chance I stumbled upon the Tang Nano 9K development board. It’s surprisingly cheap, and it could even run a picoRISC-V, something I wanted to play around with as well.

Alas. When looking at where to get it, the only solution was to get it from AliExpress / China. It’s not available at any European distributors, apparently. (For ecological reasons, I don’t want to order there anymore. I don’t want to participate in this Temu, and whatever these the other shops are called, hype.)

So I already put the project off the table, When suddenly EBay notified me a German individual put one for sale. Yes, you may criticize me for that, since the board still comes from China, but I find in more bearable for myself to buy used stuff.

So anyway, here it is:

I already started playing around with it, you can follow my learning progress on my Git repository.

I have next to no knowledge of this topic altogether, so it’s something entirely new for me! Exciting!

Tuesday, 2025-10-28

The trip from Würzburg in one go is too long for me. Also, the best train connection from Frankfurt starts at like 8 a.m. I’d have to start from Würzburg about one hour before that.

Since that’s too early in the morning for me, I started one day early. A fellow furry, F1fth, offered to let me stay the night on the couch :D. Warm thanks for that.

Wednesday, 2025-10-29

In the train to Switzerland. Traveling is so much nicer in company!

With F1fth, Leso, schMA, H3xe and Jonas, the time went by quickly. The first view of the alps was as beautiful as ever.

There was “Schienenersatzverkehr” because of construction work, so part of the trip was by bus instead of by train. It went pretty well, though. For the last part of the trip, we saw a cow pissing (from inside the bus while driving by). That was pretty funny. Situationskomik.

Registration at the con went smoothly and relatively quickly, and I already did the first tasks for the scavenger hunt.

Also on the first day, I already met so many people I either haven’t met in a long time, or only knew from the internet: FoxbrushTailwag, Ookami, LabWolf, Nerkitt, Neirin, CJ, StripeyYena and Takiwuff. That makes me happy, especially since I struggle with that mentally (“I know nobody” / “Nobody knows me anyway…”).

Thursday, 2025-10-30

Took a small walk in the morning. The climb made it quite exhausting. But the view was worth it!

So, what else were the events that day? The snack exchange! There were many nice snacks, and I even tried some of the licorice liqueur. The whole day ended in a food coma.

The place around the campfire was popular as well. It was down by the hostel, where you had a superb view on the mountains, and also where the pool was located.

Also, I bought some furry artwork in the Dealers Den, and then watched the dance competition in the evening. Everyone performed really well.

Friday, 2025-10-31

I helped cutting bread for breakfast in the kitchen - with an industrial machine. And I even managed to keep all my fingers :D. Also, I helped drying the dishes the day before. Helping in the kitchen is important for a furry-only managed convention.

Also, that day was the Maid Cafe, which was pretty popular. And I also got a massage from a fellow furry, which was really nice, since I had some shoulder problems during the con.

Saturday, 2025-11-01

I did a night-time walk at 2 a.m. because I woke up in the middle of the night (again) and couldn’t go back to sleep. After the walk, I could sleep some more, though. The sleep problems continued the other days, though. I blame the mattress. Or my back in general.

That day, there was the group photo, I went down to Meiringen with schMA via the gondola, and in the afternoon, there was the jam session, in which I even played some guitar.

In the evening, I go to do some mixing at the video table for the live stream! A whole new experience for me.

Sunday, 2025-11-02

After breakfast, packing, helping cleaning the tables in the dining room, I returned to my room to find the con cat on the bedding :o. I left the window to the room tiled open, so he or she must’ve slipped in.

Then it was already time to travel back to Frankfurt. It was a nice journey, with the same group as the way to Switzerland.

The last part back to Würzburg was a catastrophe, though. The train was running late, and had to be re-routed around Aschaffenburg. I arrived sometime around 11 or shortly before midnight back at home.

I like to travel with minimum luggage, so I don’t have to haul around several kilograms. (I’m going by train, of course). Sure, some things can be bought at the destination, but that 1) might be more expensive and 2) I either need to carry everything back or toss it, which is a waste of resources and/or money. Especially when I think about those small cosmetics containers with toothpaste, shampoo, and stuff.

Only from volume, clothing takes up a lot. Which is why I want to take as little as possible. Which mostly results in me taking only one pair of shoes. Although two would be more appropriate sometimes. Anyway, the “cosmetics” bag alone is 1.4 kilograms. (Including the toothbrush, electric shaver, soap, etc.)

And then there’s this thing “did I pack everything I need”. Most worrying are things you can’t buy at the destination (e.g. medical supplies). Or maybe those are just “proxy worries” for the con itself. I don’t know myself enough to assess that.

Anyway, I’m actually looking forward to the con, and hope I can “switch off” my worries to actually enjoy it.

PS: You know this “ohhh, wait, let me open the bag again and check if I packed that specific thing”?

After a friend of mine 3d-printed me a new back cover for my Pebble classic (I fucked up the screw holes, probably by screwing them too tight), I reactivated my Pebble, by pairing it with Gadgetbridge again.

First, pairing itself was a PITA. Gadgetbridge would show the pairing screen, Android would show its pairing screen, I would acknowledge on Android, then on the Pebble, and then Gadgetbridge would endlessy show a spinner. Also, the Pebble wasn’t paired with Android.

So I manually paired the watch with Android in the OS, and then in GB. Fine.

But then, calendar events wouldn’t be synced, although I enabled the setting in GB. Disconnecting/Reconnecting multiple times didn’t help. What did help was creating a new calendar event. For some reason, only this seems to trigger syncing.

Infuriating.

Just check

• The certificate must be in PEM format. If it is in DER, you get the error above.
• The file extension must be .crt or .cer. Not .pem. Otherwise you get a different error.

For me, it deducted points for missing HTTP headers. Amongst them, Content-Security-Policy. Basically, that header says what content may be loaded on the website. Especially, it can prevent loading stuff from external sites. (Cross Site Scripting as attack scenario).

So, basically, it doesn’t add much value for my blog, since this is a static site and I control the content. Sure, there is my comment system, but even that I consider safe enough to handle escaping. So setting the header was mostly done to score fake internet points only. But also, a chance to learn something.

Because, even after adding self and my domains to the respective header fields, some stuff would not work. Mainly because of inline scripts and inline styles. So I put them in separate js files and created CSS classes.

One thing that doesn’t work anymore are avatars for the ActivityPub comments (and probably for the Isso comments?). This is because I have no idea from what servers I will get comments. So, I replaced the avatars by a grey square.

And that’s it already, really.

Two weeks before Awoostria:

Hey, I should build something for my Tinkering Projects Show And Tell panel!

So it begins… The story how I built myself an ePaper badge.

Actually, the story begins way earlier (unrelated, when I still had a physical Raspberry Pi running stuff in my home network). I wanted to tinker around a bit and bought myself a Waveshare ePaper. These are simple black-and-white displays which maintain their content when the power switches off. They are also inside eBook readers.

This was also when I wanted to build myself an electronic door sign for the EAST convention with these, and I wanted to go “as minimal as possible”. I wanted to use one of the MSP430 controllers I had laying around, and I wanted to change motives via MiFare RFID transponders (using an MFRC5xx reader). Work on that development never really took off. (Ugh, too little flash for all the pictures, too much stuff to code myself!)

Requirements

So this time, I simply said “fuck it”, and threw an ESP32 on the problem. Also, I decided to use PlatformIO, a toolchain/SDK/library manager. I started with the Arduino framework, which is… pretty wasteful in terms of resources (Flash, RAM, CPU etc.), but speeds up development significantly.

I had a simple ESP32 devboard, and one of the Waveshare modules, and started coding.

…

But wait, what do I even want to achieve? Well, I wanted to “mood badge”, i.e. show my current mood with funny pictures. I couldn’t get one on previous conventions, so I was just gonna build one myself.

This involves several sub-problems:

• Control the ePaper display
• Get the pictures on the display
• Set what is displayed
• Power-saving
• Attach the badge to myself

Control the display

Usually, you never talk to the displays themselves, but to a display controller. You talk to these via a digital interface, e.g. SPI. There are different display controllers with different command sets.

But why bother with implementing this myself? There are ready-made libraries. For myself, I decided to use GxEPD2. They support some Waveshare displays. The problem with Waveshare displays is, they don’t disclose which display controller they use. So it’s kind of an trial-or-error procedure. Or rather, you can look at their example code, figure out which commands they are using, and compare what commands GxEPD2 uses. That’s a bit cumbersome. But still better than writing everything myself. Also, it supports graphics primitives!

Get the picture on the display

You can’t just simply throw a JPEG onto the display. The display doesn’t understand that. It only understands pixel data. Also, the display can only draw black and white pixels. I also have a display with yellow color support, but that makes it even more complicated, actually. Even when you don’t use it, refresh is slow.

So, you definitely can’t throw a color picture on the display, nor a monochrome one. There are displays which support a few gray-levels, but I don’t have one of those.

So. What to? The solution is “dithering”. I.e. you trick your eye into perceiving grey by having clusters of black and white pixels. There is some technical background to dithering (see the Reference section), but I simply used either GIMP with the Floyd-something algorithm, or one of the “ordered” modes of ImageMagick. It was a bit of trial-and-error and seeing-what-looks-best.

The result, then, looks like this:

Now, about the image format… GxEPD2 supports “XBitmaps”, or XBMs, which are basically just a C array declaration, so you can GCC that file and throw in the array into the GxEPD2 function call. And voilá, it works. You need to set the rotation first, though.

How to attach the badge to myself

I have a Waveshare module/PiHat (which is too heavy), and a simple “ePaper sheet” including a plastic housing for it. The housing can only fit the ePaper, not the devboard, though. Also, it would be too cumbersome to attach to the devboard - loose wires! So, at this point, I decided to switch from the prototyping platform onto something better.

Fortunately, Elecrow provides a CrowPanel, which is exactly what I need. It has a display, a built-in ESP32 controller, a housing, and even some switches! As a huge plus, they even specify which display controller they use. I had to try some of the GxEPD2 display classes, but finally found one working.

I decided to glue magnets onto the housing, and attach the display via magnets on the inner side of my shirt — not ideal. I positioned the magnets in the (vertical) middle of the housing, so it wobbles and is not readable. Also, I accidentally washed the shirt after Awoostria with the magnets still sticking inside — and now there’s a hole in it :( . This problem is still unsolved. I can kinda attach the magnets to the housing screws at the top, but that’s not very stable.

When starting to work with the Elecrow display, at first nothing would work. When I looked at their example code I noticed there’s an additional power pin that needs to be toggled.

Set what is displayed

In addition to these switches, which allow choosing the motive, I wanted something “more direct”, so I added the NimBLE-Arduino library. With a bit of coding, I added a service and some characteristics, so the available motives could be read via BLE. Also, the motive could be selected via another characteristic. I started writing the characteristic with nRF Connect For Mobile, but started writing an app later.

Actually, the switch-selection was a bit troublesome. Redrawing the whole display takes around 2 seconds — but that is not acceptable when navigating the presets one-by-one. By looking at the API, I found out you can select a “partial region”.

What I didn’t mention yet, the text that shows the mood is drawn at runtime, not integrated into the picture. So, I simply update a region in the vertical-center-right of the display with the mood text. The picture stays the same, but the text reflects the selected mood. The selection is confirmed my pressing the rotary switch.

This is still not ideal. The first update after power-up must be a full one, and I don’t save the selected preset in NVS — I don’t want to destroy the flash by lots of write cycles. I don’t have a solution to this, yet. Maybe I’m gonna integrate an microSD card (there’s a slot for that in the CrowPanel). I’m gonna research a good wear-levelling file system for that. Probably not FAT. That doesn’t need to be readable on the PC. (And even if, simple stuff can be written in FUSE). Alternatively, drawing the first motive on power-up would also be an option, but I don’t like it that much.

Power saving

I first measured the current and was shocked. The whole thing draws around 80-100 mA. Not a big surprise, given that Arduino basically calls loop() over and over again.

Using a bit of experimenting, and failing to cancel light sleep with a GPIO interrupt, I implemented power saving by using a timer-based light sleep (10 ms, gives good user response) and reducing the CPU frequency to 80 MHz. And lo and behold, my USB current measuring equipment (resolution 10mA) showed 0 mA. Success.

Actually, reducing the CPU frequency was a requirement! If I didn’t do that, the CPU would constantly crash when entering or exiting light sleep. No idea why!

Apropos of powering: The badge is normally unpowered and only powered if I need to change the motive. I don’t want to have an USB cable hanging on me the whole time! Using a battery might be an option, but I had problems with mismatched connectors — the Elecrow display doesn’t have a standard JST connector like the LiPo battery I bought (Li-Ion might even be the safer option? I have no clue about this stuff. With a quick search, I only found these cylindrical Li-Ion batteries and have no idea how I would connect them). The badge seems to have a “mini” variant of that connector.

For the time being, I power it with a USB power bank, but this I still consider an unsolved problem.

The app

Writing the BLE characteristics with nRF Connect is all and well, but not really user-friendly. I didn’t want to install the Android SDK, so I looked at cloud based development for a start. I found MIT AppInventor. First, I was disgusted, because apparently they require Login with Google. But I found an alternative way by which you simply get a “Passphrase-like” codeword you use for login.

The graphical programming is unusual to me. I used Scratch shortly in the past, so it was not completely foreign. Actually, it was kinda fun coding this, in “event style”, once I figured out how to to like stripping, list filtering, etc.

This was good enough for a while, but then I decided I wanted to actually have the source code available. So I looked again at development options, and settled for Flutter.

Again, this was completely new to me. I started off with a popular BLE library, which turned out to be an unfortunate choice, as Linux support had a few quirks. That was probably a good thing in hindsight, as this made me abstract away the BLE stuff in implementation classes, so I could easily try out different libraries, and only use the abstract base classes in the code. Well, you can see what the code looks like, I linked my repo below. This is what the motive selection looks like:

Resources

• surma.dev about dithering
• git repo with badge source code
• git repo with app source code

Day 0 / Wednesday

As usual, more or less, I decided to go by train. It’s only about 5 hours, anyway. And I can sleep during the trip. Which I couldn’t do if I went by car.

Before the convention even started, I got into a Signal group with Tuxel, Nightraccoon and LynxOnRails. From them, I knew that LynxOnRails was in the same train. We actually sat together for some time and talked a bit, before I went back into my first class seat ;) to take a nap.

Actually, I ran across another furry in the same train (easily recognizable, what other kind of person would wear a tail and have a big fox plushie? ^^). That turned out to be NoteFox, which I should learn on the next day. In the end, the train was only 5 minutes late.

In the evening, I went eating with Tuxel, Nightraccoon, LynxOnRails to 5 Guys. I wanted a BLT, which turned out to be a CLT (Charcoal-Lettuce-Tomato Sandwich). Meh.

My three fellow furries played some rounds of Uno, but I had to go to bed early, so I couldn’t play with.

Day 1 / Thursday

The bed in the guesthouse I got was… meh. Might be because I have shoulder-neck issues anyway. I booked the guesthouse without breakfast, because I wanted to save money. So I looked around and went to get breakfast in an “eastern shop”. It was a regular breakfast, bread rolls with jam and a far-too-hard-boiled egg.

Since the con didn’t really start yet, I went to the “Haus des Meeres” with Nightraccoon. This is an aquatic animal exhibit. It is located in a former flak tower. Actually, I’d have loved to visit the Zoo Schönbrunn, but that would’ve taken a whole day probably. I need to remember to book a few extra days next year.

Next to that was a computer gaming museum, which we didn’t have the time/stamina to visit.

In the evening, I enjoyed the CoVahr concert, and was really blown away to see fursuiters play instruments. A truly special experience.

Day 2 / Friday

Went looking for breakfast again, and got desperate, because all cafés apparently only open at 9 a.m. or so, or even later. In the end, I settled for a café, where the owners were coughing a lot, which made me feel very uncomfortable. I sat outside, so it was probably okay. I got an omelette, which is not what I eat usually. Also, a fucking wasp decided to visit me again, but this time I was prepared, I brought a spray bottle with water, infused with lavender oil, which drove that insect away, so I could eat in peace.

During the day, I met quite a few familiar faces, namely Ookami, Labwolf and Karpour. This made me quite happy. (I was already overwhelmed by the crowded Wimberger lobby the day before, with lots of people I didn’t know. That stresses me out for some reason.)

Also, I got to meet Kianga, which I only knew from online before. Yay!

I even held a panel, the “Tinkering Show And Tell”, which I already did at EAST last year. We had leather masks, several electronic badges, moth wings with a quite sophisticated foldout mechanism, and a very old VHS camera with some upgrades. I got some positive feedback for the panel in the end :). Sadly, I missed the fursuit striptease charity event, which was happening at the same time :(.

I got some food at the nearby “Loving Hut”, which offered a special menu for furries even. Sadly, it turned out that the Carbonara portion was way too much for me, so I had to forgo the cake.

Then, in the evening, I attended the Riichi Mahjong panel held by Blujay and Viper. It was very nice to play that game again after over 10 years. I think I last played it at one of the Berlicon conventions I went to.

Day 3 / Saturday

As I got fed up looking for breakfast places, I simply went to get it at Flemings, since they has a superb offer. One could attend the breakfast buffer for only 15 €. This had the added benefit I could enjoy breakfast in company, with Nightraccoon, Tuxel and LynxOnRails.

After breakfast, I got a nice massage from a learning physiotherapist. This was really needed. That day was also the Whsprs concert which I enjoyed for a whole, before I decided to leave early to get food at the lovely Maid Café the convention organized. It was in the Fleming’s café/restaurant, and fursuiters were roaming around serving the guests. That was lovely. I also got a snep shirt in the dealers den later.

I finally met Tabbie in person that day. I haven’t seen him in suit during the whole convention, probably as I was more around at Flemings. Also, I met Fox and Gustl that day.

Also, during the days, I participated for a bit in the game that was prepared for the convention. It had “reality” elements, but also had online elements. For the theme, they had the con space nicely decorated.

Day 4 / Sunday

I got breakfast at Flemings again, in nice company; later, I had lunch with Kianga and Keeya; and in the evening, I had dinner with Fox and Gustl. CoVahr played the piano in the hotel lobby that day.

Sadly, I didn’t win any bids in the art show :( But I got a mail saying I won the lottery at GLC, though :).

After the closing, I actually met Runo shortly, whom I haven’t met in real life before, either.

In the evening. I played some last rounds of Mahjong with Blujay, Perrydotto, Sylpheon and Sharky, before we had to leave because the bar was closing.

Monday

I got some breakfast at bakery at West station (because I needed to buy some stuff there), said my goodbyes, hoping I didn’t forget anyone, before heading back to the Meidling station together with Nightraccoon, where we both had a coffee, before parting ways. The trip back home was quite boring, though.

Summary

It’s been a while since I had so much to do, felt some FOMO. The first few days I “panicked” a bit in the hotels, because there were so many people around I didn’t know, even if they were furries. In these situations, it helped me to retreat to the community room. It wasn’t exactly quiet, but at least it wasn’t crowded. Also, the feeling subsided once I met a few familiar faces.

Now what’s left for me is to wait for GLC, and then for next years Awoostria.

It took some tinkering, especially because Gemini’s markup language (“Gemtext”) is deliberately minimal, and Jekyll can’t output/convert Markdown to Gemini, so I had to take “the ugly route” to convert the “finished” Jekyll HTML page to Gemtext via the below-mentioned tool, which basically does HTML > Markdown > Gemtext. I can’t directly use the raw Markdown files of my blog, since I use Liquid tags.

Anyway, my blog is now accessible in “Geminispace”, alas, only within DN42, because I’m too lazy right now to do it properly. (With the DN42 namespace isolation and all). And also, it’s a really “nerdy” protocol, with I don’t know how many users.

gemini://uvok.dn42/

Addendum: What I really like is the “feed” specification, which basically consists of separate lines of
=> $link $date $heading,
and browsers like Lagrange can subscribe to these (like RSS feeds, but the format is much simpler!).

• Gemini Protocol on Wikipedia
• Gopher Protocol on Wikipedia
• Gemini Protocol homepage
• Gemini “Quickstart”
• Gemtext intro
• Html2Gemini
• Lagrange browser

Cue last weekend. “Suddenly” the resolution didn’t work anymore. It simply timed out. So I connected to my VPS (which is running DN42 in a namespace) and took a look at tcpdump. Inside the namespace, I saw the strange lines

18:49:05.296629 eth0  In  IP6 fd7a:115c:a1e0::xxx > fd42:d42:d42:53::1.53: 42631+ [1au] AAAA? wiki.dn42. (50)
18:49:05.296679 kioubit Out IP6 fd3e:bc05:2d6::80.50255 > fd42:d42:d42:53::1.53: 42631+ [1au] AAAA? wiki.dn42. (50)
18:49:05.302946 tinc_dn42 In  IP6 fd42:d42:d42:53::1.53 > fd3e:bc05:2d6::80.50255: 42631 1/0/1 AAAA fd42:d42:d42:80::1 (66)
18:49:05.302990 kioubit Out IP6 fd3e:bc05:2d6::80 > fd42:d42:d42:53::1: ICMP6, destination unreachable, unreachable route fd3e:bc05:2d6::80, length 122

And all the time I was thinking… “huh??? Why is fd3e:bc05:2d6::80 unreachable??? It is clearly in the ip -6 a output!!!”. I looked through all the iptables statistics and couldn’t find the culprit.

A join in the DN42 IRC and some back and forth later, someone suggested “Hey, what’s with the fd7a:… address? Is there a route for that?”.

And of course, no, it wasn’t! I was so focused on the ICMP6 message that I didn’t notice the incoming line. As you can read in my other article linked above, I perform NAT. Of course in that case it probably wouldn’t make sense for the ICMP6 message to tell someone that there’s no route for the original IP (before NAT).

So, but… where does the fd7a:… address come from?
The answer is Tailscale. Unfortunately, they decided to use the fd00::/8 IP range, which collides with DN42. I didn’t do any DN42 stuff since installing it, so I didn’t notice that.
But… why is that address used at all for the DNS request?
Weeeeell… I found out as well. It comes from OpenWRT. I simply set up a static route there, and Linux does its best to determine the source address for the DNS request. And it seems the Tailscale one was a closer match than the address from my own DN42 prefix.
So, how to fix that?
It’s not as easy as you think!. Merely using the “source” option in the config file would work for IPv4, but for IPv6 it has a different meaning!
But why does it say “no route to host” instead of using a default route?
Because I configured bird to insert an “unreachable” route for the fd::/8 prefix to avoid leaking traffic.

# ip -6 route show fd00::/8 table dn42
unreachable fd00::/8 dev lo proto bird src fd3e:bc05:2d6::1 metric 500 pref medium

At this point, it’s Monday evening. Unnerved, I threw my hands in the air and simply put a line of

ip -6 route replace fd00::/8 ... src <my-openwrt-dn42-address>

in /etc/rc.local and called it a day. My setup works again, and I learned something again. Don’t just look at the last line, look at the whole picture. A lesson I actually already learned in the ubuntuusers forums when asking for help compiling a package and only posted the last few make output lines, which of course didn’t contain the actual compilation error…

I found it can even be modded! The mod in question is Animals and Myths Pack.

That adds to the fun. I might even get a mod that adds NPC lines. The build-in ones can get monotonous after some time.

There are some ;) who take great joy in Kubernetes. I never really understood how I could use it.

Okay, so, very simplified, K8s let’s you say “I wanna run these services (Docker containers) on my cluster (various computers/servers), optionally with redundancy”? Well, I only have one “server” in my “homelab”, and then 3 VPS or so. Only one of them runs something in Docker/Podman.

I can’t imagine/don’t understand how I would run, say, Nextcloud in K8s. I want to know which server is currently running it, and where the data is stored. Especially with something like Nextcloud, I want to have the Nextcloud application, the database, and the data store on one VPS, without any indirections, without any communication over the internet or a VPN, via some proxy software. From what little I’ve heard about K8s (forgive me my ignorance), I had more questions that I could answer. K8s seems really complex, because it has can have so many moving parts (yes, you can probably run a very basic setup, most of the components seem optional). I don’t want my database suddenly moved around to somewhere else.

That is to say: I never had a use case of trying out K8s. No actual, real one. I could probably construct one if I tried really hard. But, eh. “My current setup works”.

My attempt to run K8s on my Proxmox via LXC all failed, even if they’re privileged containers, probably because I need to mount Linux Namespaces, or load specific kernel modules on Proxmox itself so they can be loaded in the LXC containers as well (???).

<insert AI generated image here - hah, you wish. I’ll have none of that on my blog.>

This thought was presented to me while listening to the “Stay Forever” podcast, a German-language podcasts about old games and their technology.

So, as for games I played (recently-ish)? Roughly sorted by time last played ascending:

• Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in my childhood (in no specific order):
  • Civilization ¹, ². Yes, the original one! If I remember correctly, I always got destroyed sooner or later… - FreeCiv is an open source game inspired by it.
  • 3D Pinball Space Cadet. I spent hours on that one. Never quite succeeding on hitting the targets…
  • Anno 1602. I think the first game I searched for cheats to improve my chances… - Unknown Horizons is a similar game in open source. ³
  • SimCity 2000 ⁴ - LinCity-NG is a similar open source game.
  • Need For Speed III
  • Empire Earth (quite like Age Of Empires, as I found out later) - As far as open source goes, 0 A.D. is probably the closest?
  • “Die Völker” (apparently, “Alien Nations” in English, “The Nations” was actually the sequel. Yeah, what?). I sunk quite some time into that one as well.
  • “Funk-Flitzer”, which was on a “Mickey Maus” comic magazine. Go search for “3-D Ultra Radio Control Racers”.
  • Worms 2 - Hedgewars seems to be the open source alternative.
  • Moorhuhn, Winter Edition
• Sometime later deep in the past: Minecraft (I stopped way before Microsoft acquired it), recently followed by Minetest, or rather, Luanti (Though, “it’s just not the same anymore”. I’m not sure what exactly it is, maybe my changed mindset, maybe I liked the original soundtrack and game elements more…).
• Starbound, very shortly
• OpenTTD: Trains and buses! Though, admittedly, I never quite “got it” (why do you have to manually “park” passengers on train stations, instead of unloading them completely, so they continue taking the train?)
• Dwarf Fortress. Go with LNP if you wanna give it a try, or the Steam version.
• Stardew Valley (on Android tablet)
• Factorio - Shaking my head over the people arguing over how to perfectly optimize everything ;). I disabled biters in recent play-throughs, it got to annoying for me.
• Terraria. Another one where I had to resort to the Wiki for the bosses.
• Cattails: Wildwood Story. Got through the main story, had to resort to YouTube for looking up how to beat the final boss.
• Turing Complete
• And, the most recent one, dotAge

The latter ⁵ one is a “turn-based village builder”, with challenges. I guess I can kinda compare it to Dwarf Fortress, as in, it can be incredibly hard, and you have to build a civilization ⁶ and take care of it, as in terms of food and drink, for example. Only you don’t have to deal with goblin or forgotten beast invasion, but, basically, nature. And DF doesn’t have tech research… Okay, maybe they’re not comparable after all.

The first play-throughs are rather rough, since you will only unlock additional content, such as farming, with play time. So your first villages will cease to exist quite quickly, I think. That’s expected. Probably to show you the failure modes?

From personal experience: Don’t build some new buildings too quickly. The game allows you to build them even though they’re “useless” at that specific point in the game, and you need additional tech research to make them usable.