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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 17th, 2023

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  • Same. I have a general rule that I don’t pre-order. I also tend to wait for reviews to come in. This is because I’ve been burned in the past. I made exceptions to this for CP2077 and KSP2, and we all know how those went.

    So what used to be more like general guidelines for myself have now become strict rules.

    But Factorio has earned an exception. They’ve proven time and time again that the game is a product of passion and not (primarily, at least) profits. This has been clearly visible since I first bought it during early access in 2016 or thereabouts.

    So its expansion will be instabuy for me. The game has simply given me so many hours of entertainment that one could argue that if anything, at least I will now have paid full price for the game I already have (I don’t remember what I paid for Factorio, but it was dirt cheap).



  • Everything I wear is based around practicality which involves a lot carrying capacity. As someone who’s a lot on the move, this is my usual kit:

    Jeans, right pocket: Snus
    Jeans, left pocket: Bluetooth earbud charging box thingy
    Jeans, right back pocket: Boarding pass / ticket
    Jeans, left back pocket: reserved for trash
    Jacket, left front pocket: card holder, in which I also keep receipts
    Jacket, left inner pocket: Phone
    Jacket, front right pocket: varies. Usually a pack of chewing gum and a pen
    Jacket, right inner pocket: Wallet with passport and misc other important stuff
    Backpack: Two laptops, a change of clothing, USB battery bank, a bunch of adapters so I can plug in almost anywhere, phone stand, misc access cards, a plastic fork, and a toothbrush. Plenty of room to spare for things I add last minute or pick up along the way.

    When I’m only moving locally, it’s the same except I don’t bring my backpack. And when I’m not flying, I have a small multitool/knife in my right inner jacket pocket instead of my wallet.

    Oh, and up until a few hours ago I used to have my sunglasses hanging from a ring that is hanging Frodo-style around my neck. But I realized while I was boarding my plane on my way home that I’d left them in the airport lounge. No time to fetch them, but they weren’t particularly expensive.





  • I just had a chat with my oldest (almost 13 years y.o.) asking him some theoretical questions in the hope to spark some curiosity: “When you connect to a Roblox game, what do you think you’re connecting to?”. It took him a few leaps of imagination to realize that he’s connecting to a physical machine somewhere, and now he’s curious as to how such a machine looks. So that server stack I’ll be setting up, he’s interested in tagging along.

    He already knows full well that there are more to PCs than just the windows UI, as I’m a linux guy, but I don’t think they’re aware of just how much can be done with a computer once you go outside of the usual GUI app that connects to some cloud service.

    So, provided that his teacher agrees (after all, I have to take him out of school for what effectively will be “alternative education” for a few days so we can fly down to the head office), he’ll end up with bragging rights of having dealt network hardware that costs more than the average computer, and computers that cost more than the average house.


  • I think so too. My kids are around the age I was when I first started tinkering with PCs, but they don’t have any awareness of what’s going on under the hood, (to be frank, nor do they seem to need it, as everything is so polished these days).

    I’m thinking of asking their teachers if I can take them out of school for a day each and bring them to work with me for educational purposes so they get some perspective in the form of networks and servers.

    Sure, they’re mostly interested in gaming, but I want them to see what kind of infrastructure is needed for a multiplayer game, specifically the hardware that they never get to see.

    I’m building a new server stack in a couple of months, and most of it will be used for testing, so I’d like for them to help build and connect it.


  • Jabra still exists yes. I’m still using Jabra, although I’m using a pair that I bought after I thought that one earbud was gone forever. I still use the older ones, which was Jabra Elite 4, but only with my PC, as its battery took a hit after those 6 months at sea. I currently main Jabra Active 7 or something like that, and I quite like them. I noticed that the cover doesn’t stay very attached after a few proper cleans, but nothing a drop of glue doesn’t fix. What I really like about the ones I currently use is that they’re supposedly built to withstand sweat while training. I don’t work out, but it would seem that those who do sweat A LOT, as I can wear mine while showering without any issues.

    As for resilvering, the RAIDs are only a small fraction each of the complete storage cluster. I don’t remember their exact sizes, but each raid volume is 12 drives of 10TB each. Each machine has three of these volumes. Four machines total contributes all of its raid volumes to the storage cluster for 1.2PB of redundant storage (although I’m tempted to drop the beegfs redundancy, as we could use the extra space, and it’s usually fairly hassle free to swap in a new server and move the drives over).

    EDIT: I just realized that I have this Jabra confference call speaker attached to the laptop on which I’m currently typing. I mostly use it for discord while playing project zomboid with my friends, though. I run audio output elsewhere, as the jabra is mono only.


  • Story time!

    In this one production cluster at work (1.2PB across four machines, 36 drives per machine) everything was Raid6, except ONE single volume on one of the machines that was incorrectly set up as Raid5. It wasn’t that worrysome, as the data was also stored with redundancy across the machines in the storage cluster itself (a nice functionality of beegfs), but it annoyed the fuck out of me for the longest time.

    There was some other minor deferred maintenance as well which necessitated a complete wipe, but there was no real opportunity to do this and rebuild that particular RAID volume properly until last spring before the system was shipped off to Singapore to be mobilized for a survey. I planned on getting it done before the system was shipped, so I backed up what little remained after almost clearing it all out, nuked the cluster, disassembled the raid5, and then started setting up everything from scratch. Piece of cake, right?

    shit

    That’s when I learned how much time it actually takes to rebuild a volume of 12 disks, 10TB each. I let it run as long as I could before it had to be packed up. After half a year of slow shipping it finally arrived on the other side of the planet, so I booked my plane ticket and showed up a week before anyone else just so I could connect power and continue the reraiding before the rest of the crew showed up. Basically, pushing a few buttons, followed by a week of sitting at various cafes drinking beer. Once the reraid was done, reclustering was done in less than an hour, and restoring the folder structure backup was a few hours on top of that. Not the worst work trip I’ve had, except from some unexpected and unrelated hardware failures, but that’s a story for another day.

    Fun fact: While preparing the system for shipment here in Europe, I lost one of my Jabra bluetooth buds. I searched fucking everywhere for hours, but gave up on finding it. I found it half a year later in Singapore, on top of the server rack, surprised it hadn’t even rolled down. It really speaks to how little these huge container ships roll.