Roo – Page 25 – Roo's View

Goodreads – 2019

I’ve been using Goodreads for several years to track my reading. It’s been interesting to see what a few of my friends are reading, and more generally what people as a whole think of the books that I’ve been reading. The other thing that appeals to me as I’ve switched heavily into reading ebooks, is that it gives me a sense of ‘collecting a shelf of books’ – without the actual books. I’ve also become a big user of the local library (and it’s lending of ebooks).

In 2019 I read 50 books, this is actually fairly typical for me, but I don’t always manage 50 a year. This is why I set my goal to 35, a number I’m certain to get to (in 2017 I only read 37). Breaking the goal gives me that sense of over-achieving and avoids me stressing at the end of the year.

You can also visit my Goodreads profile.

My reading is almost exclusively science fiction or fantasy. It appears that the reading challenge shows the titles in reverse order, as the 1st book I read last year was The Martian (I was re-reading it actually). I’d recommend the book, and the movie, both are very MacGyver.

The Cosmic Trilogy was a physical book that I dragged through at the cottage over several visits. It was terrible, I should have just stopped reading it, but I finally finished it. Do not read this book! Certainly the worst book I read in 2019.

I will call out a few great reads. Atemis by Andy Weir. The Legend series by Marie Wu (another re-read). I really enjoyed the Mortal Engines series by Philip Reeve, very steam punk.

I’m already into my 2nd book of 2020, and I’ve got some great titles waiting for me to get to. It should be a good reading year.

WordPress migration

I’ve been slowly working on upgrading the server that hosts this website (along with other things such as email, news reader, backups, etc). I started a hard for me to believe 3 years ago. Somewhere along the way I experienced some sort of issue with the ASUS motherboard and after a few attempts to get it fixed via the RMA process, I ended up moving to a Gigabyte based motherboard. I’ve even done a hard drive swap since I started the upgrade process.

I started with a basic Linux install, layered on some useful system utilities and most importantly docker. Most of this is covered in the rebuild post. After that, I try to manage all of the “services” I want to run in containers. I’m cheating a bit and the containers are fairly monolithic, but this is fine for my needs as I’m primarily using containers as a way of managing the software versions vs. trying to build a scalable collection of micro-services.

When I initially started, I figured that I’d use the wordpress container. Now, as I run several wordpress based sites from lowtek, I was just going to run multiple containers and front it all with nginx to distribute the traffic, with of course nginx in a container too.

Along the way trying to get this setup to work, I learned a few valuable lessons about docker networking. The short version of this is if you want docker containers to be able to easily work with each other, create a docker user defined bridge network and make sure all of the containers you want to talk between each other are attached to that network. Now container A can talk to container B using the container name as the local DNS name and things just work.

WordPress generally doesn’t talk https, it’s really just http. This didn’t seem like a problem because nginx is pretty easy to setup with https and let’s encrypt to provide an always secure connection. Unfortunately since wordpress is running as a container itself, it doesn’t really know that it’s setup in a sub-directory nor that the correct URL for it is https. There are simple hacks you can do to the wp-config.php file to make this work, and I did finally succeed in getting all the bits happy. However, when I looked back at what I’d created – it didn’t make sense for the complexity I was dealing with. My nginx needed to reverse proxy to the wordpress containers. Each wordpress install needed extra magic to make it aware of where it was really running, and upgrades to wordpress were wonky because upgrading the container doesn’t really upgrade a running install (the files on disk are what matter).

So I bailed, and just installed wordpress into my nginx deployment. This was pretty straight forward. I added a MySQL container to host the data store for wordpress and everything fell together nicely. I just did a backup of the database on my old server, and an import on the new one.

Nginx makes it very easy to run a full https website. The linuxserver.io project has a well maintained image that includes let’s encrypt and everything I wanted. Unfortunately many links were to http:// – including images. Chrome, and I assume other browsers will follow, is starting to become more strict about mixed content pages. Also, Google search results tend to favour secured sites over non.

I found a good post that covered moving wordpress to a new URL, which is sort of what I want to do. I’m moving from http://lowtek.ca/roo to https://lowtek.ca/roo.

The key commands are:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.oldurl','http://www.newurl');

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.oldurl', 'http://www.newurl');

UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value,'http://www.oldurl','http://www.newurl');

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.oldurl','http://www.newurl');

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.oldurl', 'http://www.newurl');

UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value,'http://www.oldurl','http://www.newurl');

This feels pretty scary, so two things. (1) I want to back up my database, and (2) I’d like to see what it is I’m about to replace.

Backup is actually really easy (this is why containers are cool).

docker exec CONTAINER /usr/bin/mysqldump -u root --password=root DATABASE > backup.sql

1	docker exec CONTAINER /usr/bin/mysqldump -u root --password=root DATABASE > backup.sql

To keep things a bit more brief, I’ll lay out the steps I took to success for the second part.

# get a shell in docker container
docker exec -it mysql bash

# run mysql cli
mysql -u root --passsword

# pick the right db
use my_wp_db;

# dump guid list - this will show you what you're changing
select guid from wp_posts;

# bravely run the replace
update wp_posts set guid = replace(guid, 'http://lowtek.ca/', 'https://lowtek.ca/');

Query OK, 516 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Rows matched: 1513 Changed: 516 Warnings: 0

# ^^ looks pretty good
#
# Turns out I had a bunch of www.lowtek.ca's as well
update wp_posts set guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.lowtek.ca/', 'https://lowtek.ca/');

Query OK, 993 rows affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 1513 Changed: 993 Warnings: 0

# get a shell in docker container

docker exec -it mysql bash

# run mysql cli

mysql -u root --passsword

# pick the right db

use my_wp_db;

# dump guid list - this will show you what you're changing

select guid from wp_posts;

# bravely run the replace

update wp_posts set guid = replace(guid, 'http://lowtek.ca/', 'https://lowtek.ca/');

Query OK, 516 rows affected (0.01 sec)

Rows matched: 1513 Changed: 516 Warnings: 0

# ^^ looks pretty good

# Turns out I had a bunch of www.lowtek.ca's as well

update wp_posts set guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.lowtek.ca/', 'https://lowtek.ca/');

Query OK, 993 rows affected (0.02 sec)

Rows matched: 1513 Changed: 993 Warnings: 0

This only took care of one set of the links. I needed to also do post_content in wp_posts and meta_value in wp_postmeta. Reviewing my blog postings, nearly all of the posts/pages are now fully https with no warnings from Chrome about mixed content.

There were a few standouts. A couple of Creative Commons images I’d linked to needed to get fixed to use https. During the trip down memory lane I found a few busted posts due to images I’d linked which were no longer hosted at that location. I also came across the sad fact that some of my friends who used to host stuff, have let those expire or have changed it significantly enough the information I was linking to doesn’t really exist anymore.

This got me thinking about the state of the web today, and the fact that social media sites have taken over the websites people used to maintain themselves. It’s great to be able to easily communicate with friends and others via things like Twitter, Facebook or Instagram but it’s also unfortunate that there is a lack of diversity in how people are expressing themselves. There is also a lot less control you have over the information once you give it to one of these platforms to host for you. Maybe we’ll see the pendulum swing back a little.

Google Pixel XL

On average I upgrade my phone every 18 months. Sometimes I’ll hang onto a phone for 2 years, and other times it’s much less than that. My most recent phone I used for about 2 years – the Motorola X Play. It was a great fit for me, huge battery, headphone jack, SD card support for more storage and the camera was pretty good. I have for many years bought used phones, avoiding the high prices for new devices and still enjoying a regular flow of great hardware. The Moto X Play was great, it did everything I needed and I really didn’t have a strong urge to upgrade.

Buying used phones, means I’ve always got my eye on the used market. I’ve usually scoped out the set of possible phones I’d consider owning and watch for the street prices to drop under $200, my personal sweet spot for buying a phone. I think it was near the end of last year that the original Google Pixel started to dip into that range locally, and I got a recently refurbished from Google version from someone for a great price. This phone went to Jenn, who had been struggling a little with her Moto X Play and I knew she wanted a better camera.

This of course started me on the slippery slope of wanting a Pixel for myself. Still, prices were fairly high and the Moto X Play did everything I needed. The one thing that the Motorola didn’t have was a fingerprint reader, and this is a nice feature to have as my work apps require long passwords OR biometric access. When I wear my tinfoil hat, I’m not a big fan of fingerprint access – too easy to fool and impossible to change once you’ve run out of fingers and toes. On the other hand, accessing my phone is super fast and easy with a fingerprint vs. typing a really long password in every time.

Then I spotted a Pixel XL with 128GB of storage, but a cracked back glass. They were asking more than I was willing to pay, but the darn listing sat there for a couple of days and ate away at me. I offered quite a bit less than asking to knock it down below my $200 ceiling – it was a bit of a low ball price, but fair enough considering the damage to the phone, and I wasn’t willing to pay more than that.

Wouldn’t you know it, they accepted my offer. I almost walked away from this deal too, because the first time I was supposed to meet up to buy it – they had a schedule mix up and were a no show. That’s usually a sign to say that something isn’t right and it’s a bad deal. They were very apologetic, and I decided to meet up a couple of hours later – where they apologized again, included a nice craft chocolate bar, and knocked another $10 off the price! I have walked away from a couple of used sales where things didn’t feel right, but in this case aside from a schedule mess up there wasn’t anything off about this deal.

Recently Woot featured the same phone for $250 USD, now they are ‘brand new’ condition and come with a warranty, but I still think I’m laughing all the way to the bank with my find. Considering when the Pixel was first launched it was north of $1000, the depreciation as always has been harsh. While my used model may not have ‘like new’ battery life, I still get a solid day out of it.

The camera continues to be amazing, and 4GB of RAM makes a huge difference over the 2GB I had before. I also really like the AMOLED screens, which was one of the attractions to the Samsung Galaxy phones.

Of course, even though the Pixel has the latest version of Android on it (Pie) and looks like it may even get the next one, I went with a LineageOS build, I’ll have to write up that process later as it was a journey. On cold boot I get a pre-boot screen telling me dire things will happen because my boot loader is unlocked, but I can live with that.

It’s been over 9 weeks since I switched over to the Pixel, and I’m still in the honeymoon phase with it. I keep telling myself that I should really fix the back glass, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get to it.