Food and mood

I had mentioned how sometimes I feel both hungry and not like doing anything useful. It makes for an interesting challenge to try to use awareness of this to manage it. It reminds me of how I also feel more like doing things if I can see a pleasant outdoors on a sunny day which is one reason why I plan to move back to a house in a field in the rural Midwest or similar, somewhere with decent windows and porches (our previous house in Ohio was blessed with an abundance of both): I expect to not only be happier but also to get more done.

I woke up this morning feeling fairly productive and did some stuff. I should be alone in the house this afternoon which would be a good time to make major changes to the router through which we are online. However, this occurs toward the end of my fasting window so I get to do something non-trivial while possibly not feeling great.

Knowing this is coming up may be a help. Perhaps I can put some music on, make some tisane or somesuch so that there is at least something in my stomach, etc. Or, I can be more mentally prepared, knowing in advance that I can take my time and divert a little effort into ignoring being hungry. It should go fine: once I am into the work then it is likely to be akin to many of my workdays where mid-task I have an obvious short-term what-to-do-next step, the sequence of which hold my attention ongoingly.

I feel as if I don't have a good enough handle on my various to-do's but when an opportunity comes up to do something that seems both important and time-sensitive then I figure the way's clear to just go ahead and do it without overly fretting about relative priority against other maybe-forgotten tasks.

Network router installation

This afternoon I did go ahead and make major changes to the router through which we are online. Specifically, I installed NetBSD on it. There is much to do yet, ranging from shell profiles to NTP, but we are actually onine so that is enough for today. The nearest I had to my desired firewall setup was a pf.conf that I had written for OpenBSD 6.1; for expediency today I backported that to something that works sufficiently under the NetBSD version but I'll have to translate it to an npf.conf. One issue was my failure to notice that a patch cable to the access point had come loose so when wireless clients could not get IPs it was not because pf was blocking them or dhcpd was ignoring them. I also observed awkward driver issues with a USB ethernet adaptor where the corega FEther USB-TXS ran unreliably and an ASIX AX88179 loses the carrier but I remembered my laptop's adaptor, a Realtek RTL8153, which NetBSD appears to be driving fine; I think my Linux laptop gets on fine with the ASIX instead. It also turned out to be critical to figure out the old-pf syntax for MSS clamping. That was all quite enough for today anyway. I took brief breaks to make myself a couple of tisanes along the way.

Update: Tonight I also got NTP and DNS working, different master zones being served from different interfaces. Another issue earlier today was not only backporting NAT configuration to earlier pf but also remembering to use sysctl to enable IP forwarding.

Resurrecting an old Kindle

Last month I mentioned my old Kindle 3 Keyboard. I am reluctant to replace it because it is just about right for me just as it is; I am leery of subsequent improvements. Unfortunately it finally lost the ability to accumulate charge so I ordered a cheap battery from China and installed it last week. It charged rather hesistantly at first but patience bore the fruit of my Kindle seeming to have returned to normal. Prying the back off involved drawing inspiration from having observed others who apply rather more force than I ordinarily dare; it worked out in the end. Next on my Kindle reading list is some Dickens; I am not much of a fan but thought I should give Great Expectations and Bleak House a try. The Kindle works well for local buses because the seats aren't generous enough to easily accommodate a computer open in one's lap.