There are days when I can sympathize with Mr. Spock’s plight in The City On The Edge Of Forever.
“I am endeavoring, ma’am, to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bearskins.”
As a young programmer, I think it was probably around 2.4 or 2.2 that I started to use Python. Today it remains one of my favorite languages.
I remember thinking quite highly of the Zen of Python at the time. Much time as gone on since then, and to be frank, I think it even more beautiful and dead on balls accurate today than I did then. The older I get as a programmer the more accurately it reflects the reality.
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
Mobile Suit Gundam Anime That Started It All Launches on Crunchyroll.
Now there’s a surprise. Crunchyroll has long had plenty of Gundam series available, but I don’t recall anyone carrying the original series. Thus why /dev/shelf contains the Blu-ray š.
Don’t think that I’ve watched the entire series from end to end in a decade plus. But it’s definitely one worth watching. I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of the animation style from back then, so much as Gundam’s One Year War era.
Tech things that mildly worry me
I find it just a bit worrisome how often I remember shortcuts for running the MMC‘s various faces.
PS C:UsersTerry> gci C:WindowsSystem32*.msc
Directory: C:WindowsSystem32
Mode LastWriteTime Length Name
---- ------------- ------ ----
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 41587 azman.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 63081 certlm.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 63070 certmgr.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:08 124118 comexp.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 113256 compmgmt.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 145622 devmgmt.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 13091 DevModeRunAsUserConfig.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:08 47682 diskmgmt.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 145127 eventvwr.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 144909 fsmgmt.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:53 147439 gpedit.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:08 144998 lusrmgr.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 145519 perfmon.msc
-a---- 2019-10-15 09:53 146389 printmanagement.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:53 43566 rsop.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:53 120458 secpol.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 92746 services.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:09 145059 taskschd.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:08 144862 tpm.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 06:19 144967 virtmgmt.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:08 115109 WF.msc
-a---- 2019-12-07 04:08 144673 WmiMgmt.msc
In most cases I’m more likely to do foo.msc from a command prompt than go hunt down what I want through the start menu or other methods. Despite my background having focused heavily on unix systems, I’ve actually have learned a fair bit of NT over the past 15~20 years. Don’t think I’ll ever enjoy the care and feeding of Windows systems but it does come with the computer nerd territory, I suppose.
When you consider that for much of the past fifteen or so, the main reason I’ve kept Windows around has been for video games it may be kind of sad and worrisome, lol.
My data migration plan is almost wrapped up, yay!
Attempts to start Plex, or fire up Speccy to see if I could get a smart reading, was causing my 3 TB drive to dismount. Read access at least has proven reliable, and despite the driveās age it doesnāt sound like hell.
Since the important stuff on that drive is copied to my backups drive, and a copy of the backups drive is periodically sent to it: data loss would have been minimal if it went duddaaa splat like my old 1 TB did. Risk of loss was most of my Plex content, and the local mirror of my backups.
Last time I replaced a failing drive: one of the 1 TB drives I bought back in January 2013 died. Of course it was the one used for backups, and a short time after I started backing up the backups in full rather than the most vital parts. Which turned out to be rather handy, even if most stuff on ny backups drive are files I wonāt cry if theyāre lostāunlike my photo albums.
Faced with a drive going wonkers, and limited time. I did some planning and found myself buying a pair of 8 TB drives ā because the price was so good, I decided to get a spare.
Since taking a day to migrate my unbacked up media over to the new 8 TB drive, Iāve also decided to shift gears on how my dual drive arrangement works.
How itās been done:
- Backups drive
- Plex drive
Originally these were both 1 TB drives. The 3 TB in question replaced one when various retro fittings occurred. The 1 TB that failed a year or two ago was replaced with a 2 TB. But otherwise things remained the same.
Rather than backup vitals pike photos from Plex to Backups, and then mirror Backups to Plex just in case. Iāve decided to integrate everything into one drive.
Such that one new 8 TB drive is the complete data set. Backups, Plex, etc. Thus the 2 TB drive can go on to replace either the 2013-era 1 TB drive hanging out of my xbox, or the roughly as old 1 TB used to backup my laptopās 0.5 TB drive. It could even serve as an extra backup of the most important parts. Iāll figure that out later.
I chose to buy a second 8 TB drive in part because the prices are so nice. And because itās big enough that whatever fits on the new āMasterā drive can also fit on the spare.
The open loop is how I want to handle backups in this new arrangement.
Periodically mirroring the master to the backups would leave me with an automation that makes the spare ready to rock and roll. Syncing up once or twice a month is sufficient risk prevention for my needs. In that time period, data at risk typically exists on other devices or offsite.
Alternatively, I could simply use the āSpareā as a destination for backups of the new master. Similar to how I take care of my file serverās system drive being backed up to the āBackupsā drive that is now a folder on the master. Ditto other machines are backed up to that location in similar ways but less frequently.
As I see it the differences are moot from la failure rate perspective.
Mirroring on a monthly basis will generate ample file accesses; the difference is the āSpareā wonāt have the wakeful workloads of the āMasterā. By contrast the various backup software I rely on, can easily toss differential backups but doesnāt make the drive ready to rock. Doing so will still generate load on the drive whenever the operation occurs.
Thus I find myself favoring the approach where recovery is change mount point, go by new drives. One to replace failure, and one to decommission the spare for less sensitive uses.
Why a portless iPhone would be a nightmare
Reading this, I kind of have to ask myself: how many people actually use their phoneās port for something other than charging?
Iāve used the Micro-B ports on my phones to mount a monitor, flash drive, or use a keyboard, but this has been a rarity. Most times Iāve used the port for debugging Android applications with logcat. Since I strongly prefer a tablet, the monitor, drive, and keyboard stuff usually fell to that rather than my phones.
In terms of what my iPhone SE 2020 offers, I canāt say Iād actually give a flying floop if it was wireless charging only. In the sense that Lighting already declares I am unlikely to do anything more complicated than mount it in iTunes and copy ringtones, lol
āWe must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.ā
ā from Dr. Kingās speech in St. Louis on March 22, 1964.
Not the first time Iāve added something Dr. King said to my quotes file, but I have to admit this one is well worth the adding. H/T to The NY Times.
What happened in the capital was pretty terrible. Well worthy of condemnation, and more than a little messed up. In that vein, as I have a sense of humor I parse this article with tongue very much in cheek.
When I see an interesting article from The Atlantic pop up in my feeds, I usually question whether or not I have time to read twenty pages of article. In this case it was more like an awesome series of giggle snorts describing a day that will reflect poorly in our history books. Thank goodness we still have the right to a sense of humor š.
Hereās why everyone should own a cheap Android tablet
An interesting if unusual line of reasoning for a site full of nerds and shifting attention spans.
Tablets are often more natural to repurpose than other computing devices. Phones are often too damned small or the only size you need. Laptops are often too damned big, or all you really want is the keyboard input. Tablets strike an excellent size between being so compact you can Velcro it to the wall, and being large enough to prevent and interact with globs of data like videos and web pages.
Kitchens, bathrooms, garages, craft rooms, head boards, et.al. often have space as a premium. If not at first then eventually, lol. If money grew on trees instead of being made from trees and tears, Iād probably have a dedicated tablet just for scribbling notes.
One of the open questions Iāve had since my Tab S3 -> iPad Pro conversion is what do I want to do with Scarlett. The cracked screen works fine most of the time, but Iād largely prefer to avoid putting it in a position where fluids and cleaning are regular needs. The old HDX7 has principally become a clock now that itās long form reading duties have migrated to a conventional Kindle.
Currently it resides near the charger cluster of /dev/headboard. Which has shown promising possibilities as an electronic picture frame or clock in either room. Mounting it on a kitchen wall or the side of my refrigerator would readily solve the problem that Iāll need to update my grocery list for something, but donāt have the time to leave my kitchen to go get a phone or tablet. Thereās also the perk that the S-Pen still works pretty well as long as you donāt rest your hand too heavily on the screen, or need fine lines near the cracked part.
Going on somewhat of a cleaning kick, I managed to sort through and clean various artifacts that havenāt really been gone through in a few years.
Along the way I decided to put some stuff with my treasures box. Not sure if everyone does, but ever since I was little my mother had these jewelry box like things for us. Mostly made up of artifacts from when we were born. Like buttons or coins with our birthdays, or stuff that was my fatherās. Various stuff has been collected here since I was a kid. Troll dolls, a folding paper fa from Chuck-E-Cheeseās arcade, etc. More recent additions include a Pokemon TCG coin, my wristwatch, yadda yadda.
The box also contains various things like my dadās driverās license and registration. Canāt remember how much has been there next to forever, and what has been merged into that over the years. Most of Dadās personal artifacts are in one of his old containers. Likewise my motherās are in various containers she kept her personal stuff in.
In debating where to put some of my motherās stuff, I opted to put it in my box with some of my fatherās stuff. Makes sense to me that her driverās license would end up next to his. While I was at it, also incorporated are things like the fob and last registration from my first car.
Also a little happy. Looking through my parents things, I found dadās other dog tag in one of my motherās boxes. Next to important stuff of her fatherās. Last time I moved, I had feared I might of lost it.
And then of course thereās irony. In knocking the box with comments that I should really get something bigger to store this stuff in the frame of the lid finally came unglued. Considering itās at least thirty years old, I suppose I canāt complain, lol.
Think if I was smart, Iād find some time to clean and organize that entire shelf and make it more orderly. Family albums on the bottom shelf might even be worth the sneezing attack.