There's an old, old joke: A man jumps into a taxi and starts chatting to the driver about philosophy. The taxi driver turns to him and says, “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” The man says, “Well, I'm an atheist.” The taxi driver thinks for a moment and says “OK, but is it the Catholic God or the Protestant God that you don't believe in?” I've written before about the UK's rapid loss of faith, but it is always interesting to have statistics confirmed by lived experience. A few…
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I needed to copy 3TB of data from my old homeserver to my new one. I decided to spend as much time "sharpening my axe" as possible. I spent ages dicking around with ZFS configs, tweaking BIOS settings, flashing firmware, and all the other yak-shaving necessary for convincing yourself you're doing useful work. Then I started testing large file transfers. Both scp and rsync started well - transferring files at around 112MBps. That pretty much saturated my Gigabit link. Nice! This was going to…
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ZFS sometimes benefits from having a logging drive. Usually, you need to assign a whole device or partition to it. Unfortunately, I had already partitioned my SSD and didn't feel like repartitioning it. So, here's how to create a file, mount it as a loopback, and then assign it to your ZFS pool as a logging drive. Create a 1GB file somewhere on your SSD: fallocate -l 1G zil.img Mount the file as a loopback device: sudo losetup -fP zil.img Find the name of the new loopback device: …
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Zombie films are always social commentary. The original Night of the Living Dead is a story of small-town racism and paranoia. One Cut Of The Dead is - if you'll pardon the pun - a cut above the rest of the zombie flicks. It asks some deep questions about cinema and the role of the audience. Are we morally culpable for the actions that occur on-screen? Without us, there is no bloodshed. Without our insatiable desire for more blood, more gore, more torture - there is no pain and suffering. And …
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As part of my never-ending quest to banish this skeuomorph from the world… I was reading a fascinating eBook recently which was, sadly, designed to mimic a legacy / paper book. To the point where the authoring software had hard-coded in page numbers and forced them to be displayed. Here's what it looked like: There are two abominations here. There's no need to interrupt the reading experience by bisecting a page and displaying the page numbers. And there's no need to put footnotes at the a…
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I have a headless server - one without a GUI - which I use as a NextCloud client. My laptop, phone, tablet, and server all sync with a cloud-based NextCloud instance. But, sadly, NextCloud don't offer a way for servers to speak to servers. If you try to run apt install nextcloud it will try to install 300MB of GUI dependencies which you just can't use. Luckily, there's a way around all that! It's a bit convoluted, so here's a guide. Download the latest AppImage Grab the link for the most…
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Back in 2011, I bought an HP Proliant Microserver G6 for £250. Last week I upgraded to... A Proliant G8 for £270. Nice! Hurrah for Moore's Law! Of course, setting it up is a bit of a mare. So here's a tangled mess of notes to hopefully remind me what to do... Firmware Download the latest gen8 firmware / BIOS / iLO. Find a site offering demo licence keys for iLO 4. Boot Order I stuck in an SSD on the internal SATA port which is meant to be used for a DVD drive. The internal RAID has to b…
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Well gang, I did it! After two years I've finally finished my MSc! My final project was a 10,901 word epic about... The ✨Metaverse✨. Have I gone a little bit peculiar? No. I don't think so. I was advised to pick a project which would sustain my interest for 6 months. So I chose something which would have lots of modern papers to read. And, more importantly, justify me buying a new toy to play with! I was delighted and overwhelmed that it received a score of 80% - taking my overall grade to …
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After 3 full years of having solar panels on our London roof, they've generated 11,950kWh of electricity. Nice! Here's how those three years look, according to our smart meter. kWh Solar Generation 11,950 Solar Export 7,346 Grid Import 7,521 Quick maths! The difference between the generation and the export is our solar consumption: 4,604kWh over 3 years. So we directly use about 38% of the solar we generate. The remaining 62% gets sold back to the grid. I…
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Yes, that Mae West wrote a novel. And it is a corker. Unabashedly sexy, druggy, provocative, and daringly modern. You can read the whole thing in West's voice: “It’s all right, Charlie,” she said. “I won’t hurt him. I only want to feel his muscles.” Every line just sizzles off the page. As with any 90 year old book, you might have to translate some of the slang: “the true story dope I’m commencin’ in the World. You’ll be gettin’ your sheets in Dutch if you spill that line of apple mush.”…
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At a recent OpenUK meetup, one of the participants declared that Open Source had comprehensively won. While businesses might not always release their proprietary source code, 100% of everything they wrote used an open source programming language. I wondered how true that was. You can, perhaps, moan about the shenanigans around Java's licencing and you mutter about whether it is easy to get involved with C++'s JTC1/SC22/WG21 - but the core tech behind the two is open. Anyone can read the…
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Three years ago, I wrote about how you could add SIP calls to Android for free. Android had a well-integrated system which made VoIP calling a first-class citizen on its handsets. Sadly, Google killed native SIP calling in Android 12. FFS! It's relatively easy to get it set up again, although you'll need to install a separate app. Sign up for a free Sipgate account. That will get you a UK phone number (+44), username, and password. Install Linphone for Android (or via F-Droid) Setting up …
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