The Magician King by Lev Grossman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Well, good. don’t go digging too deep, Quentin. Don’t stir. Shit. Up.” Fogg enunciated the obscenity crisply. “Right now you have the air of somebody who thinks he knows better. Humility is a useful quality in a magician, Quentin. Magic knows better, not you. Do you remember what I told you the night before you graduated? Magic isn’t ours. I don’t know whose it is, but we’ve got it on loan, on loan at best.”

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, that was a great little read. If you were worried John Scalzi was a one-trick pony, worry no more. This thriller is a great little romp through a world in which no one dies anymore…or at least, can’t be murdered. Scalzi does a bunch of great world-building in which he shows us what happens to a world in which you effectively can’t die because of murder anymore. It’s alternately bitingly witty and a little sobering. I’m not entirely sure if I want more stories in this universe or if it’s best that you just have this little tidbit before things fall apart from too much introspection.

Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:

lxc-ls

That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:

lxc-start -n lemmy -d

As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:

lxc-console -n lemmy

That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did:

Once kids learn how to open doors, drawers, etc - it’s all they do. Overall, it’s not too bad - they’re learning how the world works, gaining physical skills, etc. But unless you’ve child-proofed the crap out of every single thing that can be opened, it becomes very easy for the kids to make a mess. Since they are (as of late September/early October) currently obsessed with opening their drawers, we practically never play with them in their rooms.

Once again just assigning intention to some random toddler stuff, but I just love how he looks like he just heard his favorite team won the World Series, or something.

I’m continuing on from yesterday’s post to get the VM ready to host LXC. I’m starting with Centos 7 so the first thing I had to do was enable the epel repos:

yum install epel-release

Then, according to the guide I was following, I had to also install these package:

 yum install debootstrap perl libvirt

That installed a bunch of stuff. I also get that they’re trying to break out what they’re doing, but they probably could have installed both that and the LXC stuff below in one blow:

As I mentioned before, I’m looking at Linux Containers (LXC) to have a higher density virtualization. To get ready for that, I had to create a network bridge to allow the containers to be accessible on the network.

First I installed bridge-utils:

yum install bridge-utils -y

After that, I had to create the network script:

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-virbr0

In there I placed:

DEVICE="virbr0"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="192.168.1.35" #IP address of the VM
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"
DNS1="192.168.1.7"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE="Bridge"

Then, since my ethernet on this machine is eth0

While I think that part of what really makes this image work is the way I converted it to black and white, I do really envy my wife for having a good eye and good timing to capture the photo.

Vertical Drop Heroes HD (2 hours):

I continued to be addicted to this little rogue-like. I’m getting pretty close to level 10 and the hinted reveal.

https://youtu.be/chJaJcP8J68?list=PLEJrELYLxNgXBv5HxeZNUxg5AWWM9QGJb

Civilization III (2 hours):

It came a bit later than I wanted it to, but I started playing Civ III in an attempt to play Civs III-VI between the end of September and the end of October when Civ VI comes out. (Unless things went horribly awry, it should be out by the time this post is published)