Happy Easter! It’s a long weekend, made even longer by also having Tuesday off. I’ll have disconnected from work so much that I will barely remember what I was working on at all.
Quick bits
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I started cycling again in Berlin (it’s so quick to get around) but holy fuck car drivers really think they own the street. Just this week, a car driver behind me was honking incessantly and then drove up right next to me and used their vehicle to push me aside. This behavior is actively malicious and wildly dangerous. Yikes ×100.
It has become very clear to me why vast numbers of cyclists prefer the pedestrian paths, even though that comes with quite a fine.
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After my trip to London, I had caffeine-induced headaches for days. My coffee intake spiked while in London (I could tell by the shakes) and so the fallout was not entirely unpredictable.
Quick tech bits:
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A few years ago, I started using pointing and calling for making one-off changes to production (e.g. production Rails consoles) and found it to be very helpful.
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For a while now, my Kensington Orbit trackball with scroll ring has been malfunctioning. A single right click registers as two button-down events, then two button-up events, then again two button-down events, and finally two button-up events. I think I need to replace the input device. Fortunately, it’s still in warranty.
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This week, I learned that USB 4 exists, and that my many-years-old MacBook Air supports it. How did that pass me by?
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My photo library has accumulated a great number of duplicates over the years. I am not sure how that happened. My duplicate file finder doesn’t detect them because of minuscule and irrelevant differences in the file metadata, so I wrote my own script that compares the EXIF metadata and deletes duplicates according to my own rules. I now have dozens of gigabytes of extra storage space.
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I need to find a solution for the constant guard-nanoc breakage that I’m causing. I really just need to remember to release guard-nanoc in lock-step with the other Nanoc packages. But how?
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It’s infuriating that GitHub now requires being logged in on mobile. No more anonymous browsing repositories, I suppose? More reasons to move away from this collapsing platform.
Spring cleaning
I have so much stuff that I end up never using. Over the last few weeks, I’ve given away so much stuff. I’m having trouble even remembering what it all was that I gave away, which illustrates appropriately the degree to which these items no longer mattered to me.
Kleinanzeigen is great for getting rid of stuff. I had previously used the “Free Your Stuff Berlin” Facebook group, but Kleinanzeigen is more convenient. That group was the only thing still keeping me on Facebook, and so I’ve scheduled my Facebook for deletion. I’ll consider it part of my spring cleaning.
My items go in three piles:
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Sell: Surprisingly few items go in here. There have been a few big items, but putting a price on things makes them a lot less likely to be taken, and I’m not in it to make/recover money.
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Donate: Most items go in here. Giving items a second life is a good thing to do.
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Trash: I’ve got a few borderline worthless things — both in terms of monetary and emotional value — that I somehow kept around.
Why spring cleaning? Because it’s a useful thing to do once in a while, but also because I’m getting ready to relocate in the next few months. More on the latter later.
I am surprised by how spring cleaning has increased the mess in my home. There’s stuff everywhere!
Data storage revisited
My current storage setup is four external HDDs in a four-bay external enclosure. This setup works reasonably well, but has some clear disadvantages:
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Physical proximity. My laptop has to be physically plugged in to the enclosure. That constrains my laptop to my office desk.
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Tough replacement. To replace an HDD, I need to manually figure out where to temporarily move its contents, before moving it all back onto the newly-inserted HDD.
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No built-in redundancy. While that’s not needed for backups, I am effectively mirroring other data (such as my archived material, imported/transcoded films, and my music collection), and that makes the space usage not great.
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Inefficient allocation. Each drive has a specific purpose and specific size. There storage space is not pooled: some drives are too big, and other drives are too small. The allocation isn’t great and there’s no good way to improve it.
I have a NAS, which had been collecting dust after a total failure a few years ago. Last weekend I set it up from scratch with some spare HDDs I had lying around. Alas: this two-bay QNAP NAS goes into a restart loop when an HDD is inserted in the leftmost bay. I’m stuck with using it as a one-drive NAS, which is a bit silly and pointless.1
I have two ways forward:
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DAS (direct-attached storage) with RAID support. This would solve the issue of not having redundancy. It would also combine the drives into a single pool, where I no longer have to figure out how to allocate disks. Finally, I look forward to being able to replace a drive without much hassle.
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NAS. RAID is implied here (you’d be hard-pressed to find a NAS without RAID support). This has all the advantages of the aforementioned DAS setup, without the limitation of having to be connected to the external HDD enclosure.
I’m leaning towards a NAS. But this is not something that I need to solve soon! There is no urgency. At some point, though, I want to simplify my setup and make it more robust.
If only there weren’t such an HDD shortage right now! Ach. I would have considered tackling this hardware refactoring if the process weren’t so damn costly right now. As part of my spring cleaning, I’ve been going through my unused hard drives and looking at their S.M.A.R.T. statuses; most of these drives are just fine, but I can’t readily use them: for RAID to work effectively, all drives need to be the same size, and I just about don’t have the right HDDs.2
Entertainment
- Pacific Rim: Uprising3 is fine, I guess.
Links
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I helped break a 142-year-old bell, and that's okay. (Tom Scott)
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[1645] Getting Into My Wife’s Furry Fanny (LockPickingLawyer): Classic.
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It's Time to Take Down your Smart Cameras 😬 (Benn Jordan)
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Am I German or Autistic?: My result is “neither, somehow.”
Tech links:
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Your job isn't programming (Nick)
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Intuiting Pratt parsing (Louis Baragwanath)
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your hex editor should color-code bytes (alice pellerin)
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CSS or BS? (Keith Cirkel): I am surprisingly not as good at this as I thought.
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I’m unsure what to do with it. I’m too inexperienced to consider a hardware repair myself. It feels like a waste to throw it away, in any case. Perhaps give it away to someone who is able to fix it? If you’re in Berlin and want a free (and broken) NAS unit, let me know. ↩︎
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That’s not strictly true. There is Synology’s SHR, but that only works on Synology devices. There is also ZFS’s RAIDZ, but then I’d probably need to run my own NAS OS. ↩︎
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Pacific Rim: Uprising, directed by Steven S. DeKnight, written by Steven S. DeKnight, Emily Carmichael and Kira Snyder (Universal Pictures, Legendary Pictures, Double Dare You (DDY), 2018). ↩︎