AI, Firewall, Flask, Workstation, TCG OPAL

1. WordPad (@ Wikipedia) is being terminated by Microsoft. Oh that loved program! Yet I personally haven't used it for quite a while. I've preferred pure text files, markdown or the full documents (ODF). Yet .TXT is the most preferred format. Only if the document is slightly longer then markdown and if it's full document, then something like Microsoft Word (DOCX) / LibreOffice (ODF) / Adobe PDF. - One of the reasons why I didn't like  and I phased it out early, was the fact that it doesn't compress screenshots / images in any sane way. Most interestingly if I save same document to RTF using Wordpad or LibreOffice, the output file size is radically different. Screenshot: BMP = 83 MiB, ODT = 11 MiB, RTF (LibreOffice) = 23,8 MiB, and RTF (WordPad) = 170 MiB. That's the reason I didn't want to use WordPad to save anything which any images at all. And for lulz, same screenshot as AVIF = 0.745 MB. Well, it's time for the WordPad to go. There are better options, lighter and more full featured. The LibreOffice is great.

2. Zamba2-7B (@ GitHub). Me and a few friends tried to set it up, not one of us got it to work. We tried several different approaches and distributions, docker base images, etc... No, it won't work. There are some curious dependencies which completely break it down. I would be so much nicer to use if they would provide it with vLLM or Ollama. Well, maybe we'll try it later when suitable runtime / setup is available.

3. Nftables (@ Wikipedia) - Spent around four hours digging around nftables documentation and features. Good stuff. I haven't had time to dig around, and it's wonderful how many legacy solutions it replaces, including masquarade stuff. Yet usually it's not necessary dig so deep, unless setting complete organization edge firewall. Most of workstation / server firewall setups are very simple.

4. AI - People whom would really hard need the AI can't use it. Many sites have so complicated login process that users can't login to access the services. Nor they're smart enough to even ask AI. - Interesting thoughts. At least some applications are pushing AI so hard, that it's getting really hard to ignore, like WhatsApp. Driving adoption to even groups of people who've missed all the hype.

5. Added Flask-Migrate module to my project, allowing easy database version migrations and automatic schema updates. Under the hood it uses Alembic (@ alembic.sqlalchemy.org) - (lightweight database migration tool. kw: Python, Web, Microservice, REST, JSON, SQLAlchemy

6. To use Perplexity (@ Wikipedia) directly from Firefox browsers search bar: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/new?q=%s and to use you.com directly from browsers search bar: https://you.com/search?q=%s&tbm=youchat - Links as text on purpose, also the URLs are unfortunately likely to be changed often, they don't consider those as static API points.

7. My primary battle station (workstation) did blow up during the weekend. Thanks to efficient backup schemes, I only lost about two hours worth of personal work (mostly with this blog). I assume the systems power source, motherboard or SSD had serious issues and both of the connected SSDs died simultaneously. A new build is going to use btrfs (with snapshots), raid1, and additional redundant version history. I guess you can read between lines that btrfs means, that my next battle station is going to use Linux obvious.

8. So much fun, with TCG OPAL (@ Wikipedia) / SEDutil / DM-Crypt - cryptsetup --hw-opal-only and enabling hardware encryption with high performance SSD devices. Now only the main device needs to be unlocked for boot with agonizingly long random key, and then data from it is used to unlock the rest of media which are using completely random keys. It's really nice that the dm-crypt now supports setting up TCG OPAL 2.0.

9. The key and session management in Matrix is quite broken. It's not surprising though, unfortunately nothing new. Now, for example, on my laptop it shows messages from my phone and work computer as untrusted. Maybe someday it will be fixed. But such problems (especially long-term ones) don't inspire deep faith. I was surprised myself at how inadequate the Element X client is, as there's a long list of essential key features missing. This is just for information to those who have been eagerly longing for it. It's by no means suitable as a primary client, but only as a side tool in its current state. This now confirms the view that security, reliability, and functionality are just a side plot in Matrix. Unfortunately, it's not surprising. - Worst thing is the negative attitude you'll receive, if you'll ever manage to mention these things. It kind of works, so... It must be good?

2025-05-11