Knives old, recent, and new

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Given two new additions, I’m not sure if I’ve inadvertently started a collection or I’m just now well stocked.

The knives on the left are ones I’ve had a long time. The little Wenger used to ride my keychain as a spare, something that I purchased as a replacement for one of my dad’s that unfortunately made a trip to an airport in the 2010s. The smaller Gerber STL became my “Kitchen knife, utility” and letter opener about ten years ago. You can safely say, I’m not a scissors kind of guy. I received the Ozark Trail as a gift from someone at my old job, it rode my belt for quite a few years until becoming my goto for household use. I used to carry a Leatherman Juice S2 multitool as my EDC, but after it disappeared about 3 years back, I went with the green Leatherman T4 as a replacement.

In the middle are two knifes that I bought for Christmas. A larger Gerber STL to replace its little brother, because I always wished that dainty little knife was bigger and it’s held up superbly. The Gerber Paraframe was selected because of how well the little STL 2.0 held up despite being disposable cheap. It was mainly intended to either replace the Ozark as my “Knife, Household Utility” or the Leatherman as my daily pocket knife. Since Christmas, it’s done the latter. Doesn’t really do it for me, but nothing wrong with it either.

The new additions are the two knives on the right side: a Civivi Praxis and a CKRT Squid XM. The Praxis was selected for two reasons: that I really like the larger size of the Ozark Trail, and that I personally find the Paraframe hard to open one handed. Another reason is that I’ve never had a “Flipper.” Having grown up in an age where thumb-nicks, pocket knives like my dad’s Schrade slip-joints, and ye-ol’ Swiss Army Knife were still popular designs, I was always rather content with the newer frame/liner locks, which have probably been around as long as I have. The Squid, I bought because the original model interested me, but like the Gerber’s would just be a bit too small for my hands. The newer assisted model is larger, solving all of those concerns. I’m still tempted to pick up one of the originals, since those are cheap.

Based on initial impressions, these are looking like good additions. They fit the metric where I rather prefer the larger size and solve the qualms that I have about the paraframe. I’m pretty sure the full sized Praxis has the perfect hand grip of the lot, and the Squid is probably the perfect size for me. Neither is as cheap as the others, but still in the realm of buy a new one instead of crying over it. I’ve never believed in crazy-expensive blades, especially ones that may get lost or sacrificed in an emergency.

Ironically of all the existing ones, my favorite all these years has been the Ozark Trail with the tan handle. It’s the one I would be saddened if it were destroyed or damaged. I think they were like $14 a pop when Clay bought them at Wally World, but they were like the best cheap ass find ever. Most went to his folks in the production department, those working more closely with hardware and shipping. I was lucky enough to be included despite being a software engineer, it was a great gift. On one hand, there’s sentimental value. Basically the highest aside from my dad’s, most of which are purely keepsakes now. On the other…it’s just been so damned useful!

When it’s come to needing a knife for odds and ends at home, it’s usually been the first reach for anything outside of cooking. In my apartment, it took up a position on the counter outside my kitchen for quick access. In my current home, I’ve kept it in the hallway near the kitchen, so that it’s always handy when I’ve needed a blade. My only complaint is it’s been so handy for household use since I moved, that I ended up not carrying it anymore. The Leatherman T4 has a much better blade than my old Juice S2 had, but is a jack of all trades and master of none when you really need to cut things.

At this point however, I think I now have enough knives that any of them can be rotated for regular carry. The larger ones, should be suitable for home use as well. When shopping for Christmas, my thinking was either of the new Gerber knives might replace the Ozard for household needs, or at least make a passable one for regular carry since I’ve never really liked the T4. Guess we’ll see how that plays out :).

The great parting between VLC and my TV

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A while back, I did a bunch of video tests when ripping one of my favorite movies didn’t yield the usual results. This was actually, so crappy, that it lead me to reverting to x264/AVC encoding for later rips. Yes, it was that disappointing. But, I think I’ve come to conclusion the problem isn’t with x265–it’s somewhere between VLC and its handling of iOS based platforms.

One thing each of these tests shared was its reference view: my TV downstairs streamed via VLC. And lo-and-behold, it would rear its ugly head again. Recently, two projects for home improvement have come up.

First, is looking for a VLC replacement on iPad. The USB related woes I posted about with iPadOS 26.2 boiled over, causing me to both cease using VLC+USB on my iPad. It’s just so fucking bad. I’m inclined to believe this is either Tahoe or its support for APFS externals, anyway, it’s a road block enough to drop VLC. Something that’s been a staple since my Android -> iPad conversion now quite a few years ago. This lead me to adapting Infuse Pro as a viable replacement candidate. It experiences the same USB problems, and testing points the finger at Apple’s biscuit eating operating system in that regard.

However, that lead towards project number 2: I recently finished watching Picard seasons 2 and 3. Also, one of the few times I’ve used an actual Blu-ray player. After enjoying that, I opted to splurge on Star Trek: The Next Generation while The Complete Series edition Blu-ray set was near its 90 day low price. It’s one of those really-wants but never-gets. Because it’s expensive. Even on a great sale, we’re still talking like $100. I’ve only waited like a decade or so!

Well, watching the first disc or two on Blu-ray player wasn’t so bad. But of course, me being me, the longer term goal remains file server -> stream all the things. Honestly, the box set is a pain to jockey discs around. We’re talking about 6 BDs per season, packed line sardines, and with two or more discs per spindle. Yeah, screw that. It’s also a enough of a slog to rip though, that I created a new HandBrake preset with a modified audio selection scheme to expedite the processing.

So, imagine my surprise when I start to notice artifacting issues–using the same x264 reference. We’re talking wtf is this kind of artifacts. I nearly switched Hide and Q over to disc by the time the Enterprise-D reaches Q’s barrier. That’s circa the first 5 minutes. I wasn’t happy.

This lead to some further testing comparing video playback on my laptop (perfectly fine) and streaming to the Android version of VLC on the younger TV upstairs, perfectly fine. I’d consider choking up the latter to how modern TVs post-process video, but the same can’t be said for my PC monitor, which like many PC monitors doesn’t have those goodies. That testing was also dominated with IINA, basically a Mac version of MPV that isn’t annoying to install. My PC based laptop also had no issues. The only problem was the Apple TV, in VLC.

Deciding to try things a bit more scientifically, I made a reference conversion with x265 (HEVC) and a few encodings with Apple’s Video Toolbox in various H.265 and H.264 mode, to compare to the original x264 reference. I also uploaded the original MakeMKV rip, i.e., the full unadulterated Blu-ray video quality. It too sucked ass and artifiacted when played in the tvOS version of VLC!

Now, that’s where both home improvement projects intersect. Deciding to try Infuse on the Apple TV was going to be an experiment, and the Plex like TMDB integration made it worth installing for later testing. Faced with the issue with my ST: TNG rips, I decided to test this again. It’s there, why not try another data point? I really wanted to try another video player for comparison at this point.

This was followed by shouting and cursing, because it played fine. All fucking versions. As long as I didn’t use VLC to do it!

The outcome of this experiment has also lead to an unexpected shift. Since eliminating VLC from the picture solved the artifacts, I took a closer look at the hardware encoded files. The winner of which was made with one of HandBrake’s built in presets on Mac, which configures a 10-bit H.265 encode at CQ60 in quality mode. Not as high as the Video ToolBox tests I did with Pacific Rim in speed mode, but sufficient that ST: TNG looked good enough across data points to consider worthy of adoption. So, I’ve integrated a variant of the same profile I was using with this in place of x264. I was always a little miffed about the HEVC thing, but I now am pretty sure it just amounts to never use VLC on anything iOS-derived. Sorry, good ol’ x265. But on the flip side, I’ve also changed gears.

Results? Encoding time dropped to an average of about 4¼ minutes from around 20+ minutes per episode, while presenting similar quality and file sizes curtesy of the newer codec. This is a fairly drastic shift, delivering the joys that are +200 fps to encoding times but not having to tank file sizes to maintain the quality. Based on the results for my ST: TNG tests, sans VLC, I’m considering adapting this as my new ‘standard’ for video encoding instead of returning to my x265 reference point or sticking with my older x264 reference point.

Demon Lord of a Small Village: Volume 2

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After a bit more prodding on than originally expected, Volume 2 is finally released. Continuing the tale from shortly after Volume 1‘s epilogue. For a project that began 3 years ago, and has drafts of 7 volumes in various stages of completion, hopefully the third volume will be out with much less of a gap.

Now available on Amazon

In this action-packed continuation of the series, Lucious and Seraphim face new challenges as they fight to protect their homeland from the relentless legions of Lorica. Now as acting village chief, Lucious must rally his friends and even raise the enemy’s fallen to turn the tide. Meanwhile, Seraphim steps up as a key leader in the rebellion, navigating a path towards the fortified city of Nelloran. Joined by refugees and an enterprising lich, our heroes set off to bring Margrave Tiberius to justice, not knowing that the Goddess has far more in store for them.

Will Lucious become the next demon lord or fall at the hands of Lorica? Can their ragtag band of villagers and undead horde triumph over the powerful legions? The fate of Cerulea hangs in the balance as destiny calls. It’s time for the demon lord to rise up and answer his people’s call.

As might be obvious from the synopsis, Volume 2 ramps up the action and is full of much antics by our favorite heroes as they face the next step in their journey.

Why did I never think of that

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As someone who usually does it with a spoon, I have to admit my reaction to seeing Jacques doing a vinaigrette with a jar makes me shout, “Why did I never think of that!”

In fact, this rather makes me wish I had jars in such a size.🤔 My Pyrexes are principally intended for food storage and reheating, so the plastic lids don’t lend themselves to making an emulsion this way. Hmmm….

Simple things with simple objectives

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Feeling so cooped up over the holidays, somehow it makes me feel better to actually get up and out this morning.

Today’s agenda was pretty simple. Get up. Make eggs, onions, peppers, and sausage with coffee. Go get the grocery shopping done for the coming cycle. Now, that’s not asking a lot—certainly a given that I’m having coffee. But for plans made just before bed, combined with my increasingly hermit like nature when it comes to running errands, this makes me feel better.

While I kind of determined as a young man, that I could probably be shut up in a submarine or a space station for years at a time and not go insane without walking through trees and foliage, I’ve also come to recognize that I’m happier when I’m more active. Ironic, for someone as sedimentary as I am.

There’s also one cold, hard fact when it comes to grocery shopping as far as errands go. I enjoy my own cooking 😋

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Coming across “I transcribed hours of interviews offline using this open-source tool” in my news feeds, I can’t help but wish this approach to applied AI was more common in this era of ChatGPT.

There’s plenty of reason to run models in a cloud context, particularly if you want to have truly large or complex models. The more computationally invasive the task, the more a data center starts looking smart—ditto if handling many users. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to do useful things with LLMs on commodity hardware.

The catch of course, tends to be the need for a powerful computer by modern standards. PrivateLLM’s quantified models for example, range from models that probably fit on several year old iPhone (15/14 series) to a pimped out Mac Studio.

Considering that many Intel/AMD chipsets over the past decade max out in the 16-64 GB of RAM range, and that you basically need 16 GB in a modern laptop, I think people underestimate the possibilities for squeezing smaller models onto PCs for specialized tasks. Especially when given modern computer hardware. I mostly feel that the drive towards NPUs is marketing snake oil, but to be fair, it’s pretty unlikely that we’re going to start seeing beefier GPUs in the typical computer. As impressive as modern integrated graphics have been compared to when I was young, common designs still fall far short of even laptop dedicated graphics, never mind six pounds of RTX!

Here’s at least, hoping that those fancy ASICs see some useful value rather than being today’s equal of the Transistor Wars. If nothing else, I suppose it helps bring the base of installed RAM a little higher in-between price hikes and push faster CPUs and SoCs down people’s throats.

The backup strategy

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Since my file server adopted hardware RAID as part of its 2024 refit, and even the mdadm array that preceded it as part of the original 2023 design, one of my concerns has been the need for manual backups. It’s at least a process that’s been tested under fire during the Thinkpad to the face incident. But, I’m never been a great fan of manual for what should be automated.

The process remained largely the same, aside from the drive’s contents exceeding the capacity of one of my spare drives, leaving me with only one external drive sufficient for backing up. How often I actually managed to ensure both drives up to date aside, it’s generally been a bigger priority to take care of things that backup to the file server on a nightly basis.

Well, one of the upside of the transition from Rimuru to Ranga, is it’s effectively seen my Steam Deck decommissioned from /dev/tv to its storage case. As such, the external drive used for augmenting my deck’s internal drive and microSD card, became freshly available for repurposing. A drive that quite conveniently has the same storage capacity as my file server’s RAID array.

An upside of the Christmas break, I was able to find the time to setup the drive alongside the file server. It’s now a backup target, the entire RAID array being rsync’d daily via cron. My largest external SSD (only half the arrays size) remains an additional backup, and my frequency of go plug it in / run the backup script / unmount will still likely average a monthly or bimonthly ad-hoc affair.

The difference that makes me somewhat happier though? This solves one of the annoying problems: location. As an extra incentive, the external SSD has generally been kept nearby Zeta, so that it’s safe as the server. Since its smaller compadre graduated to being too small, no onsite backup has been stored in a separate location. Now that there’s a drive dedicated for daily backups of the array, my external gets promoted to ‘stored across the building’ status.

Because it’s always bugged me when the backups are right next to the machine being backed up. Like that never goes wrong? 😑. That’s exactly why a subset of the data deemed critical is deemed offsite required. But it’s still nice to have the full backup in a physically separate location, because ya never know when that is going to come in handy in a pinch. One of those days, it’ll probably get upgraded to being the offsite backup.

Ahh, here’s hoping I don’t end up buying hard drives next year….

Reminders that Apple hates iPad users

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So, for a while now I’ve been pretty pissed off with the iPadOS edition of Tahoe and how it handles files. At this point, I’m pretty sure that it’s just broken and I should hope for iPadOS 27.

The first indication of woe, the canary if you will, was VLC being a steaming pile of bantha poodoo. Now, admiringly, VLC on iPad is pretty crappy compared to how awesome it is on basically every desktop platform, and even a few TV centric ones. But its problems are in terms of usability and features. Also, sometimes getting shafted by the platform.

For a good while, I’ve noticed that VLC would lose access to files on USB. Initially, it would play content, but subsequently picking files would fail to playback when trying to access the files. At first, I actually considered the drive could be going bad, but this was ruled out by using other devices.

Simple solution to that of course is one of my network’s core resources: a file server, ya know, that thing that’s cut down on the amount of removable media that I’ve needed over the past fifteen years. VLC seems to work fine with that.

Then enter the “Why the fuck can’t I actually edit a text file” problem.

Trying to access files in the sense of Files -> app works fine. But the pipeline for saving them back seems to be broken. At first, I didn’t spot it, since the editor I was using falls back to saving to its application folder rather than throwing an error–yeah, that’s stupid. But it’s at least pretty obvious when you go open the file somewhere else (or even on the same iPad) and it’s missing your changes.

So, for sake of sanity, of course I tried a different editor and this was effectively the same. Except that one didn’t fallback to its application folder. At this point, I was pretty sure that it’s either the Files app or iPadOS’s APIs for brokering file access.

The part that removed all doubt, in what I’ve been suspecting since the issues with VLC started. The same thing happens when using my USB drive :).

There’s also the stupidity where attempting to paste another file over to the file server results in Files throwing a permissions error. While connected to a share with the exact same credentials my other systems use and successfully, ya know, edit and create damn files. I consider that double confirmation.

Ahh, sometimes I wish iPadOS was worth a damn. The only thing truly unique versus other tests is that it’s running iPadOS, where my other points of reference are running macOS, Linux, and NT–and just work fine.

Picard Season 2

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Catching up with my backlog of Blu-rays, I have to admit that season 2 panned out much better than I expected. If the first season serves as a view of why Jean-Luc is such an enlightened individual, season 2 paints a picture of what shaped him. One, that it’s hard not to here quotes of Kirk about pain, as it unfolds.

I do have to admit though, that I rather loved that Agnes ends up making a difference by being herself and the concept of a new direction for the Borg. Not to mention the finale and motivation of Q.

If there was ever going to be one last snap for Q, I’m glad that’s the one they went out on.

Plus the entire season is littered with things any fan of Star Trek would find notable, particularly those familiar with the 24th century. It’s quite a long list, if you pay attention during the whole season.

My first hackathon

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There’s a concept that I’ve held since I was a boy, maybe 12 or 13 years old. That you should aim for the moon and plan to fall flat on your face, because you’ll probably land somewhere in-between and hopefully it won’t hurt as much when you do fall flat. Decades later, I consider this thinking fairly integral to my nature, and it’s often how I approach things.

Today, I found myself in a somewhat odd position. Going into a small hackathon, my private view was that I should just be glad not to be thought a fool. Insert good quote often attributed to Abe Lincoln here. The project was something that I chose, largely because it combined a technology that I wanted to learn more about and figured that building something small in this context was a good way to both participate and knock that off my bucket list. Well, both off my bucket list, since it was my first hackathon.

While I didn’t win, I placed well enough to walk away with both a nice little prize and positive comments from several people that I respect. That’s actually a lot higher result than I expected. My little project was based on an idea that I’d typically plan for a 3-day effort when left to my own devices, and compacted into about a 4-5 hour event to deliver something demonstrable. Not great, not horrible, in my personal opinion. I really didn’t expect much more than a thanks for participating, or at best, being glad not to be taught an idiot. No thoughts of positive mention or reward really factored in my desire to participate. I was far more interested in building something to learn if the tech was worth poking further than succeeding at anything.

Part of me, I kind of have to wonder what that form of thinking might say about the environment that I grew up in. See, it wasn’t necessarily anything anyone did to me. My family was a bit harsh more than touchy-feely in such respects, but nothing all that bad happened. Like, I probably gave up expecting to ever make someone proud or happy at my achievements by the time I was 6 or 7. Just knew it wasn’t going to happen. That’s the most I can really say about that, in the sense of ‘bad’ on the subject. I’ve known people who had things thousands of times worse than I ever did. It was fine, really.

Sometimes as an adult, I also think about the distinction between what I grew up around and the kind of person that I am, that I choose to be. It makes me wonder how much is innate versus a side effect. That’s the contrast that tends to draw my attention. On the flip side, thanks to good friends, over the years I’ve come to believe in the need for positivity. Even if, to be honest, I tend to be more of a hope for and work towards positive things than expect positive things kind of person.

Unrelated to all of that, however–I must say that I did have fun. I would’ve been happy even if I didn’t end up with anything to show, but I was glad to land somewhere in-between. It’s one of those things, I always thought might be fun to try but never really had a lot of opportunity to focus on. So, I think that’s one item off my personal bucket list and another off the equivalent for my technical interests.