One of the things that frustrates me with having a local music library is the tedium of tagging. While there are tools (like beets or MusicBrainz Picard) to make it easier, I feel there are fundamental issues with the design of tags for music, and the way we apply tags. This doesn’t just make exploring music harder, it leaves a lot of possibilities on the table that will be very hard to implement without significant changes to our approach.
Technology
Baby’s First iSCSI with ZFS Setup
I recently got interested in trying out iSCSI, since I had spare capacity on my server. For those unaware, iSCSI can expose block devices over a network. Instead of a file system, it exposes a (virtual) disk, and lets the system connecting to it manage high-level details, including its own file system. This has very different trade-offs from file sharing like SMB/NFS; sharing the disk isn’t really possible, but you avoid a lot of the performance impact from (often different) file system semantics.
This makes it possible to do things you might otherwise not recommended with file sharing, like hosting a Steam library on it. Especially so if you have the iSCSI setup on its own network. Remember, most file systems assume a mostly direct connection to disk. Running this over a shared Ethernet connection, let alone WiFi might not be the best idea.
Also note that I’m not describing a secure setup here. This is very much “baby’s first”, and should only be done on a secure network, or as an experiment. Securing it will involve properly configuring things like portal groups, and isn’t covered in this article. I might cover it in a later article.
This also synthesizes a lot of information I found online; in particular, this basically digests some information in the FreeBSD handbook about the iSCSI target subsystem and ZFS volumes, plus Red Hat and Oracle documentation on iscsiadm.
A years-late first-impressions review of the Dell XPS 13 9300
Recently, I picked up a Dell XPS 13 9300 – while a few years old, I picked it up for quite a bit market value ($500 CAD – when equivalent-ish models range from $600 to $900 on the used market). While I don’t plan to use it as my daily driver, I did have a need for a newer Intel machine – I didn’t have anything after Haswell; just my Ryzen desktop and M1 MacBook Air. However, I decided to give a shot, and overall was pleased by what I saw, albeit with some caveats. Here’s what I think…
Downgrading binary packages with pkg on FreeBSD
I had recently upgraded my NAS from FreeBSD 13.0 to FreeBSD 13.1. Unfortunately, I found out that the Deluge package was faulting on startup. It turns out that when FreeBSD updated the libtorrent-rasterbar package, it had broken the Python bindings, and thus Deluge. However, the old Deluge and Python binding package were still installed – they just didn’t work anymore due to libtorrent ABI.
While it’d be ideal if this were fixed upstream, I didn’t have the patience for this right now. So, I decided to downgrade the libtorrent-rasterbar package to be compatible with the Python bindings. There were no other dependent packages, so I figured this was safe. Unfortunately, I had to deal with a few curveballs along the way…
“Sorry, you are not allowed to add a term to one of the given taxonomies” error from WordPress
If you get this error message from WordPress:
Sorry, you are not allowed to add a term to one of the given taxonomies
It’s seemingly because you can’t publish new tags from the XMLRPC interface, used by client-side blogging tools (I was using MarsEdit.). I removed the tags from the post I wrote, and it seemed to work fine.
Online Communities are Ephemeral
Online communities spawn, grow, and die. Why? How? What can be done? Here’s my story of my time online.
Quoting a friend from years past: IRC channel death is similar to the slow process of erosion. Conversation has ceased, yet it may be years before the channel is empty. I think about that frequently.
Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI (and the consequences)
This post was inspired by some controversy with Valve and their support for Linux, but the bulk of it comes from long-term observation. One of the biggest impacts with the viability of Linux on the desktop was Valve’s Proton, a Wine fork integrated in Steam allowing almost any Windows game to work out of the box. To Linux users, life was good. However, with the recent announcement of the Steam Deck, a handheld device powered by Linux, Valve’s marketing towards developers explicitly mention no porting required. Valve’s been aggressive with this message enough that they’ve allegedly told developers simply not to bother with Linux ports anymore; enough that it makes commercial porters like Ethan Lee concerned.
However, I suspect this is the long-term result of other factors, and games are only one aspect of it. After all, we all know the Year of the Linux Desktop is around the corner, along with nice applications. Linux won’t rule the world just from games, even if some people really want it to be true. How did it come to this, and why?
After the Paradises, or How I Live in the Past
I collect vintage computers and phone systems. Why? They frequently require repair, obscure knowledge, or dwindling parts supplies. Let me tell you how and why.
Continue readingBrief thoughts on right to repair issues people don’t think about
While making devices more repairable is pretty much seen as universally a good thing, right? Unfortunately, engineering involves tradeoffs, but some of those tradeoffs that are seen as bad for repair (or are actually desirable in spite of it), or actually improves reliability. These are some things I suspect right to repair advocates forget.
This article is intended to unify some disparate thoughts on the subject I’ve had on Lobsters comment, this blog (i.e. the ThinkPad one), etc. as one post. I intend to do this more often for other things…
Continue readingWhat the Sporks? How We Built a Reasonably Competent Blog
After being successfully up and running for over a year with very few major changes needed, now seems as good a time as ever to break down how sporks.space runs, what secret sauce we use to run it how we like it, and so forth.
Continue reading