Photo of one of four hidden lakes within the Southern end of Waiuku forest.

Received this perplexing rookie error while trying to undertake maintenance on one of my virtual servers.

An error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error: https://packages.matrix.org/debian bullseye InRelease: The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG F473DD4473365DE1 matrix.org packages packages@matrix.org

Apparently apart from running the usual such as…

/usr/share/keyrings$ sudo wget -O /usr/share/keyrings/matrix-org-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.matrix.org/debian/matrix-org-archive-keyring.gpg

…I needed to also hop into /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out the line…

deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

e.g From…

# deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security multiverse
deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main
# deb-src https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

…To…

# deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security multiverse
# deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main
# deb-src https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

After that, was able to upgrade my Matrix Synapse homeserver without error

Home time traffic on a Friday. Just as well I was working from home today. If I had to deal with this again on a regular basis. Would absolutely lose my freaking mind.

Auckland transport suggest that the Bus Driver Shortage afflicting the region will likely draw to a close in September. That long?

Unfortunately, it seems a few employers are still keen to force people back in the office at all costs while openly admitting that productivity while people were working from home was not actually a problem but simply to say it was “Sad” to walk into a sparse office – I struggle to see how this is a well throughout reason for lumping employees with such a heavy personal cost just to fill “bums on seats” in terms of personal time, commuting cost + stress along with mental health, and more importantly morale.

Keeping my clocks in Daylight savings time (DST, NZDT, UTC +13:00) until such a time I can’t.

Have already stopped bothering with changing the clock in my car and since I’m still working from home (until May that is) and am chatting mostly with work colleagues who are mostly overseas anyway, I have set all the devices (with the ability to do so) likewise to UTC +13:00

Picking I’ll eventually stumble though, schedule something in DST time resulting in confusion which may compel me to fall back into line and put my clock back an hour.

If one claims to advocate for the environment and is pretty blunt in doing so, what am I to think when I find that one drives a large double cab diesel ute and a Ford Falcon along with living in a huge house that you’ve just recently built. Basically goes against the whole concept of “Taking only what you need”.

Luggage exhibit from the Maritime Museum at the Viaduct.

 

 

The issue I have with the events that have transpired over the weekend is that the result was really a loss for both sides of the transgender discussion. Not only that, the impact has apparently spilled over to inflict at least some mild transient damage to New Zealand’s reputation.

Instead of reasoned debate, we ended up in totally unnecessary and counter-productive violence of both the physical and verbal kind. The issue here is instead of making the other side more likely to see and come to understand your point of view, the attacks like this just make the other party dig in, radicalize and double down entrenching a war that frankly does no one any use.

Thought the cones in this scene may be a little excessive…

Admittedly it hasn’t been in my nature to feel like this towards others, but If you want the public to either do or not to do something (as in areas you can and can not go to), it would help if there were signs. It’s simple people. Don’t expect people to freaking mind read.

On a tangent but still on the Signage rant bandwagon. Why are so many speed limit signs in Auckland these days twisted and turned around facing the wrong way? Even the new ones showing the recently lowered speed limits are like this.

Yeah, sorry, I fear I may be becoming only a husk of my normally meek self.

Picture of an urban waterfall, in Raumaga, Whangarei. Beware of the roaming / unrestrained Pitbull.

TL;DR Answer was found here. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1426476/ubuntu-22-04-audacity-does-not-show-up-in-pulseaudio-recording-tab

sudo apt install audacity -y

Admittedly, the process of trying to lay down and run Audacity initially gave me a bit of grief.

Wanted to install Audacity on my freshly laid down copy of Ubuntu 22.04 and all the references I could find of Audacity was to either install using “Snap” or “Flatpak”. Was apprehensive about Snap versions of any software and recall having grief with Audacity Snap before on my older machine giving me vague errors (e.g error -9985) about being unable to save or being unable to listen to a particular recording device. “Going Transport” –> “Rescan Audio Devices” did absolutely squat.

Even went back into Ubuntu Store and enabled all permissions on Audacity with again, nil effect. Appears nothing has changed (at the time of writing this post) two years on. As a Ubuntu user, I don’t have an overall very good impression of Snap at all having had issues with other Snap packages including with Flameshot (a screenshot tool) being unable to save to the Picture directory.

 

Traditional Hangi at Christmas.

Admittedly, my desire to travel anywhere is in a definite lull at the moment. I’m anticipating it will come back at some point, but I ain’t going to try and force it back. May be accommodation and general travel costs is impacting this a bit.

Might do some day or short overnight trips somewhere these Holidays depending on availability of accommodation / tent sites and depending on how I feel. Again, I’m not going to force it. Will spend my holidays how I see fit.

An average picture of “The Tron” (Hamilton, New Zealand)

Have migrated this website peak.nz to the Main VPS (where nui.nz currently is).

The server pcluster09.stablehost.com has allegedly been suffering a DDoS attack that is now going on two weeks. In an apparent attempt to try and mitigate this, Stablehost deployed BitNinja which results in the frequent triggering off of false positives under WAF rules 941100, 941160 when ever I attempt to edit any given WordPress post.

Scanned the web space for potential Malware using both of the Antivirus tools they had available and nothing was found. In addition to that, as a test… laid down a fresh install of WordPress and attempted to edit the sole example post there, BitNinja again kicked me off the server. Support as friendly and as eager to assist as they were, were not able to ultimately resolve the issue.

Anyway, having migrated this successfully to the Main VPS, noticed this site now loads up so much faster and is so much more responsive both at the front end and at the back (composing posts)

Discovered in the billing section of my Stablehost account that I’m only paying 36 USD a year for the service (Billing history indicated I was originally paying over 100 USD per year). No wonder it is now crap. To be honest, I’m done with shared hosting. It always starts off great, then somehow it always ends up being a race to the bottom when providers slash prices to compete resulting in frankly shit quality hosting performance.

Unfortunately broke my Weider Home Gym over the weekend.

Have gone and put in a M20 bolt in the meantime. But looking at the whole construction, will need to replace it as it’s clearly under designed to handle the weight it was supposed to be able to handle

Continue reading “Home Gym Breakage” →