I recently put together a short animation showing the spread of Covid throughout the Northeast United States: I thought it might be interesting to walk through the process I used to create the video. The steps described in this article aren’t exactly what I used (I was dealing with data in a PostGIS database, and in the interests of simplicity I wanted instructions that can be accomplished with just QGIS), but they end up in the same place.

I found the following error from gpgv to be a little opaque: gpgv: unknown type of key resource 'trustedkeys.kbx' gpgv: keyblock resource '/home/lars/.gnupg/trustedkeys.kbx': General error gpgv: Can't check signature: No public key It turns out that’s gpg-speak for “your trustedkeys.kbx keyring doesn’t exist”. That took longer to figure out than I care to admit. To get a key from your regular public keyring into your trusted keyring, you can run something like the following:

Out of the box, OpenShift (4.x) on bare metal doesn’t come with any integrated load balancer support (when installed in a cloud environment, OpenShift typically makes use of the load balancing features available from the cloud provider). Fortunately, there are third party solutions available that are designed to work in bare metal environments. MetalLB is a popular choice, but requires some minor fiddling to get it to run properly on OpenShift.

I’ve had my eye on the Vortex Core keyboard for a few months now, and this past week I finally broke down and bought one (with Cherry MX Brown switches). The Vortex Core is a 40% keyboard, which means it consists primarily of letter keys, a few lonely bits of punctuation, and several modifier keys to activate different layers on the keyboard. Physical impressions It’s a really cute keyboard. I’m a big fan of MX brown switches, and this keyboard is really a joy to type on, at least when you’re working primarily with the alpha keys.

At work we have a cluster of IBM Power 9 systems running OpenShift. The problem with this environment is that nobody runs Power 9 on their desktop, and Docker Hub only offers automatic build support for the x86 architecture. This means there’s no convenient options for building Power 9 Docker images…or so I thought. It turns out that Docker provides GitHub actions that make the process of producing multi-architecture images quite simple.