So recently I detailed an ongoing issue I had with Telus. I did not check the traffic usage on Telus' website before the end of my billing cycle unfortunately, but I do know I checked about a week before the end and it was around 500GB, just 40GB more than my counters which is correct due to the changes I made in the beginning of the cycle.

So it is no surprise that I was shocked to get ANOTHER bill for $45 overage (472GB over 1TB):

I wanted to achieve a very simple thing - my graph showing CPU usage per core should be normalized. Regardless whether a machine has 8 cores or 2, I want to see the CPU usage as a percentage out of 100. This cannot be achieved using InfluxDB and InfluxQL at the moment as it does not support cross joining of measurements from InfluxDB as sourced from Telegraf, which stores the number of CPUs in the system measurement and the per core CPU usage in the cpu measurement.

Flux is a new language to be part of InfluxDB 2.0, which is currently still in Alpha. A more limited version of Flux is available with InfluxDB 1.7+. It took me quite some time but eventually I figured out how to write a Flux query that will work in Grafana with the BETA Flux (InfluxDB) plugin to create this:

I recently had to switch service providers and Telus was the only one offering a fast upload link as well as good download speeds through their fibre optic network. They installed an Actiontec T3200M modem to facilitate the bridge between the fibre optic endpoint and my network. Since this is fibre, they used an SFP based ONT module that plugged in to the SFP slot in the T3200M. This is pretty advanced stuff for residential networking so I was quite excited to see how well it would perform.

I did some speed tests and the results were good - consistently above 300Mbps down and 300Mbps up and fast ping times (sub 10ms). Now my network is fronted with a firewall and that firewall controls everything. Specifically, I turned off the WiFi in the T3200M and use my own WiFi equipment, all routing through the firewall connected to the T3200M. I placed the T3200M in bridge mode to disable its routing and NAT as that would just interfere with my network. Doing this is allowed by Telus, but not technically supported. What I understood from that is when you run into any technical issues doing this, their tech support will not come out and help you resolve issues on the other side of the T3200M. I completely understand this policy as one cannot expect Telus to support custom configurations for residential customers.

So when I received my first full months's bill I was horrified to see an overage charge of $45. They claimed I consumed 1.5TB of data in my July billing cycle.

Sometimes it is the weirdest things that start to become problematic. Recently I found myself fighting a stupid problem - I had no proper place to hang my kitchen towels after washing the dishes. I could hang it over the center bridge of my sink - but that kept the towel moist during the day as it kept getting splashed when you wash something. I could hang it over the kitchen countertop, but then I could not easily open the cabinet underneath. And there is no towel hanger in my kitchen. So...

I decided to solve that problem by combining some Maple offcuts I had lying around from a previous project into a JIT designed towel rack. I have to emphasize, I eyeballed everything in terms of angles and design. It is not perfect, but it does seem to work. I have finished the project with Polyurethane as that seems to have good water resistance. Also, I added four small rubber feet to lift it from the kitchen countertop. Another thing to note is that this is the first time I made dowel sticks from standard flat stock - using a spokeshave and a block plane I rounded three square pieces of maple into dowel sticks, and it was successful enough that the round holes I drilled with my brace and bit, fit snugly.

If you have a trackpad on your laptop, and you find that you can no longer easily click the left and right corners (not tap, but pressing for a click), chances are your battery is swelling and about to explode. Better have your laptop serviced ASAP.