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Random irony

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A couple days ago, the top sheet I’ve used as a light blanket tore, after probably 15 years of being used. I used to keep it apart, so when the dogs stole my blankets I’d still have something and it kind of evolved into being what I wrap myself with at my desk, etc.

In shopping for a possible replacement, I came across a blanket that I decided to order in the hopes of replacing it, since the woobie is a bit too warm for the same use cases.

The part that makes me snortle about the irony of it all? It’s expected to arrive the same day as a winter storm and several inches of snow!

Thoughts on Home Audio

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In general, I haven’t cared too much about whole home audio, but have had that available long enough to not really care.

The first setup I had for that, was based around Chromecast almost a decade ago. The 5.1 Vizio surround sound system I had in my apartment had Chromecast support, and the Chromecast Audio was very cheap and very effective when paired with the AUX/Line-In on the analog based Logitech 2.1 that was hooked up to my desktop. No real complaints about the multi-room audio support, although the sound system was enough to fill my apartment.

Sadly, those both audio devices went the way of the trash heap over the years. And I haven’t really used the Chromecast audio since the move to Desktop=Games, Laptop=Desktop. The move from Android to iPad tablet made that less of a concern, since the iPad Pro was only secondary to the surround sound system in terms of speaker quality at home, and could fill my entire apartment with music almost as easily.

The second setup, which is still in use, is an Alexa based one. Over a lustrum, things expanded from a simple puck based Dot, to an orb with a clock. Enough to easily have the audio controls over my shit in the bedroom and kitchen/living room space of my apartment. These days, one of those is still on my headboard and the other is in my kitchen/dining area; and I bought a Pop to gain Alexa control in the study.

Because of how good Nerine’s speakers were, I never really cared too much about the whole home audio was, even after losing the surround-sound setup. Doing multi-room audio with Alexa worked well enough in my experience. But in practice, I only tend to need current room audio and at most, briefly next room audio. The kicker however, is that what audio device I’m playing from can vary. It’s usually going to be my tablet, but it might be my laptop, or my phone, or one of the experiment earlier this year, etc, and sometimes my devices change.

That’s kind of what lead to the Roam 2 solution. I was never really impressed with the Echo Dots for music playback, but they were good enough for anything not an iPad Pro. Since Nerine’s retirement, that’s now basically the case for anything, because the Mini can’t beat the Pro on listening to music, lol.

For me, the dots have always been more about whole-home Alexa control than whole-home audio. But really, both have been a pain in the ass in recent years. Generally, I liked Alexa control. As a voice assistant, it worked better than Siri which has always been rather meh for me and unlike Google’s, doesn’t tend to make me rage-monkey. Let’s just say, Google’s voice assistant wasn’t a concern when I left the Android eco-system.

Since Amazon’s cutting up of their Alexa division, I’ve generally found myself going more “Why do I even bother” at how well my Alexa control works, both in terms of voice recognition and third party things. Enough so, that I mostly consider its days numbered at this point. Since discovering that my watch can handle “Hey Siri, turn on the book lights,” I’m even more considering the end of Alexa control. As meh as my relationship with Siri is, when it works, it does actually work.

E.g., if my typical use case is like, “Alexa, turn on the book lights,” as I’m changing my clothes after work–there’s two ways this exchange can end. Either the lights turn on by the time my belt’s off, or I may as well go out of my way to do it by hand. Let’s just say that I’ve become grateful over the last couple years that the controllers for my Nanoleaf lights are easily accessible, and that they use a capacitive button that doesn’t make me worry about straining the adhesives.

That’s how much my relationship with Alexa control has soured in the last two years compared to how well it worked (let’s Alexa all the rooms) ~five years ago.

In terms of a Bluetooth speaker for the current room though, I’m basically calling the Alexa setup a dead stick. Much more than saying “Pair phone” and hoping the current Dot connects to my tablet, and it’s more bother than it’s worth. Pairing new devices typically ended with grumbles like the Dot connecting to my actual phone not the device I’m using, issues in getting it to connect to the device I’ve named, and the joyous fun that is connecting a new device–even if using the Alexa app.

So, a portable speaker is looking to be a good plan. Off sale, the Roam 2 costs a bit less than my surround sound system did, and on sale closer to what replacement for my JBLs were looking like on a purely Bluetooth front.

I think Sonos is too damn expensive for building my next surround sound system, and may be too expensive for my taste in terms of equipping a speaker per major room, even if I exclude the smart home control as a factor. Really, for downstairs it would make more sense to just migrate from Fire TV to Apple TV for being able to use an AirPlay target–when I eventually go surround-sound. Since the Vizio’s demise, I’ve just made due with the TV’s integrated speakers and been glad that they don’t sound like ass.

For the short to medium term plans though, both audio and smart home control are on the agenda. For right now though, AirPlay -> Roam 2 -> take it with me, is looking to be a good plan. Plus in the study, my laptop is usually docked with the Pebbles on, making it a dandy AirPlay target.

Server Recovery

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There are rare occasions when I am glad to be both smarter than the average computer user, and a touch paranoid. Today has proven to be one of those times.

Earlier today, my file server’s RAID enclosure managed to take a ThinkPad to the face, and this lead to a great circle of profanity upon the discovery that said server was no longer seeing a disk label. Turns out that managed to nudge the mode switch (which of course some arsehole put on the front) and depress the power button sufficiently to switch modes to combined disks. Of course, switching back wiped out the metadata and so on.

But because I’m a right pain in the ass myself and the first reaction to going from a Master / Backup drive pair to a RAID 1 redundancy was roughly, “Ahh shit, now I need a third drive for the backups,” I only lost data since yesterday at about 0102 UTC when I backed up the array to my NVMe drive. Which largely amounts to having to re-upload some recent files to the server’s Music share, rather than 100 GB of family photos that aren’t offsite so frequently.

Being the anal retentive pain in the ass that I am, the restore process is even relatively simple for the file shares since it’s roughly reformat drive, run script for each share, copy files for each share, verify permissions / access control lists / ownership / contexts / yada, yada. I’m too paranoid not to already know that the backup procedure will work, because how the fuck would I have migrated the data the first time? 😁

The catch? Well, the virtual machines weren’t backed up but were being stored on the array. It’s been on my todo list to study the best way to handle backing them up automatically. Only one virtual machine actually had any local data of consequence, and was the authoritative name server for my LAN’s domain. Except I kind of don’t need to worry about that for three reasons:

  • Name servers two and three are configured so that either can be converted to take over the job with a minimal fuss.
  • Their topology was chosen so only resolving local domains would fail if name server one fails longer than the pair serving my LAN caches.
  • Name servers one, two, and three are each automatically backed up every night to, you guessed it, the file server!

Which means name server one’s sudden demise fits into the “important but not urgent” quadrant of my Eisenhower matrix, and affords cause to revisit the issue of how the VM’s should be managed on Zeta.

Also while I’m at it, I’ve repositioned Zeta’s RAID enclosure to make it much harder for anything to hit that fucking button and switch. I might build a proper safety cover just to be extra paranoid, lol.

Off to a Good Start

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Despite having very little desire to leave the warm comforts of bed, I managed to open my eyes, get cleaned up, put the laundry on, and head downstairs and begin making breakfast. Next experiment was definitely a success: bacon, egg, cheese, spring onion, and steamed sweet potatoes wrapped up in a burrito. As an experiment, I opted to try a friend’s method of wrapping around the strip of bacon and skip crumbling it into the scramble; and enjoyed the extra slices on the side.

Of course, I wasn’t smart enough to put the coffee on between the bacon and eggs, but alas it means more coffee for right now! Plus as I sit down to coffee, the dryer is now loaded and it will certainly be time for another cup by the time I have to fold laundry.

For me, it’s kind of a rare morning. I almost never buy bacon, so it’s not something that I consume a lot of, but at 105mg a slice the lower sodium stuff was too tempting to pass up. Between the blood pressure of late, and the age old problem of using it all before it goes to waste, I don’t think I’ve actually bought bacon in several years, but it was worth it 😋 even if I shouldn’t make a habit of it.

Floating day

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Today has been what I would call a “Floating day”, or a day in which nothing and everything got done because I floated between various things rather than tunnel visioned on a specific activity.

This morning saw me finally setting up my nano leaf light panels near the reading nook, which amounts to about half of my hexagon shaped panels. It remains to be seen if they will stay up, or come down, but as long as the drywall and the paint is fine then I’ll be happy enough. The command tabs are probably stronger than the vendor’s original sticky pads.

Insert a bit of zombie slaying and various odds and ends, like cursing giving into double-points weekend on my Kindle reading list, and it wasn’t a bad afternoon either. But the real plan was to take out some meat to warm up and read for a bit. A nice sit, a nice read, and the panels are still on the wall 😅

For dinner, I decided to make something that I haven’t made in ages: Salisbury steak. In the great debate of sides, I ended up making home mashed potatoes and roast broccoli because the potatoes need using up and I’ve got plenty of both. Augmenting this plan was sautéing some onions to set aside, and then making a pan sauce to finish the meat in. Sadly, in my aim to avoid leftover sauce it reduced to nothing by the time the meat was finished, but the Salisbury steak came out perfecto 😘. Nice crusting on the outside and tender on the inside.

Follow it up with a bit of wine while I finish cleaning the kitchen, and I’m inclined to call it a success just the same. All in all, I’ve gotten “Nothing” done as it were but “Plenty” got done, so I’m still contented. More importantly, with it being about -9 C outside this morning: I stayed the fuck in doors!

Normalization ftw

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There’s several upsides on standardizing on cables and devices when possible. In my case, that’s been braided (i.e., tangle free) USB-C cables rated for 100W charging when the cables are long and comparable 10 Gbit/s or faster rated cables when they’re short.

One of these upsides is “Ahh, it’ll charge a laptop!” when paring a suitable charger with any of my longer cables. These cables are usually poor on data speed but superb at power delivery, which is often what I want when the desired cable is measured in meters, which is also when I really want tangle free….lol.

Another is knowing that when I grab a smaller cable, it’s going to be good enough to feed I/O devices like a NVMe based SSD or any SATA thing I’ve still got handy. Aptly, most of these short cables either came with NVMe enclosures rated for 10 Gbit/s USB connectivity or are in fact Thunderbolt 3/4 cables rated for both 40 Gbit/s connectivity and 100W charging.

Increasingly, when the cables are short I’m aiming for 40 Gbit/s + 100W unless they’re packaged with something. The downside is that Thunderbolt cables are costly and have limited cable lengths, but generally are sufficient for ‘all the USB things’ once you’ve groaned at the bill. If I find myself buying a short cable these days, I’ll save up for a Thunderbolt for future proofing because more and more of my devices support either Thunderbolt or USB at 40 Gbit/s.

For devices in general, I’ve been swinging for USB-C 10 Gbit/s for a while now. Things like motherboards, drive enclosures and external drives, USB hubs and PCI-E expansion cards are chosen based on this. This choice was made based on the rise of the NVMe external drive, and the fact that such a cable will be no problemo when pared with my older gear that maxes out at USB 3.0 or SATA speeds.

Similarly for chargers, the rare time that I buy a charger, I’ve generally aimed for the 90~100W scenario. In the sense that most of my devices will happily charge from a 45W or 65W charger, and the hungriest ship with a 90W charger.

Is this excessive? Not really. Why? Well, let’s see… my primary machine has 40G ports, my gaming machine has 10G ports and a card with 40G ports. SteamDeck has a 10G port and my file server has an expansion card with 10G ports.

Much like USB-A and MicroUSB-B has become relegated to specialized and rare things around here over the past decade, so has 5 Gbit/s connectivity begun to age out of the herd ;).

Oh, Christmas Tree!

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When I was moving, I had decided to toss the small tree that I typically setup on my kitchen counter; apartment space being a premium, and dogs being mischievous, that worked well. But for the past couple years, I’ve had it on my list to replace it since it was wearing out from over a decade of use.

It being my first Christmas here, I opted to go with a more normal sized tree. And seriously, I forgot how much work it is to fluff up a full sized tree.

Given the relatively safe environment, I decided to use some of my mother’s nicer Disney ornaments that haven’t been put up since she was alive, for fear they would get broken. In the same vein, I incorporated my father’s Christmas balls as well (damn, that just doesn’t sound right 😅). They haven’t been put up in at least thirty years, and I have no recollection of them being put up since I was very young. Rather there were so many of dad’s balls broken (oi, oi) in the 1990s and 2000s that we spent most of the past few decades trying to keep them from being further destroyed in storage. Much to my surprise, only one ball was broken when I inspected the box earlier this year.

An open question is what I want to do about the star. It fits this size tree much nicer than the old one meter tall tree, but the connector for the lights isn’t the old style plug. Therefore, my options are leave the star unlit or run an extension cord halfway down the tree.

Ahh, it’s been a decent day

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Saturday’s walk, rather wiped me out to the point that I could barely sleep from the pain in my feet. It wasn’t so bad afterwards but by the end of the day, it wasn’t pretty. About three weeks ago, I noticed that my boots are worn enough that the right outsole has cracked all the way through, such that you can flex it enough to stick fingers through to the sock if you try 😲. For me, that’s actually not so bad, given my history with footwear from before I started to wear boots, but still means new ones are overdue.

In retrospect, going for a 2.5 km walk in the park was probably not the brightest idea, even if my feet haven’t been paining me as part of my regular days. But just the same, after spending Sunday trying to actively stay off my feet to recover, I think buying new boots has gone from “Yeah, I should plan on that” status to “Do I want to do that over vacation” status. Soaking my feet also made a good opportunity to catch up on my reading for the weekend.

Today, on the positive side, I’ve felt well enough to be mostly unencumbered. Sore enough that I wouldn’t be inclined to go for a long walk, but normal enough not to be bothered. To the point that farting around the computer, I didn’t have any problems making routine trips downstairs to refill my water, rather than keeping a canteen handy.

Taking advantage of the day off, I decided to start on early on dinner plans that I drafted yesterday. Mirepoix (carrots, celery, onions), a few leftover mushrooms, and some ground sausage made in the fashion of beef stew using stock and seasonings. I had bought the celery planning on such a meal, but had yet to go for it. Figured, best do it while the carrots and onions were still good.

While such a stew can be accelerated by preparing the vegetables the night ahead, simmering soups and stews aren’t an expeditious cooking experience. Which means more time spent standing in the kitchen, lol.

Networks and Pizza

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Having finally merged some code that’s been stuck in my craw, I decided on a mini-celebration: pizza and eggplant parmigiana, although sadly I forgot about the beer in the fridge. Oh, well; it’ll be there to go with the leftovers 😋.

On the flip side, I think it’s almost time to declare Zeta an operational battle station.

The first problem was I/O performance. Her predecessor, Cream had been pressed into sharing its Wi-FI with Rimuru, leaving the SMB shares on Cream only accessible via wireless clients. Having fished out the aerials that came with Rimuru’s Motherboard 2.0, that solved that connectivity gotcha. But not the simple fact that the file server and the clients are within a meter or two of each other, and the access point is across the house! As much as I suspect a mesh system will be the upgrade path for my network, I’m not replacing that router until it dies or Wi-Fi 7 is ready to rock.

Thus, my shiny new file server was only achieving about 5 MB/s connectivity with my Mac and PC on the other side of the L-shaped monster. Now, I’ve never expected big things of Samba compared to NT’s SMB stack, but Samba’s got waaaay better performance than that and so does Zeta’s hand me down platter drives. My solution to this problem? Gigabit!

At first, I attempted to solve this problem using the combination of libvirt and pfSense. But, I didn’t have much luck getting the bridging to work in order to have a VM on the host be a router while the client functions as the physical. In the end, I discarded this idea and configured Zeta to function as the router for my little local IPv6 network. Yeah, that’s right: I said IPv6, baby! Since this is a local network intended to join Zeta (server), Shion (Mac), and Rimuru (PC) and the occasional other machine, I opted to set this up as IPv6. There’s no real need for IPv4 in my desk’s wired LAN. Maybe I’ll enable IPv4, so I can jack old PowerBook G3 into the switch since MacOS 9.x probably lacks IPv6 support the way Sonoma lacks AppleTalk support 🤣.

Configuring things was pretty easy. A little bit of radvd to enable the Router Advertisement and Router Solicitation issues and for good measure, setup DHCPv6 as an insurance policy, and configured the Ethernet port with the desired address and itself as the gateway. In the future, I may try setting up BIND, so I can have DNS A records map to Zeta’s IPv4 address on the household Wi-Fi and AAAA records map to Zeta’s IPv6 on the desk’s Ethernet, or perhaps even separate domains. But I’m a little hesitant of taking out DNS whenever I reboot the server.

On the flip side, thanks to the lack of fuckwittery, Samba and the SMB stacks on Mac and NT just handles this case fine. Navigating to \\ZETA or smb://ZETA while jacked into the local Ethernet switch nets me about 80 to 115 MB/s, or roughly how fast you can spew data over a Gigabit link to SATA powered things. Seems that the SMB stacks are smart enough to prefer the local Ethernet, but something more DNS aware is how to fix cases like SSH.

The next phase has been setting up the virtual machine environment, which will probably replace the Parallel’s VMs I sometimes spin up on my Mac and the WSL2 environments on my PC. For this, it basically amounted to setting up a bridge interface with the same IP information and using Zeta’s Ethernet port as its bridge port. Then setting the virtual machine’s second interface to bridge to LAN, so that it can be routable over the local switch.

Thus, Shion, Rimuru -> Zeta works. Shion, Rimuru, Zeta -> some VM on Zeta works. Muhuahuaha!

Eggs and power tools

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Breakfast

While the handiwork of just about any Japanese housewife would put mine to shame, I do think that this morning’s experiment at tamogoyaki is the best success yet.

The key I’m finding is to be sure to add thin enough layer of the egg mixture that it cooks fairly evenly and quickly, so that it’s easily rolled before the pan facing side gets too brown. Adding a small amount of egg is a lot easier when you don’t almost cook your thumb off the heat radiating from the pan 😅. On the flip side the square shape of a tamogoyaki pan and a spatula near the same size, does make it pretty darn easy to roll the omelette over. That’s pretty much the difference between a tamogoyaki pan and a small skillet: it’s square instead of round.

Power tools

My follow up project for the day was to investigate the wiring on the light switches by my garage. There’s two switches there, one that controls the hallway lighting and one that controls the main lighting in the garage itself. In general, I’m tempted to replace the classic flick switches in my home with slider switches like my apartment had, or simple rocker switches because I kind of like the newer types. A few with Alexa control would be nice but aren’t a big deal thanks to electrical code mandated multiway switches. But for the hallway there where it is the only switch, I’m interested in putting a motion sensor in place so that it’s easy to have that lighting ‘on’ when useful and not constantly forget to turn it on in the first place, or off.

Popping the breaker and getting my tester out because I’m more cautious with mains electricity, it looks like both these switches are the classic two wires and a ground. So that will probably curtail that idea more than finding a suitable two gang plate would. Occupancy sensor type stuff I’ve seen tends to require a neutral third wire. I’m really not surprised though, this house is relatively young but it’s not that young a building.

In retrospect, I should have unscrewed the left switch instead of the right, in order to get a better look at the wiring coming into the box, but for now I have enough information to satisfy my research. Finding it rather a pain in my ass to unscrew the switch itself and that one screw refused to drive far enough to get the front plate to rest flat, I finally caved into that reoccurring thought that groans, “Damn it, I should just buy a drill”, in the back of my head whenever I do things like this. A short ride to the Home Depot later, I now have a cordless drill and impact driver as well as the switch’s plate properly in place. That should take care of my thermostat plans and help with tasks involving light switches and furniture assembly!

I find it kind of curious that I’m accustomed to dealing with low voltage electronics but I find myself far more paranoid when it involves household mains electricity. But not as curious as the fact that power tools make me far more self conscious than handling firearms would. Firearms tend to put holes through things and civilian weapons are limited to the semi automatic variety. Power tools also tend to put holes through things, but have the potential to keep going and typically have less safe guards built in than a pistol or carbine does. Making them far more dangerous to handle IMHO. I was kind of amused at the instructions warning against hitting the trigger when picking up or slinging the drill with the battery still in place.

On the positive side, I suppose the safety concepts are similar enough. It’s just while a dumb ass with a firearm may neglectfully reach out and perforate someone or something at a distance, a dumbass with a power tool is more likely to make like the chainsaw scene from Dawn of the Dead’s finale. I like to think that I may be ignorant or foolish at times, but I try to be a responsible schmuck rather than a true dumbass.