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D.O.P.-T. (yesterday)

This morning when I emerged from the side door with recycling, Mama Violet was lying in front of the garage door. She eyed me balefully. It then got hot enough that this evening I heaved windows open in my room and the kitchen. I suspect we'll switch to a/c soon.

Photo-DOP-T

I sometimes walk through a late housing tract. Large, comfortable-looking houses on winding streets, a few of them cul-de-sacs, each with a shelf beside the front door, for potted plants, tchotchkes, or package delivery as you choose, and with large front lawns (mostly; a few have become gardens) and probably not much open space in back, especially these days when people have extended their houses and in some cases built accessory dwellings. There's a tradition on these streets of cute lawn ornaments. Like this froggy birdbath.

( More back here. )

D.O.P.-T.

Mama Violet was extremely miffed when after putting down her breakfast, I went down the steps to get the newspaper instead of withdrawing into the house. It was hours before I saw her around again. No sighting of her kids, not even sitting on the fence or insouciantly devouring something under the car while I did some pruning, as Monty did yesterday ... until after my dinner, when I took out the recycling and they both materialised out of the dusk and sat side by side watching me. So they got provided with a plate of food.

D.O.P.-T.

Six oranges were waiting for me this morning.

They did a good job of clearing away the crash debris. Just one bit of metal and one bit of polystyrene forgotten in the gutter, and a pale streak across the middle of the intersection where either the fluids or the cleaning product affected the tarmac.

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

D.O.P.-T.

Coming back from a walk around the park at lunchtime, we noticed a couple standing on the sidewalk/pavement with a baby in a carrier and a small child. The guy was talking on his phone and an older lady was talking to baby and mom. A car was badly parked in front of them with its hazards on. Looked like there might be a problem. Then as I stepped into the street to walk around the car, I saw the cop cars and wreckage at the crossroads, the one where we cross to get to the park. It has traffic lights but all too many people speed. I don't know what had happened, but there was a totalled car in the middle of the intersection. Crumpled front end, glass, a pool of transmission fluid, a torn off and shredded bumper or two, and to my surprise, a lot of polystyrene. Looks like they pack bumpers with the stuff these days? I suppose it's better than foam rubber. No ambulance, but police cars kept arriving and after we managed to get across (drivers were having to inch through a right or left turn), one of the newly arrived cops started trying to find someone who'd actually seen it, rather than just emerged from their house at the noise. So we went home rather than get in the way.

D.O.P.-T.

And today to the local library for the housemate to pick up an interlibrary loan book. It was hot, but there was enough of a breeze that it was bearable, but we both need to go back to getting up in time to run errands before it heats up.

D.O.P.-T.

We went to the San Jose library. Traffic was surprisingly light both ways, and we found a spot in the nearby parking lot even though there was clearly some sort of event being set up a few blocks away: roads blocked off, glimpses of booths. In contrast, for a couple of weeks now our neighbourhood has been awash in out-of-state cars. Arkansas, New York, and Ontario were all represented on our block yesterday. (The New York is a hulking vehicle, a successor to the station wagon, indicating a large family). The Chron jobs section was fat on Sunday. I suspect the AI companies—mostly in SF—are drawing people who've decided to live either there or in Silly Valley proper, and we're convenient for Caltrain commutes.

D.O.P.-T.

The temperature dipped today and the Chronicle weather guy is really emphasising how remarkably warm it's about to be, so I wore long sleeves while I still had that option.

My walk today was a series of close encounters with joggers and cyclists. And just as I was wearing my new sandals, lots of people seem to have bought new sneakers. Lots of fresh-out-of-the-box whiteness.

Entry tags:

computers,
linux

Linux Progress: backups

Last night I officially gave up on linux backup software and modified one of my existing backup-by-rsync scripts to backup my user account on the linux system to its new external drive. I took

ravan's suggestion of adding the -delete argument to the rsync command; this should reduce the incidental duplication and reduplication of moved files.

As I went to bed, my first backup was still running. Subsequent ones will be much faster.

When I'm happy with the results, I'll remove the -v argument and substitute -q, then arrange to run the script from cron.

I'm a bit concerned that on a system with no local mail service, there will be no effective way to learn about errors from the cron job. I may have to install a rudimentary mail server just to get emails from cron sent somewhere where I'll see them. (Maybe some of the full fledged backup systems handle notifications via the system's notification manager, but I doubt it.)

Overall, I'm very disappointed with the offerings. There were far too many missing features, lots of missing or broken documentation, and one feature I didn't want - extra encryption for the backups, on top of any full disk encryption one might have on the receiving media. I don't object to this being available - you'd probably want it if backing up to a different machine - what I object to is making it mandatory (restic), or broken documentation that should have told me what encryption scheme to use to have no encryption (borg).

Deduplication would have been nice, given the mess I have from prior non-use of -delete in rsync-mediated backups. Also because it would save a lot of backup time when I move big chunks of data to new locations in the file system. But I need to clean up that mess anyway, and with an rsync backup I can do the same 'mv' within the backup files as I'm doing within the source files, thereby avoiding a stupid copy-to-new-location and delete-at-old-location.

Entry tags:

The Associated Press Wants Me to Stop Reading Them

I've been using the AP as my source of US news headlines. I started with its daily email summary, which was actually one of a pair - morning and evening - and they presumed all readers subscribed to both. I didn't want twice-a-day news, but also didn't want to get stories framed as extra details/reaction to some story I'd never seen. Since my main reason for following daily new was to know about unicorn events that I might need to act on, I subscribed to their breaking news alerts, but never got around to unsubscribing from their morning summary.

My main news source is the Guardian. I pay them. The household also has paid subscriptions to local paper(s) that basically don't do national or international news.

This morning I clicked on the "read more" link in one of the AP emails, and got a spam wall - a requirement of a "free account" to continue reading. AP already knows my email, and IIRC they've bombarded me with unwanted extras - mostly ads for other newsletters - every time I've subscribed to one of them. Their "free" account will presumably involve more of the same, plus collecting and selling the details of what I click on - though frankly I'm surprised they aren't already doing that, via extra arguments to the links in their email newsletters.

I haven't decided yet whether I'll respond not by signing up, but by deleting my existing free email subscriptions.

Yes, I get it that they would like to be paid, and this is a step towards getting money from free readers like me. Moreover, they have a perfect right to refuse to provide a free service. But OTOH, their daily summary emails are a very poor imitation of what I'd prefer to be reading. To be suitable, they'd need to include breaking news that turned up between e.g. midnight my time and 6 AM my time, and *not* presume I'd already read their afternoon news email summary. I'm not eager to pay for service this bad, not even in wasted time.

I could, of course, create an account using an email alias, and deactivate that alias once confirmed, to avoid the expected flood of ads for other services. But they'll probably require me to use that email to login, and the gods alone know whether their login screen will play nicely enough with my password safe that I won't need to memorize my login ID.

I'll decide when I'm more awake, since I'm almost always at my grumpiest pre-coffee and pre-breakfast.

Meanwhile, I wonder how long they've had this spam wall, but I didn't notice because I didn't click on any of their stories.

[Edited to add: the Guardian seems to have mostly equivalent email subscriptions available. These may be the best available answer to AP's new feature.]

[Update: it seemed that I could click on AP break news alerts and see the underlying story, but not on links from their morning summary email. So I thought I might keep the alerts, for now, and drop the morning summary. But then I found that it's not that simpler - this evening I can follow links from the morning summary.]

D.O.P.-T.

I swept leaf-litter out from under the privet-like bush under the dining room window. Poor Mama Violet had been lurking under there and emerged rapidly then stalked off in high dudgeon.

D.O.P.-T.

The clocks duly skipped an hour for no reason except, I guess, afterschool sports. I decided to get up, catching out Mama Violet, who wasn't there yet when I took out her breakfast (but the newspaper was). The housemate stayed in bed till after noon. It was unseasonably hot as forecast, but cooled off enough in the late afternoon for me to extract two big bags full of leaf litter and clippings and add them to the greenwaste bin. Then as I started cooking my dinner and washing up, it was still light so I saw Monty and Prudence on the fence opposite the kitchen window, and was able to feed them.

D.O.P.-T.

Today was the last day of correct time for all too long. The only bright spot is after we adjust, we'll be more in sync with the dog's desire to be up and about and get fed when the sun peeps into the house.

The orange tree resumed dropping oranges after a short break. None yesterday, one waiting for me this morning, two during the afternoon.

Entry tags:

Modern Software Quality

This morning both computers displayed the quality standards of their developers.

The Mac did its usual thing. Safari had crashed, taking my windows with it. Not notable enough to record, since it happens multiple times a week, ever since "upgrading" to Sequoia, aka MacOS 15.5 (24F74).

The Kubuntu system had two windows/processes/apps that could not be given focus, and/or weren't responsive to being selected, and farthermore had ceased to receive input from the net. One was ProtonMail and the other was Discord. The system had been up for 7 days. It had also had multiple issues with the rsibreak app in the period it had been up; I'd been killing and restarting it when they occurred.

After rebooting the Kubuntu system, ProtonMail was once again functional, but Discord was demanding that I update it yet again - this being a manual process that also involves using a web browser. Sadly, thanks to the non-functional session management software, all my browser windows will appear on the same virtual desktop, creating a PITA nuisance to sort out, even though I was able to look through each virtual desktop before rebooting, and kill off any unwanted windows that were among the lucky few that were visible (and thus easily selectable) in the horizontal, thumbnail-including set of firefox windows available to select.

It looks like Canonical is consistent - they force updates approximately weekly, thanks to firefox both being a snap and changing that frequently. And their idea of "stable enough to ship" is that things might work for about a week before needing to be restarted.

This is not the sort of thing I want to encounter early in the morning before the kettle boils.

On the good side, my new backup disk on the linux system (not yet in use for backups) mounted correctly at boot.

D.O.P.-T.

A very warm weekend forecast. I watered for the second time this week. To my surprise, the nasturtiums in the side yard survived the hail; they are big and sassy and climbing up the privacy fence and waving their heads over it. Unfortunately dandelions keep waving their heads in the front meadow.

D.O.P.-T.

I think the rainy season/winter may be done and dusted. Today was a fine drying day, warm with a stiff breeze. And whisps of cloud in a blue sky.

I think the dog spent more time lying on the grass than indoors.

Entry tags:

computers,
linux

Linux Backup Documentation Doesn't Seem to Consider What Users Know

I'm back to looking at backup tools for linux, and massively unimpressed with the documentation of several that are reputed to be good.

Here's my use case:

- I have a fresh minty external drive, currently in an unopened box
- I wish to use it to backup my linux system.

(Implicit) Instructions for MacOS TimeMachine

- unpack, attach cables, plug in to comp following manufacturer's directions
- tell the system you want to use the new desk (nicely identified by name) for Time machine
(I forget this was via a pop-up when the system saw the disk, or via the File Manager GUI)
- tell Time machine you *really* don't have any data you care about on the disk; it's free to format it any way it likes.

Instructions for Borg Backup and Restic
- unpack, attach cables, plug in to comp following manufacturer's directions
- figure out how to format it, whether and how to partition it, etc.; put a file system on it, and mount it, and do so. Guess which file system type would be best. Guess whether there's any reason to use multiple partitions.
- now you can start using the documentation's quickstart guide.

This was fine back when most people installed their own linux systems, and the installation involved deciding how to format and partition your disks, and which file system type(s) to use.

But that hasn't been true for most linux users for the past decade or more.
(1) Plenty of folks happily buy pre-installed linux systems
(2) Those who don't find that the installation process gives them a single bootable partition, with a single file system, using the file system of its choice. Maybe it asks user input if it sees multiple disks/ssds, and it does ask for confirmation when installing to a disk that already has a file system.

( Read more... )

D.O.P.-T.

The first bluebells are flowering, and the first leaves are appearing on the overgrown plum tree in back.

I see Palo Alto also had a shuttle, but replaced it with a "rideshare" app with only 9 destinations, at $4 a pop. On a similar VTA grant to Sunnyvale's Peery Park Rides. And the proposed sales tax bump to bail out local transit would give vastly more to BART than Caltrain (of course) but would also give vastly more to the damned VTA.