June 2023 - Tim Boyer's Blog

By request! So I’ve been wanting to volunteer at the local Historical Society for a while now, but they were only open during the day. The Director and Outreach Manager are both good acquaintances – early 30 folks running the show. They’re doing an excellent job of archiving and cataloging, and they’ve just purchased and done a renovation of an archive building.

I asked what they wanted me to do, and they wanted to know if I was comfortable around computers. ‘Well, sort of…’. They’ve got volunteers reading 19th century letters and manuscripts which are rather unreadable, and deciphering them. For instance, this one from last week:

Not a lot easier to read in person, either. The volunteers do a great job of transcribing, but they are not the least comfortable with computers – so they write it out longhand. And my job, therefore, is to take the longhand and key it into the catalog app.

Yeah. They don’t want to tell all of these very nice little old lady volunteers they have to type it into a computer, and most of the LOLV are writing in longhand – so OCR doesn’t work, Either. So I’m doing data entry once a week!

Last week I probably made a mistake, though. If you google ‘Trumbull County Historical Society’, you won’t find their web page.

I strongly suspect that’s because of the SEO being done for them. I.e., none at all. For some reason I have yet to decipher the web site itself does not appear in DuckDuckGo at all. Facebook page and lots of links, but the site itself is invisible.

Last time in, I asked who was doing their web page – and faces lit up. “Do you know anything about WordPress??”. Well, enough to make weird posts every once in a while, but I’m certainly no designer. That’s OK; they’ve got a designer (and the site is actually not too bad), but he takes two or three weeks just to upload a new file. Could I help them out with simple file uploading?

And so it begins. Got the O’Reilly ‘WordPress: the missing manual’. We’ll see where this goes. I noticed their WiFi was using WEP. I’m desperately trying to keep my mouth shut.

Finally bit the bullet and upgraded my mail server to RHEL 9.2 from CentOS 7. Red Hat’s new ‘development’ licensing for under ten servers makes that a no brainer. Didn’t go too badly! Made me remember things I hadn’t worried about for years, like generating certs and getting Dovecot to work. And I am finally forcing myself to embrace systemd. For very, very small values of ’embrace’. I’m trying to wean myself off of the old commands. Alias is my friend.

[root@kyushu3 tboyer]# service whatever restart
Do not do that, asshole: whatever restart
[root@kyushu3 tboyer]# chkconfig –add whatever
Do not do that, asshole: –add whatever
[root@kyushu3 tboyer]#

I call it my mail server just out of habit. It is no longer my mail server. I have gone over to the dark side and signed up with Google Workspace.

It allows me to still do my wildcard email thing – an email to whatever@timboyer.org will still forward to me. It’s got better spam protection than my homemade spamassassin setup has. And the cost? $6 per month. Which is cheaper than I was paying for my ssl cert!

But I miss waking up and reading logs now. Ah, well. It was time.

Totally gratuitous link to Trumbull County Historical Society. I’ve started to volunteer with them and they need thwir link count bumped up.