Captain’s Log

Breaking down Rimuru

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My primary intention was to recover the old Samsung 990 Pro, since it’s a 4 TB model and has spent the year “idle.” Since retirement, Rimuru hasn’t come out of its storage closet expect for cleaning purposes. Any useful data aside the OS, is effectively backed up to my file server already.

I’ve gone an entire year without powering on the machine. So, I think it is safe to say, anything needed was going to waste anyway, and I do not enjoy wasted equipment. I’ve pulled the Thunderbolt card for storage along with the the RTX 4070 Ti. The former because it hung over the M.2 heatsink spanning the case, and the latter because it’s kind a difficult to work inside the case otherwise.

My plan is for the storage drive to go in one of my 10G USB enclosures for misc usage, while the PCI-E cards go into /dev/closet with the associated cabling. Rimuru itself will remain in the spare closet, since it doesn’t really fit in the main technical closet. The main things remaining are the fundamental CPU/cooler/power as those are a pain to remove and unlikely to be reused, plus the lone stick of DDR5, because if I do ever power on / repurpose that machine again, I don’t want to forget which of the 4 memory slots “still work” in case I lose my system notes. It was a major pain to determine which slot still worked and what form of bad the three failed slots did.

I suppose in the end, I’m following through on the “Not another motherboard” factor. By the time Ranga is outmoded, it too will be outmoded, and the upgrade path will likely be a different processor. That machine went through too many of them, that I’m not inclined putz with it any further 😂. I feel a little bad that Rimuru turned out to be a 4 year machine (+1 in the closet), given how long Centauri had lasted… and the fact that I based Rimuru’s design on its “10 year” alternative design. Not exactly a success, nor a failure, but surely not the champion its predecessor proved to be. Centauri was originally envisioned as a 3-5 year machine depending on refits, and lasted me for 8 years. Effectively double what its replacement had!

Well, at least I didn’t drop the case on my foot, or the Big Fucking Graphics Card™️. That would hurt!

Backups and Restores

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One of the upsides of being a paranoid bastard is that I keep regular backups, and often system notes. I’ll typically maintain a digital notebook recording the major software setup and configuration, mainly to track “What’s different about this one” and to assist in restoring should it become a manual affair.

Well, as it turned out, I recently had the opportunity for this as part of migrating my host environment to a newer OS. It’s been on my backlog for a while, waiting for a few kinks to be ironed out. So long in fact, that I said screw it, and just did a full restore the long way. In the process, I also discovered that my provider’s billing for backups and snapshots are pretty cheap, so I opted to take a snapshot in case things went sideways 🤣.

Amazingly, not only was it a relatively painless restore, but it also proved that a “real” operational restore from my nightly backups actually works in the production environment. These at best, have only been tested for offline cases not the live site, which for me is almost a cardinal sin, but a practical one.

Of course the part that was the real wrinkle? It wasn’t the nightly backup, or the OS change, it was misplacing or having failed to keep a proper system notebook. So rather than playing the “how the fuck do I …” game it was more an exercise in writing down the “that’s how the fuck it’s done.” Because it’s been a good while, and while care was taken to make the process largely obvious, it’s not good to not have a punchlist–so you know you didn’t bungle anything.

Yes, I’m paranoid like that (^_^)

The coolest toy I’ve ever seen

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I may have watched most of this jaw hanging open in shock at the sheer amazement. It’s probably a great thing this didn’t exist when I was a kid. Both for me, my mom’s sake, and her pocket book 😂

*covers eyes, locks wallet in a safe, and throws away the key*

A switching of tracks

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Looking back, my experiment with the Switch 2 has gone exceedingly well. When I picked up the console over Memorial Day weekend, my biggest concern was that it would be a very expensive dust collector; two factors I consider major negatives. However, it’s actually become my primary gaming platform since then.

I’m finding that it’s also a much more focused platform. Steam experiences such a new influx of games, it’s mind boggling. Some are worth focus more than others, but content, there’s loads of by any measure. On the Switch 2, I’m finding that I typically buy fewer games and play longer–which is great until you consider the cost of them. If you want cheaper costs, Steam and GOG are there places to be. The eShop frequently sees decent sales on third party games, and you should just treat anything on a Game Card as cost of game + memory card, and assume Nintendo’s own games are plated in gold.

But, I will also admit that I’m appreciating that focus. Sometimes it’s a quick game, and sometimes it’s a reminder like refusing to count how much time I’ve spent in Skyrim across multiple platforms. Often I feel like I wish the system had a browser, but it’s very much a time to play and tune out. I’m less likely to scrounge around the eShop and just play games.

I’ve also found that honestly, I forgot how nice it was to just lounge on the couch and play a game. That’s something that I haven’t done much since the GameBoy Color was relevant, not to much Pokemon Red/Blue and Silver/Gold 😅. Yeah, you don’t really get that with a desktop PC and ten pounds of Nvidia; nor can a SteamDeck compete with that on visual fidelity, even if it can achieve an impressive Xbox One level power in a portable package.

Only time will tell where the road goes, but so far, I’m inclined to conclude that the experiment was successful. Outside of remembering Campaign Evolved released, I actually don’t remember the last time I powered Ranga up in recent weeks… lol

Brief moments between sprints

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Today’s mostly been the kind of day where I count myself lucky if there’s time to take a shit. But, I managed to get things done, and still make time for a walk in the park after work. It’s the first night this week that I haven’t had something else to do :|.

The trees provide decent cover from the rain, although they do little for the spirit crushing humidity it adds to an already humid day. Packing my water bottle, so that I could stay hydrated, turned out to be a very damn good idea. I’m really just glad that when the humidity starts looking like Florida, the temperatures aren’t so awful. I find the walks and exercise do wonders for getting my muscles towards a happier state of tired-but-not-exhausted, but the weather sucked.

Life being what it is, I still had to cook, pack lunches, and get the kitchen squared away before I could actually sit down. But I’m happy everything got caught up. My inner craving would rather raid the diner for a burger, but it’s the healthy eating that’s made one of the largest impacts on reaching my weight goals. There’s few better incentives than obtaining your objective.

For what few hours I have left before it’s time to go to bed, I have a feeling that most things less urgent than a zombie apocalypse will be waiting until tomorrow. Either that, or I’ll be shouting “Sparkle, mother fucker!” and swinging a chainsaw. The next twenty minutes or so, are nearby declared a rest period.

A little 1924us

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This stumble across rather makes me wish my quotes file supported wizard photos, lol

The sentiment largely captures how I’ve always felt about the people I care about. It nails the concept, so perfectly. It doesn’t attach anything to it, it just expresses it, so beautifully for what it is.

There’s two quotes that I’ve kept filed away that I think summarize the emotion better than most. The line in Fool’s Rush In where Isabel tells Alex that “Love is a gift not an obligation,” and part of the Celestine Chronicles where Terrance Mack concludes, “Love is to want for the happiness of another.” At the most elemental level, both quotes capture what love is without giving some kind of a type or meaning to it, and that’s oh so rare in my experience.

Over the years, I just haven’t found better ways to describe the concept. I do suppose though, I should put the URL to that video in the quotes file somewhere, it’s easier to find than searching my journal, lol.

Project Xavier

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Recently, I’ve made another shift in my hardware. My Alpine powered X61T (aka Hill, after a certain S.H.I.E.L.D. agent) is now officially retired and my W10 powered E6430S (aka Stark, after guess who) returns to retireee status.

In their place, a new “old” ThinkPad X1 Carbon takes their place. It’s a Gen 9, making it not so terribly obsolete at running modern software as Stark’s 14 year old processor. Compared to my X61 and T61 it also avoids that “Oh god, it’s the world wide web!” impact of using a web browser on a 21? year old processor. Actually, I think its the only time I’ve had a ThinkPad that isn’t considered thrift store vintage.

For lack of better ideas, I’ve named the system Xavier after Professor X. Both because it’s a 5 year old machine and because it’s purpose is to be an experimental secondary machine. Given the relatively modern processor, its initial operating system is Fedora Kinoite–something not to ancient, and theoretically not too easily broken.

On the hardware front, I’m finding it quite nicely. It’s an i7-1185G7 model with mid-level 16G of RAM, meaning that it has the same limitations as a development machine that Stark had, but can at least handle the ungodly heavy load that web browsers have become since Ivy Bridge. More useful to me personally, is it’s equipped with Tigerlake-LP chipset offering Thunderbolt which makes it possible to use my CalDigit TS4 alongside Shion and Ranga. For bonus points, i don’t even need a special charger, haha! Personally, I’m not a fan of ThinkPads, but they’re great machines to buy used especially if you can get a good deal.

Software wise, I find things a wee bit more of a mixed bag. Being an rpm-ostree based distro, system updates are quite stable. The actual user experience is a bit more akin to any problem can be solved, if you’re willing to delete your user account and start from scratch, or spend a few hours debugging which file in your home directory fucks the whole thing. On the flipside, it does actually work quite well most of the time, and it really is meant to be a test bed machine. If I assigned my computers a registry number rather than a hostname, it would probably have a Y or X prefix to it. It remains to be seen if I’ll transition the machine over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD or good old Debian, but we’re see how it goes with the atomic respin.

Seriously, don’t tell me the odds

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This Monday, I found myself both cursing and laughing at the circumstances. Walking from my car into work, my car keys slipped out of my gloved hands (grippy palms, yeah, sure 😜) and of course…went right down the parking lot storm drain.

Fortunately, someone else was arriving at work at the same time and we were able to fish it out. But I couldn’t help but wonder: what’s the probability that I would drop it right there, at just the right time, at just the right angle. I consider it a little bit of god’s blessing that it worked out the way it did. Here’s to hoping that good things are on the horizon….

For bonus points, as a kid, I always had a great discomfort about walking over storm drains. That little-itty-bitty fear in the back of one’s head that surely, someday the thing would collapse and nearly fall in or something like that. Well, I do have to admit, I’d rather the keys problem than that one.

A metric ruler ftw

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One of those long term, never found wants, sometimes deserves a “Fuck, yes!” when you come across it. In my case, one of those is a ruler marked in centimeters and millimeters.

Rulers are a useful thing, whether for measuring small distances, drawing a straight line, or well, let’s just be honest: everyone whose ever had a yardstick has used it to retrieve something fallen in a tight space 😆. I have relatively few left, resulting in typically breaking out the tape measures; the youngest of which is my age. Thus, it’s in inches only. But there’s one thing that really irks me about tape measures: dealing with 1/16th inch as a unit size. It’s pretty great if you’re building a house, but not so much for random use. At least, not for me.

Enter the Midori multi-ruler! Given centimeters and a lack of ambiguity, it works well for my purposes, and I can appreciate that the first section includes half-millimeter marks. It’s probably the first new ruler I’ve had since grade school. The folding mechanism having 15° stepping would also have been great back when I lived in an age of paper.

Science fiction often leads to encountering a greater use of metric measures, which led me to learning the metric system as a child, because it was a bother to convert everything into our customary units. I’ve generally used metric units for distance since circa The Phantom Menace, mostly reserving inches and feet for when they are actually convenient. Which means, they’re either the relevant units or just unwieldy at that scale. E.g., a foot may be more convenient than a third of a meter (0.3m), or its irrational in yards (0.33y); you may or may not care about the difference between 30.48 (12″), 30 (11.81″), and 30.5 cm (between 12.00079″). By the time we reach the point where 1/16th inch or 0.0625″ is a unit size, we’re crossing the point to where I’d prefer millimeters as a unit of measure. I’m also not a fan of converting between fractions and decimal, which is mostly just noise.

Thus, my random splurge is a metric ruler. I am literally the only one in my entire family who has ever cared about the metric system, mostly owing to being a sci-fi nerd as a kid. Americans using metric units outside of science and engineering contexts is still rare, even decades later. But old habits die hard, and I’ve wanted one of years. Sometimes, you have to treat yourself with random shit :).

The end of mass market paperbacks

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Growing up in a world that was partly divided by hardcovers and paperbacks, I find the news that the format’s largest distributor sounded the death knell surprising. Perhaps it’s not a format many avid readers are fond of, but it’s one I’ll always remember kindly.

When I was younger, the majority of my books were the pocket sized mass market variety. Cheaply made, but that was the point. As a teenager, I personally preferred the more portable size, since these lent itself to reading on the go and shelf space was always at a strong premium. But I remember it most being driven by cost: hardcovers cost far more, and were less often available at the used bookstore. If not for novels eventually being released in the mass market paperback format, I would likely have starved for books as a kid! Exchanging books at the used book store periodically, was also a far more realistic endeavor than getting to the library, and “brand new” was rarer for us in those days.

The majority of my hardcovers were Star Wars novels and notable novels that were hand-me-downs, like my mom’s copy of the original Thrawn Trilogy or my brother’s copy of Jurassic Park. The rest were probably acquired on fire sale. Mass markets dominated my shelves for years. I don’t think I actually owned a trade paperback until The Fellowship of the Ring was headed for the big screen about 2001. At roughly the same time, the Lord of the Rings was re-released with three volumes, and being a big deal of course got the better format. My mom paid a whopping $12 for the first volume judging by the back cover, probably as a birthday or Christmas present more than a splurge. It’s been quite a while since then.

Next time that I can really remember having a trade paperback was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which I can remember specifically as a Christmas present. That was the year I was sick for Christmas, actually. I can’t remember if that was in time for the film’s 2001 release or not, but it’s from the 1999 printing. Later novels in the series actually made up the majority of my trade paperbacks well into adult hood. I can still remember receiving the Half Blood Prince in hardcover as a gift while I was waiting for the paperback release to become available, and having somewhat mixed feelings. On one hand, gratitude and the glee of continued reading; on the other, feeling like they must’ve thought us poor and that now my bookshelf wouldn’t match. Most other trade paperbacks on my shelves are either relatively new purchases over the past 10-15 years, or something over than a novel.

As a reader, I’ve never really been a fan of hardcovers so much as I recognize the necessity of them. I think most people inclined towards “physical” books today, aren’t likely to be cost bound. If cost is the predominant factor, or like me, you’ve spent your life in that situation of “Damn, if only I could knock down walls and build a library….” then digital is likely the focus.

Anyone in the same reading situation that I was as a teenager would probably be consuming their content via e-books due to the cost, or more likely OverDrive through their public library–I know I would’ve gone nuts if that was a thing when I was a youngster. That’s also a demographic that mass markets were great for IMHO, those who would simply have far fewer books if you had to pay a premium for a hardcover release. Yeah, it was enough that waiting until the paperbacks filtered into our local stores was worth it.

As an adult, I’ve rather come to threat e-books as the cookie problem. Something you just cough up for if you have any pocket money. My pastor when I was a teenager, often made quips about his penny pinching German heritage. He had a great sense of humor. But he also figured out that a major difference between him and his wife doing the grocery shopping was the fact that a random thing of cookies was going to end up in that cart, if he was the one executing their grocery list. You know, it’s like magic? Yeah. I basically refuse to consider how much money I’ve spent on books as an adult. It dwarves my access to books when I was growing up.

I’ve been fortunate that for most of my life, books haven’t been a luxury. But I will always have a soft spot for paperbacks. They might be crappily made, they might fall apart given heavy reading or a few decades on a shelf, but they formed the foundation of my teenage reading. For that, I can only smile fondly.