sxan
@sxan@midwest.social
🅸 🅰🅼 🆃🅷🅴 🅻🅰🆆.
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍
- Comment on Anyone use Caddy w Porkbun here? Looking for help after updating Caddy… 18 hours ago:
I’ve never heard of Porkbun, but it doesn’t sound like a caddy issue. Let’s Encrypt requires being able to resolve the DNS name you’re requesting a cert for, and to be able to connect to your web service and fetch a secret to prove you own the domain. If porkbun does something like punch a hole in your LAN firewall and let in http traffic, then porkbun is the problem. Not Caddy.
- Comment on I feel like if asbestos was banned today there'd be a huge pro-asbestos movement 1 day ago:
And for that cost, you could just buy a new bike.
- Comment on Incremental backups to optical media: tar, dar, or something else? 3 days ago:
Shit, that’s way more expensive. If only you knew someone in the US who would buy a few boxes and ship them to you…
But, seriously, yeah, that basically eliminates it as an option.
- Comment on Incremental backups to optical media: tar, dar, or something else? 4 days ago:
Just out of curiosity, is the product on Amazon, and is it that same price?
- Comment on I feel like if asbestos was banned today there'd be a huge pro-asbestos movement 4 days ago:
I had a Honda Nighthawk 650 once. The perfect bike, for me, if a little underpowered. But it was comfortable to ride, not too heavy, and looked good.
But it always had electrical problems, and I could never figure them out myself. It would just sporadically have a phase where the starter wouldn’t turn over. I had it in the shop off and on for about 6 years, and finally gave up on it. Never replaced it, didn’t keep up my license, and haven’t ridden in years.
If I ever do take up riding again (which will be an epic fight with the wife who’s mom was a nurse, and is dead set against me riding motorcycles), I want something in that form factor again. I keep looking at Ducatis.
Anyway, electrical issues are the worst.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
I’m being absurd. Nobody would ever say that, because it’s stupid.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
Zero three hundred am o’clock in the morning daylight savings time PGT
- Comment on Incremental backups to optical media: tar, dar, or something else? 4 days ago:
This is more expensive in your country?
That’s a little over $11 USD per 100 GB disk. Is it just more expensive where you live, or is it shipping?
I’d be really surprised if these weren’t manufactured in Asia somewhere.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
It’s zero-three-hundred PM.
- Comment on Incremental backups to optical media: tar, dar, or something else? 5 days ago:
It’d be more space efficient to store a COW2 of Linux with a minimum desktop and basically only DarkTable on it. The VM format hasn’t changed in decades.
Shoot. A bootable disc containing Linux and the software you need to access the images, and on a separate track, a COW2 image of the same, and on a third, just DarkTable. Best case, you pop in the drive & run DarkTable. Or, you fire up a VM with the images. Worst case, boot into linux. This may be the way I go, although - again - the source images are the important part.
I’d be careful with using SSDs for long term, offline storage.
What I meant was, keep the master sidecar on SSD for regular use, and back it up occasionally to a RW disc. Probably with a simply cp -r to a directory with a date. This works for me because my sources don’t change, except to add data, which is usually stored in date directories anyway.
You’re also wanting to archive the exported files, and sometimes those change? Surely, this is much less data? Of you’re like me, I’ll shoot 128xB and end up using a tiny fraction of the shots. I’m not sure what I’d do for that - probably BD-RW. The longevity isn’t great, but it’s by definition mutable data, and in any case the most recent version can be easily enough regenerated as long as I have the sidecar and source image secured.
Burning the sidecar to disk is less about storage and more about backup, because that is mutable. I suppose an append backup snapshot to M-Disc periodically would be boots and suspenders, and frankly the sidecar data is so tiny I could probably append such snapshots to a single disc for years before it all gets used. Although… sidecar data would compress well. Probably simply tgz, then, since it’s always existed, and always will, even if gzip has been superseded by better algorithms.
BTW, I just learned about the b3 hashing algorithm (about which I’m chagrined, because I thought I kept an eye out on the topic of compression and hashing). It’s astonishingly fast - for the verification part, is what I’m suggesting.
- Comment on I feel like if asbestos was banned today there'd be a huge pro-asbestos movement 5 days ago:
It was a PITA to change the battery in my 2012 Volvo, and I dread the battery change in the 2016 BMW. I can’t imagine doing anything more complex than that.
I love those old engines I see at the state fair, where the fuel is literally in an open pan on the top, sloshing around. They look like something you could put together yourself with enough effort, but the trade-off is efficiency.
I’d be happy with a fully solid-state car. I’m not a mechanic, or mechanically inclined, so I have no romantic attachment to gas guzzlers.
- Comment on Incremental backups to optical media: tar, dar, or something else? 5 days ago:
The densities I’m seeing on M-Discs - 100GB, $5 per, a couple years ago - seemed acceptable to me. $50 for a TB? How big is your archive? Mine still fits in a 2TB disk.
Copying files directly would work, but my library is real big and that sounds tedious.
I mean, putting it in an archive isn’t going to make it any smaller. Compression on even lossless compressed images doesn’t often help.
And we’re talking about 100GB discs. Is squeezing that last 10MB out of the disk by splitting an image across two disks worth it?
The metadata is a different matter. I’d have to think about how to handle the sidecar data… but that you could almost keep on a DVD-RW, because there’s no way that’s going to be anywhere near as large as the photos themselves. Is your photo editor DB bigger than 4GB?
I never change the originals. When I tag and edit, that information is kept separate from the source images - so I never have multiple versions of pictures, unless I export them for printing, or something, and those are ephemeral and can be re-exported by the editor with the original and the sidecar. Music, and photos, I always keep the originals isolated from the application.
This is good, though; it’s helping me clarify how I want to archive this stuff. Right now mine is just backed up on multiple disks and once in B2, but I’ve been thinking about how to archive for long term storage.
I think in going to go the M-Disc route, with sidecar data on SSD and backed up to BluRay RW. The trick will be letting DarkTable know that the source images are on different media, but I’m pretty sure I saw an option for that. For sure, we’re not the first people to approach this problem.
The whole static binary thing - I’m going that route with an encrypted share for financial and account info, in case I die, but that’s another topic.
- Comment on Unlike in movies, most smart people aren't good in chess. 1 week ago:
Good chess players, though, exhibit some common traits which are shared with “smart people”: the ability to think in abstract terms, and a good memory.
Your success at chess is often based on how far in advance you can plan a game at any point on the board, greatly supplemented by your ability to remember entire games of famous matches. These skills are frequently exhibited by people considered smart. However, as you and OP point out, you have to play, practice, and memorize to get good; merely knowing the rules and being smart doesn’t get you there.
- Comment on Incremental backups to optical media: tar, dar, or something else? 1 week ago:
This is an interesting problem for the same use case which I’ve been thinking about lately.
Are you using standard BluRay, or M-Discs?
My plan was to simply copy files. These are photos, and IME they don’t benefit from compression (I stopped taking raw format pictures when I switched to Fujifilm, and the jpgs coming from the camera were better than anything I could produce from raw in Darktable). Without compression, putting then in tarballs then only adds another level of indirection, and I can just checksum images directly after write, and access them directly when I need to. I was going to use the smallest M-Disc for an index and just copy and modify it when it changed, and version that.
I tend to not change photos after they’ve been processed through my workflow, so in my case I’m not as concerned with the “most recent version” of the image. In any case, the index would reflect which disc the latest version of an image lived, if something did change.
For the years I did shoot raw, I’m archiving those as DNG.
For the sensitive photos, I have a Rube Goldberg plan that will hopefully result in anyone with the passkey being able to mount that image. There aren’t many of those, and that set hasn’t been added to in years, so it’ll go on one disc with the software necessary to mount it.
My main objective is accessibility after I’m gone, so having a few tools in the way makes trump over other concerns. I see no value in creating tarballs - attach the device, pop in the index (if necessary), find the disc with the file, pop that in, and view the image.
Key to this is
- the data doesn’t change over time
- the data is already compressed in the file format, and does not benefit from extra compression
- Comment on Best approach to selfhosting Synapse (Matrix)? 1 week ago:
The problem is the design is Matrix itself. As soon as a single user joins a large room, the server clones all of the history it can.
I mean, there are basically two fundamental design options, here: either base the protocol over always querying the room host for data and cache as little as possible, or cache as much as possible and minimize network traffic. Matrix went for minimizing network traffic, and trying to circumvent that - while possible with cache tuning - is going to have adverse client behaviors.
XMPP had a lot of problems, too, though. Although I’ve been told some (all?) of these have been addressed, when I left the Jabberverse there was no history synchronization and support for multiple clients was poor - IIRC, messages got delivered to exactly one client. I lost my address book multiple times, encryption was poorly supported, and XMPP is such a chatty protocol, and wasteful of network bandwidth. V/VOIP support was terrible, it had a sparse feature set, in terms of editing history, reactions, and so on. Group chat support was poor. It was little better than SMS, as I remember.
It was better than a lot of other options when it was created, but it really was not very good; there are reasons why alternative chat clients were popular, and XMPP faded into the background.
- Comment on I feel like if asbestos was banned today there'd be a huge pro-asbestos movement 1 week ago:
so you could pirate games
What‽‽ I never used my dual drives for that.
- Comment on I feel like if asbestos was banned today there'd be a huge pro-asbestos movement 1 week ago:
I think you misread their comment; they weren’t saying people they know are putting on new parts in old cars, they were saying people they know are maliciously putting leaded gas into new engines, presumably to “stick it to the libruls”.
- Comment on I feel like if asbestos was banned today there'd be a huge pro-asbestos movement 1 week ago:
Thank you. All my knowledge of ICEs has been through osmosis via a friendship with a guy who used to be a mechanic; I don’t care about them myself, and I appreciate the extensive added information you took the time to write. It’s really the only way I learn about ICEs.
but you would need new parts rather than OEM.
Yeah, that was ultimately my point. OEM is so important to that crowd; it’s both a status and a real value factor for them. They’re not just being contrarian: they do it because the cars they’re driving run better on leaded.
The end result may be the same, but I think the motivation matters for stuff like this. One is based on hostility, the other on a hobby passion.
- Comment on Light switches should be glow in the dark 1 week ago:
I think they’re good for “common” areas, but my wife hates highlights of all kinds. We have a low-key war going on where I’ll randomly put a nightlight somewhere, and she’ll find it after a week or so and remove it.
Not in bedrooms, though; I agree on that. Although, I put one of this motion-triggered light bars in her walk-in closet, and she likes that enough to keep it charged herself.
- Comment on Light switches should be glow in the dark 1 week ago:
They make switches with built-in LED lights along the bottom for this.
It’s a risky investment. Many people hate having lights glowing when they’re trying to sleep.
Look for LED wall switches on Amazon. They come in a dozen versions: light shines up, lights in the faceplate, the switch itself glows… Any version you could possibly want.
- Comment on I feel like if asbestos was banned today there'd be a huge pro-asbestos movement 1 week ago:
Old car drivers drive cars that need additives in the gas. The lead was a lubricant, and old engines ran better, and longer, on leaded gas.
They didn’t just add lead because it made the gas prettier; there was a reason. I would suppose that today there are other additives that can reproduce the lubricating effects for those old cars, but old car hobbyists are niche and you’re not going to find those products at Walmart, whereas there’s always a local airport somewhere nearby.
I’m not defending leaded gas, but I think vintage car enthusiasts do it not because they’re being stupididly misinformed and contrarian, but because they’re trying to keep their engines running well.
- Comment on The people who first invented tools had to invent inventing tools without tools. 1 week ago:
This is a good shower thought, and I’m not knocking it.
A rock is a tool. A stick is a tool. Some rocks are naturally sharp (flint and obsidian) and are different kinds of tools. Any physical object found in nature could be a tool, and other animals exhibit tool use.
Taking two different kinds of rocks and carefully hitting one with the other can improve the naturally occurring tool, and I think that’s why your thought is insightful (although, not unique). Knapping isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t require anything more than one of several special kinds of rocks and a second rock, but it does require skill, and that comes through practice. I don’t think it was probably a deep thought to think “I could make this sharp-edged rock more useful with a little chipping,” but it certainly qualifies as “inventing inventing tools.”
- Comment on Best approach to selfhosting Synapse (Matrix)? 1 week ago:
A lot of memory, and a lot of disk space.
Synapse is the reference platform, and even if they don’t, it feels as if the Matrix team make changes to Synapse and then update the spec later. This makes it hard for third-party servers (and clients!) to stay compliant, which is why they rise and fall. The spec management of Matrix is awful.
So, while suggestions may be to run something other than Synapse - which I sympathize with, because it’s a PITA and expensive to run - if you go with something else just be prepared to always be trailing. Migrating server software is essentially impossible, too, so you’ll be stuck with what you pick.
Matrix is one of the worst-managed best projects to come out in decades.
- Comment on conduwuit, “featureful fork of conduit” (Rust Matrix homeserver), is discontinued 1 week ago:
Yeah, the Matrix protocol is poorly managed.
Synapse is the reference platform, and it’s incredibly annoying.
- Comment on An alternative to Contabo (VPS provider) 1 week ago:
I think you’re probably looking a step more “enterprise” than I am. I’m doing nightly backups to B2; if one of my servers dies, my recovery is to spend a couple minutes re-installing Arch and then couple hours restoring from backup. My services are predominantly in containers, so it really is just a matter of install, restore, reboot. There are things I inevitably miss, like turning on systemd’s persistent user services; my recovery times is on the order of hours, not including the fact I’m not actively monitoring for downtime and it could take a few hours for me to even notice something is down.
Like I said: totally not enterprise level, but then, if I have a day’s outage, it’s an annoyance, not a catastrophe.
- Comment on Change the Rainbow 1 week ago:
And red baseball caps
- Comment on An alternative to Contabo (VPS provider) 1 week ago:
Yeah, wow, I was surprised and a bit concerned with OP’s post. Except for never answering customer support tickets, they’ve been great, and the price increases have been both rare and low. I’d hate to have to migrate off.
- Comment on Every non US market could impose their will, simply by banning imports of products that use, or reference SAE instead of metric. 2 weeks ago:
I think that companies tend to print country-specific labels anyway, don’t they? I know larger Mexican company products can often be found in two sections is some stores: in the “Juice” section, with an English label, and in the “Foreign” section, with a Spanish label. Same product, just different labels. I’ve seen American company products in Germany, and - again - large companies have country-specific packaging. Sometimes it’s pretty drastic differences; not just languages, but entire style and color schemes.
It’s usually EU products where I see them trying to cram, e.g., the ingredients list in 5 different languages on the same package. I don’t know why Frito-Lay wouldn’t just only print metric units on their French-labelled bag of Doritos. It wouldn’t have any impact on their domestic labeling.
- Comment on Cheapskate's Guide: Nuking web-scraping bots 2 weeks ago:
I’ve been really happy with them.
- Comment on How and where should I keep backups of system configurations? 2 weeks ago:
Lots of good ideas.
I’m a fan of stow-like tools, but there are advantages to using something like Salt (or similar) if you’re dealing with VPSes that share don’t common configs like firewalls. There’s a lot to learn with things like salt/chef/puppet/attune/ansible, whereas something like yas-bdsm, which is what I’m currently using, is literally just:
- Keep your configs in a git repos, in a structure that mirrors your target
- Run a command and it creates symlinks for the destination files
- Commit your changes and push them somewhere. Or just restic-backup the repos.
The config file formats are irrelevant; there’s no transformation logic to learn. Its greatest feature is its simplicity.