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Will U.S. tech companies side with their users or the US law? Our data is valuable, but do we have control over it? If it is with Microsoft or other U.S. tech companies, it is vulnerable to being extracted by the American government. In a recent article by Alexander Rudolph, Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty he explains why we should be concerned. The current United States administration has shown to base a significant amount of its foreign and economic policy on dubious or false pretenses with little basis in rational, informed evidence or reality. As a result, we cannot expect that all legal requests received by Microsoft or other tech giants will be evidence-based or rational. ...

Why Open Source is Crucial for Canadian Data Sovereignty In an increasingly digital world, the concept of Data Sovereignty – a nation’s ability to control its digital data and infrastructure – is becoming crucial, especially for Canada in a trade war with the US. My 15+ years experience hosting production Drupal sites has taught me the critical role open source software can play in data privacy. This experience regularly included deploying an array of open source products for automated testing, dev tools, pipelines, the LAMP stack, plus GitLab for hosting the codebase. I basically have a well established “open source habit” in setting up services. The benefits of open source was always clear to me, and now I see it aligns well with Data Sovereignty goals: ...

A Digital Buying Guide? In Canada, the trade war has sparked a lot of careful shopping, reading labels, and avoiding US products. There is also a significant drop in flights and travel to the US. But when it comes to our digital products that we use daily, we’re not seeing a shift. I think there’s a good explanation we might be defaulting to business-as-usual when it comes to our data. Switching to buying Mexican or European fruit, for example, is not nearly as disruptive as trying a new email provider or cloud storage service. Most of our office software, cloud infrastructure, and communication tools are designed to have vendor lock-in. Also, I don’t see many people talking about data sovereignty. I don’t imagine most people are even thinking about the impacts of foreign control on their data and considering the Canadian sovereign alternatives, so it’s no surprise that there isn’t a lot of interest in shopping around. ...

I recently went on an expedition cruise to the Antarctic Peninsula and took thousands of photos. Of course there are social media platforms and other easy and free ways of sharing photos, but I wanted something that I could craft the way I wanted. Also, since I’m a software engineer who has built many web sites I felt confident I could roll my own without issue (I was right). Please check out my photo gallery which inspired me to write this article. ...

Over this past year, I have set up a home lab Kubernetes 4-node cluster. I have moved my various household services over to it, including Wallabag, Calibre, Vaultwarden, and Immich. For someone who is experienced with Kubernetes, this feels like an obvious and very nice upgrade from simple docker compose hosting. Unfortunately I have yet to set up a NAS for my files which would have a RAID to ensure the safety of the data. But even with a NAS, off-site backup is a good practice. I’ve been using Restic for years for my personal backup solution. I thought to myself, hey, Restic works so nicely and there is probably a stable docker image so it might not be too difficult to get it working in my Kubernetes cluster. Turns out I was right. ...

At our club there are many boaters, including myself, who take down our masts for winter storage. These masts from sailboats, over 30 feet in length, weigh several hundred pounds, and there are points where we have possibly a dozen or more masts in a staging area. I’ve seen the sawhorses under these masks fail a couple of times. Masts are pretty heavy and when things are shifting or rolling, the weight of the mast is on a single point on a sawhorse. Even sawhorses which are rated for more weight than the mast have crumbled under this focused load. ...

Did you know that every line in your Dockerfile that starts with the all-caps statement such as ENV, COPY, or RUN creates a new layer in the docker image? This results in more layers to download and possibly larger file sizes for the images. “Whatever, my network is fast and once I have the image I’m good to go,” I hear you say. But consider the pipelines and all the environments where the image might run for dev and testing. Each image download needs to pull all the layers. I think it could be worth a bit of effort to reduce this, especially because it is easily done. ...

If you are a DevOps Engineer, you probably have a list of shoulds. “I should learn those five hot new tools someone mentioned recently.” “I should refactor that old code.” “I should migrate all our tools to microservices in Kubernetes.” “I should do a threat analysis, and review our monitoring and alert systems, and do something with AI somehow, and,” …and you get the idea. It can be a little overwhelming. ...