Start Backup <computer explodes>
A computer burns1
I recently bought a new 2TB NVMe M.2 drive with the intention of rebuilding my system. I was running ubuntu 20.04 but the next LTS release of ubuntu (22.04) was already available and canonical is leaning hard into snaps. I hate snaps. They solve the same problem as fedora's flatpacks, pollute my network list, and the last time I needed some weird software ubuntu offered to sell it to me through their snap store. The store was filled with commercial software. I specifically moved to open source to get away from this short of shit.
The last few weeks I've been researching different distros and decided to move to an arch based distro called manjaro. Arch, unlike debian, uses a rolling release process so the packages stay more up to date at the expense of having things break more often. I played around with it in a vm and it seemed like it would work.
Friday, I started backing up files and decided the best way to handle the upgrade was to just copy my entire /home/ directory to one of my backup drives so I could pick and choose what I wanted to bring back into the new system. The old M.2 drive would be my safety net. If I couldn't get everything working on the new drive, I could just put the old M.2 drive back in and it would be like nothing had happened.
The backup of my home directory had been running for a couple hours when my desktop locked up. This was unusual but it didn't bother me until I hit the reset button and the computer claimed the bootloader was corrupt. This was when I started to panic.
I pulled out my laptop and started looking up the arcane instructions for rebuilding a bootloader from a live boot. The grub rebuild command seemed to work but when I tried to boot from the drive it still failed.
So I was stuck. The first thing I did was to go online and order a M.2 - USB adapter because the data was probably still there even if I couldn't boot into that disk but even with expedited shipping it was going to arrive on the following Monday.
I work at home and my computer is a critical tool. I removed the old M.2 drive, plugged in the new one, and starting installing manjaro.
Though manjaro is a new linux distribution for me the main practical difference is it uses a package management system called pacman instead of apt. Installing software on linux systems is a delight. If I need mpv, vifm, mpd, nginx, and neovim I can just type:2
pacman -S mpc vifm mpd nginx neovim
It will download these applications from a secure, centrally managed software repository, work out any required dependencies, and start any new system services when it's done. Oh, and it's all free. The last time I used windows I still had to do google searches and download binaries from random people's web pages. I haven't used windows in 20 years but I'm guessing they have an app store that's filled with ads and commercial software. I recently got a mac book for work and that app store is the template for selling software to your customers. My guess is windows is desperate to condition their users to start paying for software and ubuntu wants to do the same.
There are a few packages that weren't in the extensive repositories. My password manager is an old tcl/tk app, my comic reader is abandonware (a project I've considered adopting), and my newsreader is a gtk app that no-one uses anymore. In each of these cases I was able to compile the application from source, without much fuss, getting the required dependencies with pacman commands.
computer explodes3
Because I didn't manage to make a proper backup before this forced upgrade I had to scramble to save the changes I made since my last backup (the night before). Also while restoring from backup I discovered I had neglected to add a '--delete' flag to one of my nightly rsync backup script which meant every backup directory contained every file they ever held the last several years (every test project long deleted and every steam game long since uninstalled).
During my live boot recovery I copied a few files to a mounted backup drive and to a thumbdrive but I was unable to read this thumbdrive later in manjaro. I spent hours combing the internet for clues why the kernel was mounting this thumbdrive as read-only only to realize that my thumbdrive had died. That it decided to die on the same day my other drive failed was just bad luck.
During the rebuild, after rebooting several times, my BIOS changed and started trying to boot from a non-bootable drive. I fixed this and then realized that the problem could have been as simple as a flaky M.2 socket making my NVMe drive go away, and then the BIOS detecting this and 'helpfully'4 reordering my boot order to load from a non-bootable drive.
Knowing this, I tried to go back to my original drive but I ran into the same missing bootloader issue which made me think the NVMe drive didn't fail at all and I broke it while trying to restore the bootloader after a socket hiccup.
The moral of this story is to keep backups. Even with backups from the night before I still had to scramble to rescue some files. A younger na might have thought I was being paranoid when I was running from a live boot and I backed up my latest changes in two places; a second drive and my thumbdrive, but this saved me when the thumbdrive chose that moment to die.
Every time I go through a re-install my backup scripts get sharper and things get easier but I always miss something. I can't imagine what normal people would suffer.
For all the bad luck of having the drive go down before I could finish my backup scripts, and having a thumbdrive fail during the recovery, I was extraordinarily lucky to have it happen when I already had a replacement 2TB NVMe drive on hand. I've still got the old M.2 drive and I suspect it's still OK but take this as a warning.
Make backups!
| [1] | At least this was what came up when when I searched deepai for 'a computer burns' |
| [2] | Manjaro also includes a GUI app that let you install and update software by clicking on nice icons with your mouse but I never use it. |
| [3] | deep ai thinks this is 'computer explodes'. When I tried to get more specific it started showing me pictures of fucked up dogs. |
| [4] | definitely not helpfully |
Right wing moral panic about 'beloved snickers dick vein'
This is real. It was created as a joke that fox news found and ran with. Fox knows that outrage keeps their viewers engaged and they don't care if the target of their outrage is real. There's always something to be outraged about. Most recently the outrage story was the idea that discussing homosexuality is grooming minors for sex.
The manufactured outrage seems like a form of twisted entertainment but I'm always surprised when legislation is introduced to address these fabricated problems. Do people actually believe this?
In this case, the story is so absurd I can't believe they're even trying to make it a talking point. I'm more inclined to believe it's performative outrage designed to make their political opponents feel smug, which they can then use to strengthen their resolve. A big reason Americans elected an inept fascist for president was they felt the opposite party was looking down on them.
Maybe everyone's in on the joke and it's just a form of tribal bonding. People want to join the discourse around a shared idea and it doesn't matter how absurd it is.
Or maybe it's just another in a series of distractions to pull attention away from the fact their leader tried to stage a violent coup?
Maybe it's because they've dehumanized their political opponents to such an extent they believe them capable of this absurdity? This one is a reach. I can believe they've dangerously dehumanized people outside their tribe but having a knee jerk reaction to 'protect the beloved snickers dick vein' reflects worse on them than their opponents and is part of the reason this story is so funny/absurd/dismaying.
So is fox news just desperate for a new thing to be outraged about, is it a long political play, is it a meaningless shibboleth to gather around, or are they serious? Maybe it's all of these things. I'm willing to believe almost anything other than that the republican party considers this a credible threat to their ideology. The alternative is just too depressing.
Dance Tango Tango
In 1977 I made a vow to stop dancing until the day it returned to the graceful splendor of the glory days. My audition as a troupe member for Santaren & The Loving Girls (I'm the one in green) is a chief example of these halcyon days.
Velodrome Sprints
I had a brief vacation in San Diego a few weeks ago and though I was working we went on a walk in the morning to check out the velodrome in Balboa Park. Amanda and Kayla were interested in the strangely sloped track and I tried to explain the weirdness of the races I'd seen online.
Watch the linked video. The racers go exceptionally slow at the start because they're trying to get into the second place position. The idea is to stay just behind the leader until the last lap when you use the slipstream of the person in front to catapult yourself past him at the finish. This dynamic makes the races interesting, the leader tries to fake out his opponent and they often come to a stop on the track. Then in the last lap they accelerate to 70kph for the finish.
As we stood watching the track a few older men and women drove in. I assumed they were referees until they reached into their cars and removed expensive looking, fixed gear carbon fiber bikes. I doubt they were were there to do any sprints but it would have been fun to see.
How long to brute force a password?
How long it takes computers to brute force a password. Brute force means just trying every combination.
Most password crackers are smarter than this but I always have a hard time explaining to people why they shouldn't use the name of their dog plus a number or an exclamation point. We need a simple image to explain how modern password crackers work.
I would also really be interested to see a video of how this table has changed every year since, say, 1980.
The infrequently updated blog.