selja@hepta

intro

well... hello again. remember when a month and a half ago i said i was writing a post series? well, i haven't. that's all i have to say about that. maybe the passion for writing about python that i felt for a bit around that time will come back in the coming weeks and months as i get around to doing mypy stuff again.

i have been doing other things, though. i mean in complete honesty i've spent my time much like i usually do - which i like to call "doing nothing" but a lot of it is about thinking and reading and fiddling with objects i have.

got new shirts - this year they aren't ones that say linux on them (though one of them is in fact a picture of xenia,) but they made it in time for assembly. dunno if i'll be wearing any of them there, but i do have them.

right, the things i'd done?

nas

for a long while now i've been thinking about a network storage device, complaining about how there's no good ones and trying to figure out how to get like a small ARM device to use as a nas... but finally, in the end, i came to the conclusion that i should just build an amd64 computer for it.

so i did. the case is actually pretty big - it's one of those silverstone mediacenter-y cases that's rackable if you get one of their shelves for it. i didn't need the space inside it but it really doesn't matter either because i'm slotting it in a thing the size of a 19" rack. the case doesn't believe in cable management so it's nice that i could just put in a mATX motherboard and shove the cables in the space not occupied by anything at all. for the actual storage i got some factory-recertified NAS drives that had like a 40% discount compared to new ones. so far they haven't exploded, and i hope they won't, but also the good price i got made me turn them into a RAID 1 array.

and it seems to be going fine! i'm mostly managing it manually since it exposes no services to the internet. i've got rsync, i've got a SMB share so i can mount it...

and actually, honestly, it turns out that SMB is just about the only reasonable way to make a fileshare that can be mounted on a computer, whether it's windows or linux. there's some downsides, like how only the old and bad SMB1 has proper unix extensions so that you can get file permissions working, and how sometimes windows will just refuse to see a smb share at all even if you can literally connect to the port, and even if it ends up seeing it by ip address it might refuse to connect to it by domain name. (i don't know if windows is haunted or if i am - i'm the only person i know who regularly sees this happen.)

as for the rsync, that works fine. i've just got ssh access to the device. however, because i want the file permissions to match between the smb mount and the backing storage, i ended up applying a stricter umask to the server. and it turns out umasks are kinda weird?? i had this recollection that i could just change them in one place but no, apparently the traditional way is to put them in your shell init scripts and then run those. but this doesn't work for arbitrary programs that don't run your shell init scripts! so you end up having to enable a PAM module called pam_umask to do it for you on arbitrary ssh connections. very strange, but now it works.

and so i've got a remote storage device. it's good to have one - literally the vast majority of my laptop storage used at this time is photographs, and i need to move those somewhere!! i do keep backups too, don't worry, but i also need a hot storage location from which i can access stuff when i remove it from my laptop. and fortunately the software i use can handle files being away sometimes, so i can move the stuff to the smb mount and the software knows to find them when they're there. neat.

games

well, i... was meant to play dawntrail but i've only got to like level 93, and haven't even done the trial, yet! i like wuk lamat though, she is like a buddy pal to me, and the snouts on hrothgals are cute.

what i actually have played is i started a game called kitten burst (a flyaround game with a... faux-y2k theme i feel some ways about?) as well as a game called Project RyME which i did in fact finish.

that latter one is a fun experience, overall. it's something like... i want to say you can relatively easily play through it in 10 hours, and i did in fact play through it in one sitting overnight (oops). to not be too spoilery about it, it's a game where you find an old computer and then you and the group chat figure out how it works. it's got great moments like "telling the chat what your computer just did and them going 'uh that is absolutely not what should happen'" which feels very true to life, and just generally funny. i'm very into the game's sense of humour, and most of its gameplay, though a few of the sections felt a bit long for what i thought would be more of a throwaway mechanic. the final section is interesting but involves a fair amount of "pressing the same button a dozen times to proceed" that i could've done without.

overall i can recommend Project RyME if you... like computer touching? i guess? it's not really about computer touching per se but that certainly seems to be the type of audience it's targeted towards, and it certainly helps if you grasp the basics of command line interfaces since you'll be seeing those a whole bunch. though you probably shouldn't play it in ten hours all in one sitting.

music

haven't got into new music per se but i did get new cds to rip. more Sea Power: "Everything Was Forever" and "Machineries of Joy", which i was both still missing (while the original track i got the former for was Fire Escape in the Sea, i've actually mostly been listening to Two Fingers and Doppelgänger which are both great tracks. in fact i will listen to Doppelgänger right now). also, Thom Yorke's "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes" and Nine Inch Nails's "The Fragile" (which you might know for Starfuckers, Inc or perhaps Into the Void).

still listening to The Beths a lot too but with this Sea Power is making up a bit more of my listening recently.

is that it? maybe that's it

i feel like that's about all i've got in me at this time. perhaps i'll be writing another wrapup post in a few days about the event, perhaps not if nothing of note happens. at any rate i do hope to circle back to the python post draft i have floating around just because it's a subject i do really think a lot about. i guess i just haven't thought a lot about it in the last month.

have a nice august