August Lightworker Download

Posted on August 14, 2024 by bluedepth

Today I received a pretty steady stream of inspiration and wrote a fair amount of what is bouncing around in my mind. I was writing to a close friend, but it is pretty much meant for everyone.

It was why I was sent here. What I was supposed to do. But I can’t. Wabbits scatter. So I just have to remain in the core vibration and be strong. That’s the primary advice from my channel. I have to be strong for people. Possibly you all. Possibly for when shit hits the fan.

First contact. Natural disasters. Mass ascension. Helping people with the endless cavalcade of release and integrate energies pouring from Gaia to us via the Schumann.

This planet is alive. Conscious. With it. Awake. She talks to us with weather, the sun, and even yes, the Schumann gap.

The reason why everyone has been spicy, grumpy, scattered, shitty sleeping, bazonkers dreams, and sudden shadow work just bubbling up from below previously riveted deck plates.

The Earth is ascending. She’s rising in vibe and the Sun is helping. The Sun affects Gaia, and she is affecting us.

The higher the lightworkers help everyone anchor and raise vibe, the faster the trip. We’re headed to a kind of New Earth. Shits gonna start to happen, miracles people will call them. And everything will change. We are leaving the domain of limitation and duality. That is direct and unmistakable.

It will start with unexpected and inexplicable synchronicities. Then people will start to align with their path, their soul contract terms, and they’ll begin to manifest. With all of it, comes inexplicable abundance. Strength, health, money, time, attention, awareness.

You can see it happening in real time. Witness the Harris/Walz campaign. Something to believe in, a source of joy, they are either lightworkers or unwitting anchor-points. But they are vaporizing fear everywhere they go.

As people leave the low vibe behind, as they appeal to love, kindness, compassion, and courage they become the next runner in the relay race to the New Earth.

So as more people pick to be kind, they are emitting that into the universe. The law of attraction is immutable and infinitely powerful. It isn’t that we have to call something to us trying to get in as much as releasing all the shit that wants to get away from us.

The more that we allow our pure inner preferences to be expressed in our lives, the more simple and easy our lives will become. Trust in the process. Release the awful shit, and stop roasting yourself with deprecating inner monologues. That’s my current hurdle.

The more people that do this, the easier life will be for us. It’s supposed to be easy. We have challenges and they are supposed to be set to easy mode. But we call shit we don’t want, and we hold onto it, trapping what doesn’t want to be with us, with us. And so, we are beset with misfortune. Letting the shit that you don’t want go, opens the door to all the amazing stuff that is desperately trying to reach us. Every single one of us. Lightworkers were sent to help everyone learn this, make better choices, be kinder with yourselves, and we are meant to quite literally show the way. We point to an easier life. Abundance. Plenty. Not ever having to fret or worry, regret or dread. But stay here and now. Make your choices and allow us to show you that some of your beliefs are actually gremlins smashing all the good things away from you.

I’m tearing piles of tar out of the world and brightening it. The less tar around me, the more that people near me will not be so angry, upset, and fearful. They will begin to let their shit go. Then, once they start letting go, there is room, a void, a gap, and then all the blessings FIFO queue into your life. They are right up against you, but we are all riddled with beliefs that create cinder block shields. Nothing good can cross, unless you smash a cinder block out of your wall. Then the abundance comes.

But you have to listen to us. The raving ones. The people who are trying desperately to illumine the way. Don’t believe in us, don’t follow us. Listen to us. What we say. Our advice is leading you all to the New Earth. Nova Gaia.

Every person is a fully powered and functional warp core that believes it’s a baseball card stuck in the spokes of a bicycle!!! I am not shitting around! That’s EXACTLY what we see!

Everyone has the capacity of God. That’s the power we see in you all! It’s all the shit that people carry. Thinking that you have to carry it. Your traumas, your karmas, all of it. You all, generally, sit inside a lead casket and since nobody sees any shine, they assume shining isn’t even possible.

So we are to demonstrate our teachings through our living. We are to be powerful and abundant and all the things that each and every human is entitled to feel. To show you all, it can be done. To cajole you into trying to forgive your traumas. Try to release your karmas. It is only you holding yourself in the jail of your own making.

Think of it as red pill exit the matrix. If that helps. We are all in a matrix. Some of us have begun to red-pill ourselves.

Some Of The Best Things Come When You Are Dancing

Posted on July 18, 2024 by bluedepth

I felt inspired, and wrote quite a lot of material and I think it’s a great idea to share some of it with you all. It’s a series of statements I made from everything that I have learned and witnessed as a #lightworker. As with tarot readings and other intuitive writings, at the very best, simply take what resonates with you and leave the rest. If it doesn’t resonate with you, I invite you to move on, this isn’t for you. None of this is for everyone, there aren’t any “new rules” here. These are presented as I wrote them, blocks of text, some of the prompts are responses and I’ve maintained the privacy of those folks out of common respect. Anyhow, on with the show…

A kind note, I use a lot of movie and GenX Saturday Cartoon metaphors in these writings, if you don’t know what I’m referring to, watching the referenced movies and cartoons might help.

“And all of these things are just “permission slips”, like all the rest of the rituals and beliefs that humans have. You can do all of it without the permission slips of whatever you are doing, all the cruft that surrounds the woo-woo. You can just do it, directly, without the getup and pageantry. People just use the getup because they think they need it, they believe it will work, and in a way, it’s kind of a placebo effect. If you believe it will work, it will. You don’t need it, but your ego does, because it just can’t believe that any one person has such power. Part of the poisoning of belief in your head. How much of what is in your thoughts isn’t yours. It’s someone else’s baggage. So you pick it up, like the Japanese husband in Airplane 2, just having one more camera slung around his neck by his doting wife, until he topples.”

“The getup works even in Christian traditions. You go to church, you pray to God, you tithe, all of it… all slips. Ways to get what you want because you were told that was the guardrails of existence, it’s how everyone does it, it’s how we all do it. It’s normal do this, this way. But it is all the same. Prayer in Church, a circle cast with an Athame for a high pagan ritual, putting Officer Howie in a Wicker Man and setting him on fire. It’s all just permission slips to clear some artificial hurdle you were told exists. You do the thing, and the universe responds accordingly. The same for a religious zealot as it is with someone in a New Age shop buying a Cassanova Candle for true love. LOL. It’s all the fucking same thing. How we all channel the power we all have but were never taught how to use.”

“And then taught that we are inconsequential little sprockets, individually as effective as a firefly in a meadow. Inconsequential, powerless, just a floating nothing, a wisp just transiting the void. Except, there’s that awareness deep down. The thing that the thoughts adore deep within you. Which then leads to the idea that thoughts are pollution, filling your head, robbing your attention and your awareness. I often times think about the double-slit experiment when I’m considering the power of human awareness. If we don’t attend, the experiment displays wave diffraction. If we move our awareness onto it, it suddenly bellyflops over to particles. Heh, I did this when I was a kid, maybe late teen years. I had three plastic light polarization filters, longitudinal polarizers. Set up a flashlight, shine it through a polarizer, dimmer light comes out the other side. Then position a contrary polarizer beyond that, and there is no light at all. Smiling and nodding, makes all the logical sense in the world. Then put another polarizer in any orientation in between and poof, light flows through all the polarizers. So you have a paddock full of chickens, put up a single fence and only some of the chickens get through it, set up the other side, and no chickens get through it. Put a third fence in the way, and now chickens can get through all of it. LOL.”

“So anyways, if our awareness can do that, amongst all the other neat things, like how awareness can alter how water crystallizes, and you have all this very subtle effect and all you do is just sit and observe. That’s your bit, that’s what you bring to the party. That awareness changes reality on a teeny tiny level. And we stand around, absolutely cocksure that we’re helpless little fireflies in that grassy meadow. The fuck we are. But we never figured out how to train ourselves to USE our awareness in any manner, so it went into an atrophy state, and we live our entire lives with vast untapped reserves of power because we were taught we are individually powerless little nothings and we let that belief just sit there, ruling us, thinking there is nothing to it because it’s “normal” and nobody ever displays anything truly amazing or bombastic, so obviously it’s the truth, we’re helpless, because look… nobody can! Heh, but can they? ;)”

“How much effort is put in, before they figure they did enough, link their caboose to the train of Hope and figure, hey, I gave it a love-nudge, obviously that was enough to get the engine chugging along, toot toot! Here we go! …. why aren’t we moving? ;)”

“Like why positive thinking really can’t make a dent. Positive thinking is sweet wine, it can do incredible amazing things. So you have a lifetime of despair and thinking-of-yourself-as-powerless, filling your cask with sludge and bullshit. Then, years of collecting this sludge and suddenly you stop and decide to pour in some of that positivity. A few drops of sweet wine in a cask of sludge. WHY IS THIS CASK NOT ALL SWEET WINE.”

“Yeah, pretty much. The constant drumbeat is still present… “You are not to ask how.” which is sooooo pregnant a statement coming from the great beyond. Don’t ask how. Okay. It sort of begs the question of why. What does the ignorance of how impact everything else? It feels like it leads to “don’t ask how, you won’t believe it anyways…”

“A lesson I found really speaks to this. A rather lovely presentation that links hardcore physics with the metaphysical art of manifestation. We all know that empty space is not empty, it’s frothy with virtual particle pairs, blipping in and out of existence all by themselves, so this level is wild and rich, but also has zero energy, because all the positive and negative particles created all tally up to zero. So in walks human awareness, thoughts and emotions plenty, and as the lesson goes, your thoughts create a empty structure in this quantum space, like an empty Energon cube, borrowing a metaphor from the Transformers, and then your feelings and emotions are a box of crayons, adding color, style, and actual “mass” to this empty “Energon Cube” until it fills up completely, then you pivot, and you draw this thought linked with feelings and pull it closer to you, lavishing it with attention and rehearsal and repetition. Do it enough, and supposedly, the Universe will render it for you, start the wheels turning, acting in the deep backstage, and the whole while, “Don’t ask how!” and… boom… you get what you created.”

“The trick of it is, sometimes you exercise your power by lavishing your attention on something, and sometimes you exercise your power by utterly ignoring something. HAHAHA Aaaaaand in walks so many Zen teachings I can’t even. “Do without doing, standing at the gateless gateway.”

“And you can see it happen for real. Countless stories of a small group of passionate meditators all sitting and lavishing their attention and awareness on peace and love, and then the city crime rate drops like a fucking stone. Inexplicably. Over and over and over again. Heh, crime, frozen water, stupid flashlights and plastic polarizers, yeah, we’re ineffectual little fireflies just floating around a meadow, totally inconsequential. Hah. And this is the shit we’re doing with all this atrophy. What could we do if we actually had a handle on any of it?”

“Just makes me wonder, if we all got together and agreed to manifest a world without all the ugly in it, really poured our hearts and minds into it… all the unlikely events that could pour out of such an endeavor humbles the mind. Imagining a world where we are all living in peace and harmony, manifesting it all, the more you exercise this part of yourself, the more effect you’ll have. Not even looking for results, but having such an outsized effect. LOL. And here’s the on-ramp to unity… the function of the dark in our world is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt across each of us, so we don’t unify. We don’t come together, we stay separate, little islands of light, flickering and doubting itself, easily cowed, easily controlled. Easy to manipulate for whatever ends you like. Fear is what keeps us all from unity, so if we simply elect to fuck fear, maybe through the LItany Against Fear maybe, a little handy saying that can remind us about the nightmare fuel that fear is and what it is doing to us all – if we could just get past it, and come together with one unified passion… All those little teeny lights all joining up, aligning with each other, crests matching crests, troughs matching troughs, amplification. Enough collective power, perhaps, to fucking change reality itself. Warping the past, changing histories, fingerpainting the future. We see many mandela effects, the past is a patchwork quilt that is constantly fading in and out of truth and existence.”

The Realms Of A Lightworker

Posted on May 30, 2024 by bluedepth

Many years ago, when I was twenty years old I experienced a massive and radical awakening through what I later discovered was a Kundalini experience. What I never realized was what this single experience did for me, for the rest of my life. In the intervening years, into my mid-forties, I explored everything. I resolved, in a poetic way, that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living, so I explored as much as I could. I intentionally opened myself up to everything that would come to me, and that’s when the synchronicities began.

At first, they were curiosities, coincidences and happy accidents. I was beset by strange memorable dreams, deja vu, and a whole host of little oddities that I could comfortably ignore. My explorations included a bunch of discoveries, and realizations that not everyone starts their life like I did mine. From eight years old, I knew what my life purpose was, I wrote it out, and I never revised it since, and it’s been with me for forty years of living and I have no reason to change it now. At twelve years of age, I lost what little drabs of organized religion were impressed upon me by everyone else, and I lost it in the most amusing of places, the Church Library at the First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca, New York, which was my maternal grandmothers church, and the one where I was baptized and grew up frequenting on Sundays. Then zoom forward, seventeen years of age, and I encountered a medium / psychic fellow who helped me remember a previous incarnation. I was an Irish Catholic priest, mid 1800’s, and being inducted into that understanding was at the time just another amusement, but turned out to be fundamental for all the things that came afterwards. All of these events, little accidents, little nudges, all to place me on a certain path, and now that I look back in retrospect, it is hilariously obvious that I was always going to end up here.

Then several years ago, I started knowing things. I would be able to guess, with shocking uncanny success, if I was posed with a problem or question, and in the first heartbeat, that answer, which more and more started just happening all by itself would just land in my lap. After a series of self-exams where I would honestly test myself, test this gift, and after I was rocking nearly 100% accuracy I accepted it and let it become a part of who I am. I don’t use it intentionally, instead my instincts guided me to regard it as just another worthwhile input, pouring all of what the world had for me, all my perceptions, the events that happened in my life, all into a central pool and let everything mingle. I later discovered that this gift has a name, it’s called claircognizance. The ability to acquire knowing, gnosis, immediately without having to expend any sort of mental labor to reach the answer. I still had no idea what was happening to me, but I wanted desperately to follow all these breadcrumbs left for me, like a trail of M&M’s.

Over time, I picked up many more skills, through my young adulthood I picked up Tarot, Runes, and Bibliomancy and started to appreciate the more numinous and subtle shadings of existence. I started asking the big questions, the purpose of life, why we exist, and trying to understand this world that I exist in, what it means and my place within it. Then I had three lifelong lessons to cope with co-dependency. The first lesson was co-dependency in my family, then in my love life, and finally in my public life. Each time I thought I was done with the lessons to learn, only to careen into the next lesson. All of this set me up for my development, but also encouraged me to start addressing all the shadows in my life. Early traumas, sadnesses, and hurts that all goaded me into a kind of compartmentalization. Every interaction with others was jarring and painful, unpleasant and upsetting. Turns out, my nascent empathy was traumatized and as such, I created barricades around this, to protect myself. Everyone who wanted to grab a token and hurt me could line up, get their abuse jollies and I would just sit there and take it, stoically. It was just dissociation, which I came to understand much later in life. You can’t reach me if I’m not here, so I would leave. Leave within myself.

Years of this, of being the black sheep of my family, to being isolated and lonely, a permanent outsider, never once fitting in properly anywhere, never a part of anything, always browsing from outside and looking in on a world that seemed to be really quite wonderful, but also not for me. So I decided that I could just do it all alone, I was isolated and lonely anyways, nobody could understand the vast sweeping ideas that I was having, so I just determined to keep it all inside. That I could explore where I wanted to go, how I wanted to evolve in this lifetime and I would do it as a solitary practitioner. It felt right, I had mile-high barricades built around me, I kept my caring parts, my empathy, close to me, protecting it from a rude and nasty world full of rude and nasty human beings, and I resolved that I would live the rest of my days, cut off and happy. Happy in my separate peace.

And then, suddenly and unbidden, I started to channel. I would talk to myself, or more clearly, I would hear my own voice talking to me, and there was both messages and feelings to this exchange. I didn’t think I was losing my faculties, I felt like it was another gift from the Universe, maybe something like a consolation prize for an unhappy childhood, perhaps. And I accepted it, if it was going to be a part of me, then I would welcome it, add it to the chorus that was feeding into the central pool of experience building slowly within my mind. By accepting it, it doesn’t upset me, and some days the channel “pops open” several times a day, and sometimes it doesn’t for weeks at a time, it comes when it comes, it says what it says, and always the messages are advice, suggestions, and above everything else, this pervasive feeling of love and support. I can’t make anyone proud of me out there, but I apparently can for my channel, and whatever is on the other side of the line. For good or ill, I accept it.

Then after a while, with a lifetime of material building up within me, I started feeling this unfocused foreboding sensation. Like I could feel something coming towards us, from the future, something we were all blindly stumbling into, traipsing into. That’s when I tried to reach out, I didn’t know what sort of warning I could give, so I started to try to help people. My gift comes with a curse. The curse of Cassandra is the closest mythological story I can come up with. Gifted with knowledge, the gnosis from the claircognizance, but the curse that I would never be believed. I came to understand that I was still an outsider, but oddly enough, I started to also find people who could actually hear me. I think they would be proud to call themselves neurodivergent, and when I would share with them, they would hear me. It was jarring and shocking. The curse was always with me, making me othered, separated, an outsider with those that surround me, except for the neurodivergent.

Over time, I came to learn that everything that was happening to me was suited to a much greater purpose. Ticking boxes, checking off elements, and slowly evolving my way into becoming a Lightworker. I had this sense of foreboding still, and I carry it to this day, it’s still with me. I then encountered a dear friend who I never considered interested in any of this stuff, but he started helping me by saying the exactly right things, at the right time. The channel kept on telling me that someone would walk into my life, sometime very soon, and that they would help me to grow and open up. So, with my channel telling me it was the best path for me, and nudging me with synchronicities and unexplainable coincidences, I gave up my barricades and let each one of them crumble. This one person, this one very special person, enabled me to share all that I had become, all I had discovered, and everything that I had to say. This person could hear me, they would listen, and they offered kindness and support. I then started to dream again, I wasn’t remembering the dreams like I had, but I felt this irresistible pressure build within me. I wanted desperately to grow, to relax, to unclench. I knew exactly what would be my next step in my personal evolution, and that was that I needed to be Bright. As a Lightworker, I am told that I have a presence and a glow to me, perhaps I do, but I also feel this urge to actually try. Not just to accept what the channel and other sensitives and empaths share with me, but to grab the reins and pursue it. This pursuit has become one of the most exciting and passionate pursuits of my entire lifetime.

I know what I am supposed to do, my role in all of this. As a Lightworker I am supposed to inspire others. I am to follow a path of ever increasing emotional vibratory frequencies. I have to ask at every juncture, what do I prefer? What choice would lead me to where I want to go, this image in my mind of a world that we all want to live in. One built out of kindness, compassion, love, and respect. That’s my path, and as a part of it, I felt this overwhelming revulsion to all my prior low-frequency emotions. Hate, Fear, Anger, Rage. So I actively spurned all of those, at each juncture picking hope, kindness, compassion, and deep feelings of love over all the awful feelings. I was so angry, all the time, and I have come to understand that anger and fear are just messengers from beyond me, helping me to push myself towards the light. More than just abandoning the low frequency feelings, I embraced them, felt them, let them reach expression through me and as I did, they one by one faded out of my life. As it turns out, I was doing shadow-work, without even knowing that it was called that.

For me, in this world, I see the realm we exist in made up of three spheres. The lowest sphere is what my channel has termed “The Tar”, it’s hot, black, sticky, and has a breathtaking undertow that will grab you and pull you under with it. The Tar is a world of hate, fear, risk, suspicion, and scarcity of everything. It’s repugnant to me, and when I feel it, I try to steer away from it if I can. The next sphere is “The Dim”, and that’s our current world. You can see the light, it isn’t bright, but it is visible. You know what you should do, you see the path, you just need courage to walk it. We all live in The Dim, it’s the work-a-day world, the subsistence of living, the endless trudge of Same Shit, Different Day. The last sphere, the sphere I am working to enter, to champion, is “The Bright”. This sphere is one of kindness, compassion, respect, understanding, and is the home of my irrational altruism. That impulse to do something nice, unbidden, without any recompense because to give of myself in this way feels authentically vital.

I figured, as my journey started to take me down many unusual and out-of-the-way avenues, which I term my “woo woo” landscape, that really all of this, how I got here, what it all means, can all be reduced down to me simply wanting to have the Bright feelings, kindness, compassion, love, hope… the things that gain and generate and produce without working for it. A balm to the scarcity of The Tar, I suppose now that I have laid it all out for the first time from thoughts to words. My Lightworker nature just gives me a kind of vector, not only do I want to be more in The Bright, but I want to bring more of The Bright to everyone around me. All the advice that I get from my channel and all the sensitives and empaths that I have gotten to know on a personal level all give me little nudges. At first I wanted to scoop up everyone that I cared for, like a kind of shepherd of my flock as it were, and try to literally drag them into The Bright with me, because I didn’t want to lose any of them to The Tar. I could help them rise above The Dim, if I could just be strong enough, and convincing enough, to try hard enough. Once I had started trying, the channel and my sensitive friends all started to beat the drum to correct my path, another nudge. My place wasn’t to force or cajole or even prompt people, but instead to understand that what really matters in everything isn’t hard power, but soft power. Hard power is slapped down by Karma, where soft power is supported by Karma. So I shifted my approach and now I am concentrating all my energies on picking the right options in each juncture, and flowing from trying to make people hear me, to trying to inspire people. I can’t inspire without actually sharing myself with others, and so, this blog post was born in my mind and I write it out in an effort to be Bright and to shine.

The foreboding of what is coming is still with me. The world has sputtered and coughed in recent years, and there is this sense of something on the horizon that we are witlessly marching into, all of us. I don’t know what it is, nor when it is supposed to be, but I do know that I am right where I need to be. I need to tell people who I am, what I can do, and to simply inspire and shine as best that I can, being as damaged as I have been – and to rise above that trauma, all the reasons deep inside me that are screaming at me to not write any of this, to not share it, to not shine. If I don’t shine, I won’t be noticed, and I’ll be safe. If I ignore all of that, if I chase this Bright down and embody it myself, then I will shine, I will be noticed, and there might be risk. Then I smile and recall that I am to pick whichever choice is brighter at every juncture, and so, it’s brighter for me to share this with you all, knowing that an act of deep disclosure of a personal vulnerability is a monumental act of grace and trust, fills me with such joy and happiness. It’s scary, it’s frightening, and it’s also incredibly liberating! As with many things, when you are up close to a thing, all you can see is that thing, so this feels huge and monumental, but over time, and perspective that develops, this is just a blip, a pebble on the path, not a mountain.

The time for me to inspire, to learn to shine in time to reach my loved ones, if not more people, is running out. I don’t want to convince anyone of anything. I want to only share ideas, not beliefs. Ideas are fluid things, they can be endlessly revised and they don’t pick up the kind of baggage that comes with belief. Soon the foreboding event will happen, and I, and the other sparsely distributed Lightworkers will be standing alone again, but instead of being alone and separate from the rest of everyone, we are supposed to stand and guide. To be independent and strong, and to show the way.

That’s what occupies my time now, all my thoughts, every motive is bent to pursuit of this Brightness, and right now my channel is open, and whatever lies on the other side has this to share here, “The thing that scares you the most is quite often your next step. Be brave. Do your best.”

And that’s what all this comes down to. Do my best. My gift to give is giving itself. I am to give my shine to everyone, in hopes that they understand what it is that I want of the world. To leave the Tar and the Dim behind, to be Bright.

Walk in the Light.

Cornering A Bug

Posted on February 5, 2024 by bluedepth

I have a #MacBook Pro, my trusty old circa 2013 model, somewhat on the old side, running MacOSX Big Sur 11.7.10. It works well enough for everything that I need it for, a basic daily driver for work, most of all.

I spotted a great deal at #Costco, a 1 terabyte #SanDisk SSD device for a song and so I got it. Then after I unpacked it and setup #TimeMachine on it, so it would serve as a backup for my MacBook I noticed a curious bug. Once I had the drive mounted, it worked well, but when I ejected the drive, sometimes it would give me a error that it couldn’t be mounted. I went off to #Google to search, and came across a bunch of people who were experiencing very similar errors with their SanDisk devices. I found that after I rebooted my MacBook, the problem seemed to go away.

With complicated bugs, often times the trigger is either complicated or multi-step, and for a brief while, the problem with this drive returned. It would come and go, seemingly at random. Sometimes when I plugged it in, it would #mount without issue, and other times it would simply not, and off to #DiskUtility, where when I tried to force the mount, it refused with the cryptic error and only clear after a reboot.

I started to really concentrate on all the things I was doing, all the little mindless actions that I do at the start and end of the day, because something was causing this seemingly random bug to appear. One day, last week, I caught myself doing the very thing that triggers this bug!

I have my MacBook Pro, it’s plugged into a standard powered USB 3.0 hub, and then I have a 2TB standard external HDD and the 1TB SDD backup drive plugged into the USB Hub. When I eject the drives at the end of the day, and then unplug them both from the hub shortly afterwards, the drives will both re-mount without an issue. Every single time.

When I eject the drives, and instead pull the USB Hub off the side of the MacBook, after that, the standard HDD will mount without a problem, but the SanDisk SDD drive will always fail to mount with the cryptic error.

I don’t know for certain where this bug actually is, but my educated guess is that it has something to do with USB Bus Enumeration or perhaps some sort of flag that doesn’t get set properly either in my MacBook Pro, the USB Hub, or the SanDisk SDD device.

If you have a SanDisk SDD like I have, and it tosses random mount errors on Big Sur, give this a shot. Eject and then unplug the device, see if that doesn’t clear it up, because it did for me. #infotech

How 7-Zip, Hyper-V, and DNS Paralyzed A VOIP Phone System

Posted on January 19, 2024 by bluedepth

Today was a tour-de-force in unintended consequences. It started with an old coworker, as a kind of boomerang. They came to work for us, then they moved on, only to come back. That was the premise of this story, the start of it, a coworker boomerang.

The task was really straightforward. De-compress the previously compressed user files related to this particular coworker, so that when they login, they see exactly what they left behind. It was modest, about 36GB worth of data. Looking at everything, the intended target had 365GB of open space, so plenty of room for this. I started with 7-Zip on Windows, opened the archive and extracted it to the drive with all the space. Near the end of the transaction, 7-Zip threw an error, “Out of Disk Space.” and I frowned and scratched my head. 365GB open space, and… this? Turns out, 7-Zip on Windows, at least this copy of it, unpacks the archive to a temporary folder on the temporary resource that Windows assigns, by default this ends up on C: drive. The process was filling an already low-on-capacity primary OS drive. I chased the temporary folder and removed it, correcting the issue. Or so I had thought.

An hour later, out of the apparent blue, around 12:30pm today, all the VOIP desk phones suddenly went “NO SERVICE”. I scrambled, naturally, feeling that rising panic as nothing had changed, there were no alarms, just suddenly total phone failure. I called the VOIP support line, and the official line from support was to reboot my network. A stack of eight fully packed Cisco Catalyst switches, three servers, and a gaggle of networking gear designed to offer at least a dozen vital services – reboot all of that. While talking with support, I opened up a console to my Linux box running on Hyper-V on one of my servers, which is to say, plugged into the very network core itself that I was asked to reboot. I then found my out-of-service desk phone, it’s IP was fine, it was totally functional, I grabbed the SIP password, logged into the phone, went to where it lists the VOIP endpoint for our phone carrier, and then asked mtr to show me the packet flow across the network, from my humble little wooden box of an office to the VOIP endpoint. The utility was clear, it was fine. No issues. 500 and counting packets all arriving promptly, no flaws, no errors, and NO SERVICE.

So I was growing more vexed with support, really unwilling to reboot the entirety of my network core when mtr was just merrily popping packets directly to the correct VOIP endpoint deep inside the carriers network. My traffic could get to where it had to go, the phones were NO SERVICE still. Support was flat-footed. I stopped myself, because I could feel the rage build, my old companion, the anger that comes when people aren’t listening to what I am trying to tell them. I stopped. It was not going anywhere and I promised myself that I would fight this anger, tooth and claw to the best of my ability. So I simply calmly asked for the ticket number on their side, and thanked them for their time and hung up my cell phone. I obviously muttered some choice phrases in a small voice, but otherwise I was very proud of myself. I derailed what could have become a very ugly scene.

Everything works. I am not going to reboot the core. The phones simply say NO SERVICE. Then other reports rolled in, network faults, adjacent but not the same, Wifi failures in Houston Texas, hmmm. What does Wifi out in Houston have to do with dud phones in Kalamazoo?

I had this sinking feeling, my gut screamed at me, something about the PDC, Wifi, and the Phones were all touching something common that had failed, but had failed silently. I chuckled to myself, the old IT chestnut occurred to me, “It’s always DNS.” and so, in respect to that, I opened the Hyper-V management window on the PDC and looked for my twin OpenDNS Resolvers, they are VM’s that run quietly, flawlessly, for years on years without a peep deep within Hyper-V. There it was, right there, right in front of me. The two resolver VM’s and just to the right of their names, the quaint little status indicator from Hyper-V. “PAUSED.”

The moment I saw that, I yelled out “PAUSED” and “NO SERVICE” and screamed. Right click on both VM’s, click Resume, and Hyper-V gleefully, in a heartbeat, resumed both little VM’s and just like that, another reboot to the VOIP phone and bleep-bloop-blunk, the phone was functional and just fine.

It is always DNS. I have three resolvers, the two resolvers were on the same host and the host had a wee panic and Hyper-V silently just paused everything, and then after a short while of cooking, the phones and Wifi, which also uses those resolvers, all went kaput all in one happy bunch.

Obviously the answer is to round-robin the resolvers, the primary on the PDC, then one resolver running in VMWare nearby, and then the secondary on the PDC. A sandwich right down the middle. I both thanked my past self and kicked my past self, for having the wits to set up a third resolver, which was then for a short while, the only resolver there was, except for choice parts of my network.

So, it ended happily, alls well that ends well. The next step is to spread this round-robin resolver correction throughout my network, to help avoid this from ever happening again. But then I laughed as I considered the gamut of what had transpired. 7-Zip, well meaning and purely accidentally caused an unintended disk space alert, Hyper-V silently and studiously paused its charges, and the network kind of rolled on over the speed-bumps, and at the end, proved again, “It’s always DNS.”

Anti-Spam Whitelist Email Strategy with the Plus Character

Posted on January 8, 2024 by bluedepth

A friend of mine on the #Signal group that I am a part of was lamenting how one of his email addresses that only exists for billing needs ended up on a spam-list. That started me thinking about how I might address this, in a really needlessly geeky way.

A lot of email providers allow folks to use the + (Plus) construction when it comes to email addressing. This construction will deliver to the primary mailbox, which is before the + character, and then discard any tag after it, unless you want to use it for categorization in email rules. Which is exactly where I was going with this entire idea.

So start with an email, probably best to pick a provider that is free, say we pick gmail.com, so a new email address, lets call it John Doe, the username is jdoe@gmail.com. Obviously, just an example.

We set up rules, in the rule we throw any email directly addressed to jdoe@gmail.com right in the trash. Then we set up uuid’s for each service using uuidgen, which is an 128-bit value guaranteed to be unique in space and time. So we can set up a vendor list, like this:

Google – E11849AF-60E5-4008-A23F-2DCDCC970DF4
Microsoft – A268F0C4-C17D-4BC1-BA46-E6E4E7DC856A
Apple – 1969FF7F-49DA-487C-9692-0AECCFC62E58

So then, when we enter in our email addresses in these unique services, we can just go with these:

Google – jdoe+E11849AF-60E5-4008-A23F-2DCDCC970DF4@gmail.com
Microsoft – jdoe+A268F0C4-C17D-4BC1-BA46-E6E4E7DC856A@gmail.com
Apple – jdoe+1969FF7F-49DA-487C-9692-0AECCFC62E58@gmail.com

Then right above the email processing rule throwing all the email to jdoe@gmail.com in the trash, we define each of these To: addresses as authentic, and then we can do stuff with the emails in the rules, like send to a folder for example, or mark it, throw a sound, webhook, whatever.

If any vendor gets clever, spots the + construction and strips it, they get nothing, as we are throwing all the messages addressed to jdoe@gmail.com and jdoe+@gmail.com right in the trash without even seeing them. If emails come in from our contact services and they are really meant to be, they will arrive.

What if we start getting spam with an address? Re-roll the uuidgen, then change your email address to the new one. So now if Google sells our address to a spammer, we just create a new uuidgen, like 49F8179E-F171-4783-9246-8D3C46532575, and then go to google and change our email address to jdoe+49F8179E-F171-4783-9246-8D3C46532575@gmail.com. Then the rule where any email that isn’t matching the right uuids gets all thrown in the trash.

This way, you’ll never get another drop of spam ever going forward. If a site sells your address, just change your email address, and burn the old uuid.

It’s one way to address spam, by a scorched-earth policy. We can’t have nice things, so we have to do it this way.

PHP 7.4.10 and JetPack

Posted on March 9, 2023 by bluedepth

A while back I vainly tried to heed the warnings in Site Health, some vague mumbling on about PHP 7.3 and below being whatever. Yeah, okay, so off to the hosting provider.

Punch the PHP to 7.4, which turns out to be 7.4.10. While this satisfied Site Health, it broke JetPack. So I chatted up the hosting providers technical support, some vague mumbles about something called ctype, and it looked like it worked. But it didn’t. Still broken. But this is a dead blog that nobody reads, so who cares?

So, on Mastodon I found a developer who mentioned something about WordPress 6.2. So I wondered if there were other updates to be had. Gutenberg got updated, and editing in WordPress is as unpleasant as usual. So that’s at least comforting. It also turns out that JetPack also updated. There was a brief flash of the old bug, where JetPack refuses to authenticate to WordPress.com, but a click on the Authenticate button seemed to work this time.

The editor, Gutenberg, has a curious anti-writer quality about it. It’s sluggish, I can type way faster than the computer can register the keypresses. So I can write out text, quickly typing away, and then go to the bathroom while Gutenberg struggles with putting characters on a screen.

It’s not really a huge surprise that this blog is dead. Writing is unpleasant. Ah well, PHP 7.4.10 appears to be working at this point, so this sad experience can end. Gah, WordPress. It was free, and you get what you pay for.

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