Author Archives: bluedepth

Reuzel Beard Balm 1.3oz

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The first reviewed product in my beard series is what I started with, this was used by my barber, and at first, we didn’t know what it was, but that it left an intoxicating scent behind. Over time, we did discover that it was Reuzel. The balm comes in a stout aluminum tin, in the standard shape and presentation of most of the balms, about two inches across, with the lid that screws on and off to present the product inside. The product itself is hard and waxy at room temperature, the first ingredient is shea butter, and the second ingredient is beeswax.

Reuzel was the first product that either of us experienced, and was what our barber used when we first got started growing our beards. First and foremost, this balm is my top choice, it is my favorite because the scent is inexplicably awesome. There is a mild but consistent manufacturing glitch that many customers have noticed, and our barber told us about before we even got started using it. Reuzel comes from the factory in somewhat of a grainy set. The wax comes in a manner of speaking, crystallized. It improves immensely when you gently warm the container, melt the wax to liquid and then let it set naturally by itself over time. I’ve discovered that the best way to do this for us is to open the new tin and put it on a candle warmer for a short while. When it’s fully melted, then carefully move it to a cool spot, and lid it. After that, it’s perfect. The scent is the first draw, then the quality. I got started using balms and oils early, so I’ve never known beard-itching-phase or beardruff at all.

Reuzel is my #1 favorite, and so I think I’ll always have some on hand. There was a previous blog post, Speed vs. Accuracy, where Amazon royally screwed up starting from distribution all the way through to shipping on this particular product. So for a brief while, getting this product from Amazon was somewhat of a challenge. To be very clear, I could also have bought it from my barber as well, and skipped out on all the frustration, too. It’s just a lesson about Amazon. They have a lot of products, but they don’t really know a lot about their products, at least not enough to mis-sticker 1.3-ounce container on a four-ounce container and notice something isn’t quite right.

The scent is quite something, there are notes of slate, talc, old books, with hints of leather. It isn’t strong at all in terms of perfumey, or cologney presentation, and is laidback. The scent lasts for about an hour or so once it’s applied, and never ceases to make me happy when I work it through my beard. The way I was taught to take from the container was to run my thumbnail along the surface and scrape up enough to cover the thumb. Then work it in my hands until it is warmed and slick. Almost all of the products that I will review share this method except for two, a squeeze tube one, and a different balm.

Beard Product Review Series

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The next few series of blog posts will all be about the ever-growing pile of beard-care products that I have amassed since I was inspired by Scott to give my beard another shot. I also must clearly declare that I couldn’t have pulled this off, a beard I am proud of, without the help of my barber, Junior. Sitting in a simple chair, one afternoon, and learning more about beard care in half an hour than I knew up to that point. Whenever I learn something new, that’s mightily important! It seems that these days so few things are honestly new anymore.

The structure of the reviews will cover the name of the product as the headline, how I got the product, and then a descriptive paragraph where I will include the packaging, the presentation, and some roughly quantitative measures like texture and viscosity. After the facts, then I will cover some of the more subjective qualitative measures of each product. I haven’t run into anything that I want to bin, yet, but likely if I do bin something it’s going to be a warning post definitely.

So, on to the first review, which would be the first product that I tried…

Dodgy Clouds

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The recent outage in the Google Cloud infrastructure has certainly revealed a fair amount of vulnerability in their cloud offerings. So many services were affected, and I heard some tales of Nest owners who couldn’t unlock their homes or control their HVAC systems because the system couldn’t function without the other side being up and running.

This has always worried me about cloud infrastructure and beyond that, into IoT designs. We have come to depend on much of this kind of technology recently, and it can be tough for those that understand how all this works to let things like HVAC controls and door lock security go off to be managed by a company without any sort of manual override.

Google Chrome and Ads

It isn’t the first time that Google has turned on us, they used to have as a company motto, “Don’t be Evil,” but then when they ran into a profit wall, they realized that they had to accept evil into their company to make more money. So now, Google is Evil. Recently, the details came to light in regards to how Google will be changing Google Chrome. They are going to disable a programming API that enables some ad-blocking software to function correctly. Honestly, I was expecting this sort of thing long ago. It was the perfect reason to look into moving ad-blocking away from the computer level and further into the network itself. At work, I use Cisco Umbrella, and that places a filter on DNS services. When I was playing around with Raspberry Pi computers a long while back, there was another GitHub project that caught my attention, and that was Pi-Hole.

Pi-Hole

The GitHub project, Pi-Hole is a very straightforward installation that provides DNS filtering for malware and adware based on community-developed blocklists. I originally used it on my Raspberry Pi until I discovered that the Pi wasn’t really all that reliable a platform. Since then I have installed Debian Linux on my original Mac Mini, and that machine, which also serves as a central entertainment hub for my household also provides Pi-Hole services. I have set my home router to refer to the Pi-Hole for it’s upstream DNS requests, so every device attached to my home network funnels all the DNS traffic through the Pi-Hole. In that installation, with all the DNS requests sent to the Pi-Hole, it has liberated my Google Chrome, and any other browser, on my computer, iPhone, iPad, or whatever without any settings to change or fuss around with. To that end, thank you, Google, for giving me the push to help eliminate ads throughout my home.

Sirius/XM Outages

In line with what happened when the Google Cloud malfunctioned, there was another event earlier today that posed a challenge for me, IT wise. I was driving into work and I often times listen to XM’s Channel 33, which is First Wave. I was enjoying all of that music, and the announcer mentioned the channel schedule. That reminded me that I have the XM app on my iPhone and I could stream the XM signal into my workplace just as easily as I can stream Spotify music. So then I tried to use the app and ran into Error 1025. What the hell is that? I eventually got into a chat with a Sirius/XM representative, and they told me that there were system level issues at Sirius/XM that was giving everyone challenges. I have to remind myself frequently that my first stop should be DownDetector.com! I browsed to that site while I was on the chat with the XM representative and there it was, Sirius/XM, with a huge complaint spike. I should have started there! Lesson learned!

The way of things, for cloud infrastructure and all these interconnected devices, will not go away anytime soon. While the settings that you have on your phone and computer might also be causing issues with connectivity, it’s important to always keep in mind that sometimes the biggest systems can also be more fragile. It’s important to keep sites like DownDetector in mind because if you are having a problem with a website, chances are so are a whole lot of other people.

Vim’s Red Pill

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I started this foray into Vim a few days ago. I’ve been talking with folks on
Mastodon.technology about exploring Vim and inspired by their learning and
exploration of this application that has been around publicly since 1991.

Vim is just a plain text editor, it’s ubiquitous on a lot of Linux and Unix
based operating systems, and less so on others. While I was in college the
professors in computer science were very fond of Emacs, so I sort of remember a
bit about Emacs and that I didn’t know Vim at all, nor did I really care for
it. Now that I’m older, I’m looking for new things to learn and Vim is quite a
good challenge for that.

The Learning Curve for Vim Resembles The Cliffs of Insanity

Learning this editor is a sheer climb straight up, on an imaginary learning
curve. There is very little that anyone who comes at Vim without any knowledge
of it will be able to understand. You get a little motd blurb on a blind open
with the name of the application and its version detail. You can’t really write
anything into the screen until you accidentally hit a command for getting into
the — INSERT — mode, like A, O, or I, or the lowercase equivalents. Over time
you start to accumulate more skills and you rely on the cheatsheets a lot less
than you were at the start.

Once the learning is done, then you start to move forward with the
customization part of the application. Vim is improved by plugins that enhance
or sometimes detract from the core use of the application. If you can get a
plugin to work, that is. Sometimes they just don’t, and there isn’t any clear
way to force the issue. Much of the plugins now live on GitHub, and sometimes
your mileage may vary when you are looking for help. For example, one plugin
which is for autocompletion at first seemed to be exactly what I was looking
for, but the fit wasn’t right for me. There is nothing on GitHub, for that
project, that even mentioned Q&A or anything like that. One thing that I have
learned is that sometimes when you add plugins to Vim, they can get “stuck” in
the Session system which forces you to dump your session details and start from
scratch. But once I was happy with how everything came together, it is a very
powerful editor.

Once You Pop A Red Pill, You Can’t Stop!

The first foray into Vim starts with editing. Then I started to look at some of
the other things that this editor could do. I fiddled a bit with Markdown, that
went well, and then afterwards I moved on to installing the Mutt mail
application. I have dwelled, perhaps malingered at Mac OSX Yosemite so when I
started to look into Mutt on my Macbook Pro, the Homebrew system complained a
lot about how some things would likely be broken because I was unwilling to
install the latest and greatest version of the Mac OSX operating system.
Everything worked out for the best in the end, and I got Mutt working for both
my Gmail account as well as my Office365 Hosted Exchange account at work. As a
funny side note, Mutt works well with IMAP servers however there was a bit of
skullduggery with the SMTP authenticator settings. For Mutt, this is the
general plan for a standard IMAP .muttrc file:

set ssl_starttls=yes
set ssl_force_tls=yes
set imap_user ='username@gmail.com'
set imap_pass = 'password'
set from='username@gmail.com'
set realname='First Last'
set folder = imaps://imap.gmail.com/
set spoolfile = imaps://imap.gmail.com/INBOX
set postponed="imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Drafts"
set header_cache ="~/.mutt/cache/headers"
set message_cachedir = "~/.mutt/cache/bodies"
set certificate_file = "~/.mutt/certificates"
set smtp_url ='smtp://username@gmail.com:password@smtp.gmail.com:587/'
set move = no
set imap_keepalive = 900
set smtp_authenticators = 'gssapi:login'
set signature ="~/.mutt/gmailsig"
unset sig_dashes

While the last bit, for smtp_authenticators simply won’t work with Office365.
To get that to work with Mutt, you’ll need this line in its place:

set smtp_authenticators = 'login'

Once I was able to get all that figured out, I then had another way to see my
email, through the Mutt email client. It wasn’t until this point, after being
able to login and logout, and receive new email and send new email that I
looked over my email to discover that almost all of it is HTML encoded. Which
makes reading it a headache in Mutt. But that wasn’t the point! The point was,
Mutt helped bring Vim closer to me. I may use it, or I might not. The HTML is a
definite headache so it’ll die a slow death because of HTML.

Distraction Free Writing

Vim’s editing powers are one part of it, the other part is the sheer speed and
usefulness of the application. There are a lot of systems that I use that seem
to have these little lags for text entry, like the system is always a few
microseconds behind registering what I want to do, which when typing in text,
is to do just that. It’s only slightly present on my Macbook, but often times
very present in apps on my iPhone. I’ll never know why user text input isn’t
the number one thing for any device to do first. Everything else can wait, be
put aside, but my typing? That should take top billing each and every time! So
with a full-screen iTerm2 screen, Vim is almost a killer app for distraction
free writing. I like line numbers on the side, and margins on either side, so
for me, this is almost a perfect arrangement. Plus the cost can’t be beat, Vim
is free. Another big draw for me is that Vim should be useful still even on
very low-powered computers, if it turns on, if it can run Linux (or Mac, or
Windows even) then it can run Vim.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We’ll see where I take Vim in the weeks to come. There is a lot of travel
coming up for me and I expect I’ll be doing a lot of blogging during it.
Writing everything out in Vim, saving it as Markdown, and then importing it
into WordPress. I suppose I could very well just email it into my blog as well,
we’ll have to work on that workflow in the future. Maybe I’ll find a WordPress
installation that works and be able to leverage Vim more directly with that
system. We shall see.

Circling The Drain

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Endless solicitations for donations and requests for money for political campaigns make up 75% of my email junk folder.

The absolute meaninglessness and crassness arrives every single day, multiple times a day. Everyone is doing it, and so they all feel like this is the best way to spend their time and what they should be doing.

“If you aren’t doing your job, you should be fundraising.”

But lets stab the pause button on all of it. What is your job? These people all are part of a great machine known as representative democracy here in the United States of America. But since the primary form of political power and political speech is actually money, we can dispense with vast sections of what used to be political reality. Senators no longer need to deliberate, Representatives no longer need to represent. Political animals no longer need to do anything other than raise and spend money. That’s all there is to it. The money is the fuel and the Machiavellianism is the toolbox that the fuel is channeled through.  The dark triad runs politics: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psycopathy.

So I get messages from Jon Hoadley, from Gary Peters, and a rogues gallery of other political animals all seeking just one solitary thing. Money. The toolbox has only one tool in it, the sopping paint-roller of fear. Money to buy writing about fear, and to instill it into the population. To squeeze us all using fear, appeals to fear, declarations of fear, condemnations using fear, it’s all the same message. We need money to terrorize you all, so that you will all give us more money, so we can ramp up the terror. More fear, more money, more fear, more money.

This is why politics is broken. This is why all of the norms are shattered. This is why the world is slowly and inexorably circling the drain. There is nothing else, no other messaging. No other communication. They don’t represent us, they simply solicit for money and vomit forth giant sopping loads of fear.

Fuck fear, fuck money, and fuck politics. This is why they fail, this is why it’s all crap.

This all came to a head with my US Senator, Gary Peters. I honestly don’t know who he is or what he stands for. The only time I ever got any communication from him, or I should say, is copy machine and letter folder, and envelope printer, and postal meter, was yesterday in a solicitation for money. I didn’t read anything in the actual letter. I just folded it up and slipped it in the recycling bag at home. It’s the same thing I do with the mental image of whoever Gary Peters is, I fold him up, and slip him into the recycling bag in my head. Right along with Gary Peters is Jon Hoadley. Whoever he is, whatever he stands for, the only time I hear from him is when he wants money. Again, I don’t care about him or what he represents, because it is all meaningless. It’s money, it’s fear, it’s politics.

Don’t ask us for money. Don’t make that ALL that you do. Engage with us, reach out to us, there are a lot of us but isn’t that a part of your actual job? And so, we return to the previous line above for a point: “If you aren’t doing your job, you should be fundraising.” And the answer is written as plain as day, you just aren’t doing your job. So all you are doing is fundraising and thinking that that is your job. That is why we are so very tired of all of you. You don’t know us, you don’t talk to us, you don’t represent us. You spend no time actually interested in your constituents and think that this is all a game of celebrity political whack-a-mole.

There is no love lost. It’s all lazy, mendacious, and corrupt. You wear a bright blue vest with the word DEMOCRAT written on it, and so we vote for you. Not because of who you are, but because we have reduced everything down to two colors. We vote and we elect you into office and we know that nothing will be accomplished, that the very best any of us have to hope for is a kind of silent trudging through the maintenance of the status quo. Life has a ritual, a pattern, a routine. As long as the routine is not affected, all the rest of it is just inconsequential political theater.

So, trot about on the political stage and waste your lives doing nothing for nobody. We aren’t watching, we don’t really care, you are all completely out of touch with the rest of us, that all of this is just an immense comedy. It’s a sham and we all know it. But none of us care to fight it out because there is no hope of change. There is nobody who will listen, there is nobody who actually cares, there is just another meaningless fear-driven solicitation for money.

 

 

Derailing Robocalls

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If you have an iPhone as your mobile device, you can set up a foolproof filter for pretty much all Robocalls, unwanted solicitations, or anything else that bothers you with multiple calls on your mobile phone.

The first step is to create a Voicemail Greeting that lets people know that they have to introduce themselves with their numbers first, and then once they exist in your Contact List, then your phone will ring and you might answer it. If your callers don’t know, then they will never get through.

The second step is to make sure your Contact List in your iPhone is as up-to-date as you can make it. Trim out any junk, do your best to de-dupe the list, get it so it is nice and tidy.

Third step is to go into Settings, then to Do Not Disturb settings, Turn Do Not Disturb ON, set Schedule if you want it off, although I just leave my phone on DND permanently. Silence Always, and in the Phone section, “Allow Calls From” and set that to “All Contacts”. Turn Repeated Calls off, and any other setting is your personal preference.

When inbound calls arrive, they will be checked via their Caller ID presentation with your Contact List. If they don’t know which number will match in your Contact List, then your phone will never ring. It will obviously ring for the caller, until they arrive in Voicemail, and then they leave a message introducing themselves, which is after all, a civilized way of using these devices. If you met someone IRL, then you’d have to create a contact for them in order for them to ring your iPhone.

If you have any other iOS device, like an iPad, you should configure that the same way as your iPhone so when it is connected over Wifi it doesn’t ring the way you don’t want it to.

After that, you won’t get any more inbound calls unless they are from your Contact List. No fuss, no muss.

Cream of Mushroom Soup & Grilled Cheese with Sauteed Onions and Peppers

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Oh, oh my God. First I started with Pressure Luck’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and then put the spurs to a small pile of onions and green peppers, then slipped them into grilled cheese with Meunster cheese, which is my favorite.

Some adjustments I made to the soup was double the Sherry, double the Garlic, ramped up the Thyme to 1 tbsp, and used Chicken Stock instead of the BTB Mushroom Base. I think the BTB would have rocked it, but I think 5 cups is too much, so next time I’ll go with 4 cups, instead.

Such a delightful dinner! The instant pot only took five minutes to bring it all together. Bravo!

Favorite Things

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As I grow older I find simple pleasures sometimes have a resonance that I previously discounted. The younger me never thought very much about hobbies, pursuits, and things I could do all by myself as being worthy. But then age started to creep up on me, I’m 43 years old now, soon to be 44 years old.

The things I enjoy now fill me with a certain considerable thrill. I’m taking care of myself. I call it self-care and it’s very good for me. It also fills me with a twinge of regret, that I didn’t pursue this when I was younger. The past is window dressing and set design, so we don’t spend any time or energy on it. You cannot change the past, you can just forget it. A funny touch of irony is that as you frequently access memories, you damage them, so a painful memory left in the dark and never recalled is fresh, while a memory that is replayed and remembered has more resemblance to Frankenstein’s Monster than a real memory. Each time you dig up the past, you start stapling new things to it. Funny that the way to destroy the past is to pick it up, drop it, and pick it up again. Recall it, frequently. You can enhance this effect by starting to drag creativity into it as well. Perhaps an awkward conversation was awkward because you were wearing clown shoes? Maybe. Over time, the doubt that they weren’t clown shoes erodes and you’ve turned your painful memory into an absurdity. In the end, there is less and less emotional resonance with absurdity and the memory dies. Getting back to the present is the key, in fact, it’s only in the present that you can really live. The future won’t happen the way you think it will, the universe is perverse in that manner.

The things I enjoy now are taking care of myself. Being possessive of my time, what I spend it on, and selecting people in my life that are important. Important for me to be in their lives, or them to be in mine. All of life is an elaborate script, with people dancing on stage, cavorting for a time, and then dancing off, exeunt stage left, pursued by a bear. I’ve recently come into new projects, and one of them is growing this beard. It’s a feature, it’s a project, it’s a hobby. I never thought I would do this again, the hair coming in super curly and having to put up with the commentary on my appearance. Perhaps age has led me to a kinder growth pattern, or perhaps it is hormonal, as I age. But I am truly and madly enjoying the feeling of having it, and the occupation of caring for it. Nothing quite like enjoying a thuroughly strenuous workout, getting squeaky clean afterwards, and then sitting back with a glass of fine bourbon on the rocks while I slowly work beard oil in with my boars hair brush. Twinges of itch fading as the oil moisturizes both my skin and my new facial feature. What used to be wiry and chaotic is now soft and orderly. I haven’t found the silver bullet that does it all for me, but I have found many excellent efforts. These options have created a new pursuit, a new hobby. Every day it’s something new, different combinations of balms and oils, and if you get close enough, you might catch a scent that already has gotten compliments. I think that it might be one of the most unexpected parts of this entire thing, patently that nobody really bats an eye at me with such a prominent feature now, but that they comment on the scent without really understanding what it is. They enjoy it, and that makes me chuckle with satisfaction.

The older I get, the more I wish I had started sooner. I suppose the only real advice I could give anyone who was seeking it would be an appeal to the Golden Rule, and to start as young as you can with jealous levels of self-care. Nobody really will care for you as much as you will care for yourself. Find things that put a bounce in your step, make you look forward to the mornings, the afternoons, and your evenings. Things that don’t involve other people to play the part of gatekeeper, but within yourself be the gateless gate. Don’t seek happiness from without, but rather assert happiness from within and kindle the flames as best you can with your own efforts. We all have firewood, metaphorically speaking, and many of us have a rain-soaked woodpile that refuses to burn. You can’t really start a fire even with kindling unless you spend a lot of time either holding the flame to the wood or drying it out. The only way to dry your kindling is by keeping it covered and letting the air get to it. In this metaphor, life only gives you what you can handle, when your woodpile or your kindling is nice and dry.

The ice is nearly gone, the bourbon is nearly out and there is little more the brush can do other than scratch the itching that growth like I have sometimes brings about. Find something you love, cultivate it, and respect life for what it was always meant to be, to quote Brandon Sanderson in his Stormlight Archive books, one of the most fundamental ideals is Journey before Destination. Spend a while with that little phrase, see where it takes you.

Cisco AMP for Endpoints

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Several months ago we bought into Cisco AMP for Endpoints. There was a lot of work right after that, so we set up the management account and put it aside. Months later, I felt a little awkward about it, so I thought I would devote my April to Cisco AMP for Endpoints.

I just uncorked my AMP for Endpoints account, for this post and going forward, when I write AMP, I mean Cisco AMP for Endpoints, because it’s a mouthful. AMP itself seemed forbidding and difficult, but then once I started working with the site, configuration wasn’t that bad. I decided to test AMP in my environment by starting a “Factory Fresh” copy of Windows 7 32-bit in VirtualBox on my Mac, with 4GB of RAM assigned to it. A standard humdrum little workstation model.

I downloaded a bunch of starter packs, including the “Audit” model, the weakest of them all. I installed it on the workstation and the site responded well enough, noticing the install. As I was working with the system, I noticed that AMP complained that the definitions were out of date on the client, so I went hunting for a “definition update” function. There isn’t anything the user can trigger, you have to wait for it. Oh, that’s not good.

So then I had AMP on the test machine and I thought I would try to infect it. So I found a copy of EICAR, which is a sample file that all these technologies are supposed to detect and find hazardous. Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) sees EICAR well enough, and really gets upset by it, immediately stuffing it into Quarantine and sending an alert. AMP also detected EICAR and because it was in Audit mode, just sat on its hands. Which I expected.

So then I found a bunch of sample malware files on a testing website, because while EICAR is useful for basic testing, it’s as relevatory as a knee-jerk reflex. It’s nice to know there is a reflex, but it’s not the same as an actual malware infection. I opened the ZIP file, typed in the password and all these malware samples came spilling out into the downloads directory. So, a workstation that is quickly becoming filthy. That’s my use-case for AMP.

So after “infecting” the computer with the files, and the tamest model, which is just to have them in a folder, I went to AMP and told it to switch the model on the test machine from Audit to Triage. That took almost twenty minutes! Are you for real on this, Cisco? Twenty minutes!!!

So I knew what I had on this workstation, but I pretended that I was the admin on the other side, with an unknown workstation connected, reclassified with Triage and waiting. I knew that the computer was infected, and as the admin, “not knowing what is going on” with the endpoint, I sent a scan command. This is the worst case scenario.

On the AMP side, I didn’t see anything at all. I panicked around looking for any hint that the AMP system recognized my scan request, and so I sent five more scan requests. Obviously, one scan request should have done it, but I wanted to make sure that I worked around even an imaginary screw-up in Cisco over scanning. Nothing. Workstation just plotzing along, infected files just sitting right there in the Downloads folder, just waiting for double-clicking end-user to make a tame infection a wild one.

Obviously this is the worlds worst scenario, one were SEP somehow is gone, not installed, or somehow lost its marbles, leaving AMP on its own to run defense. Scan! Scan! Scan! — Nothing at all. AMP just sits there just merrily SITTING THERE. Like shaking a coma patient, is very much what it felt like.

So then I started with the Help feature, request help, okay, I knew how this would go. This would lead to TAC. God help me. Cisco’s system didn’t know what AMP was, hahahahaha of course not. But there was a chat system in a teeny tiny little button, so I tried that. Someone! Hallelujah! They found my contract and linked it up, and started a case for me. When I went back to the test system, AMP had done it’s work. FINALLY. It only took twenty minutes! A lot can happen in twenty minutes. How many files could have been ransomware-encrypted in those twenty minutes?

So now I await a response from Cisco TAC. During the chat I declined the entire phone call angle since Cisco TAC people cannot speak English, or at least, I cannot understand their speech. So I told them that I would only communicate over email. So lets see what TAC has to say. We spent a lot of money on this, so obviously I’ll likely deploy it, but man, I am sorely disappointed in a system where every second counts. On reflection, Cisco AMP for Endpoints was probably a mistake.