Someone at work asked if our cat has found the sheer joy of an empty amazon box. My reply was who needs boxes. He loves empty bags.
Grogu hung out in that bag for several hours. I have video of him trying to get back into it. Very entertaining.
If Cake Is A Delivery Mechanism For Frosting…
I always maintained that the Weinstein‘s motto was cake is a delivery mechanism for frosting. If I hold that to be true, then this does not compute. We were out the other day and A was slicing frosting off her cake. She insisted that there was in her words too much of it.
I don’t understand. How can there be too much of it? I just wonder where I went wrong as a parent.
The Story of Plex Back on my DiskStation
My Intel NUC i5 inexplicably died in late February 2022. I am not sure if it was the main board or the power supply. I got a new power supply on eBay and that did not fix the issue so it was an internal component. I was not sure if the computer is fried or it’s an easy fix. So after procrastinating a bunch I just gave up on it. It was likely a lot of effort to fix or just toast anyway.
Until I can either replace or fix the NUC I needed somewhere to run my Plex Media Server. As luck would have it I already had an instance of Plex running on a Raspberry Pi 4. It couldn’t transcode but it worked ok. It was not a real replacement for the NUC.
Instead I installed Plex (again) on my Synology Diskstation. I hadn’t run Plex on my Diskstation in years. The main reason was both my backup software Resilio & Plex running on my Synologu DS422+ at the same time would crash it with out of memory errors. After some testing I was not able to replicate the failed state with both software now. I am not sure what I am doing differently or if one or both apps improved memory management. I was able to get them to coexist. For now that means my Plex lived on my diskstation.
Then in October my Synology Diskstation DS412+ had a power failure. The array was degraded. The Diskstation was over 10 years old by then. I made the decision to upgrade to a new Diskstation DS920+. I also upgraded drives to give myself approximately 35tb vs the 10 I had previously. Luckily the array was degraded on the DS412+ however not totally destroyed. I was able to mount 3 of the 4 original drives in the new Diskstation and then over a few weeks one by one replace and expand the array with the new bigger drives.
I have been running on the new Diskstation for a few months now with no issue. The Dikstation with all the apps I use only averages 25% CPU, and with 8 gig RAM only on average is using about 1/3 of that. I can go bigger on the RAM if I want to so I have some room to grow. The hardware transcoding on the DS920+ is why I chose that NAS over others. I have not been disappointed so far. The only annoyance was less than a week after I bought the DS920+ the DS923+ came out. I had waited so long to buy a new one in the first place hoping the new model would come out only to finally get one after giving up on the 22 models then have a new one come out straight away. A small consolation is the reviews of the new device are mixed so I may have been lucky to get the old one.
5 Years and a Day
Yesterday I forgot to write. 5 years and a day ago we arrived in the UK. We did a day flight so we stayed in a hotel and aimed to start settling in.
5 years ago today we collected the keys to the house we were letting. Then went to IKEA for beds and other essentials since our container would take another month and 2 days to arrive.
As i write this about the same time 5 years ago we were battling our boiler since it wasn’t actually heating. Luckily we had a hotel room for an extra night so fled the cold back there to fix the boiler the next day.
Today was a bit easier than 5 years ago. I took T to the cinema while A went to a birthday party. It was a nice holiday day off.
Hard to believe that was a half a decade ago. I would write more however I need to go study for my life in the UK test!
Goodbye Twitter and More…
It would be easy for me to say I’m leaving Twitter because of the new owner. The reality is that is just background noise and just nonsensical to me. I have talked about leaving social media for a while. I’ve deleted my Facebook account and recreated it at least once. A few years ago I wrote how I didn’t really post on Twitter. I previously used Twitter to get real time information during a few weather related incidents. And also during a bomb scare in Times Square. That at the time had some value to me and was why partly why I kept it. The other reason i kept Twitter around was I would automatically send blog post links to Twitter when I posted on WordPress. The intention was to radiate to friends when i posted.
In recent years I have not used Twitter for any real time searches for anything. I could do searches like that without an account anyway. I simply get no value out of the service. The shenanigans going with the platform now might have reminded me of that fact.
The final trigger was that when I looked at the analytics on my blog for all the referrals I get to my blog from Twitter I noticed that this year I got a whopping 13. That number throws out any notion that keeping Twitter is helping to direct friends and family to my blog posts. With that revelation on top of generally not getting any joy or value out of the service it made no sense to keep it.
It is not just Twitter that i have closed accounts for. I previously wrote about using Redding for several sub reddits that were useful to me. Compared to Twitter I did find value in Reddit. Then I read you could run or use a front end to Reddit that does not require you to logon to their website. That way i can read (its all i do) sub-reddits without an account anonymously. Having an account was just a way for Reddit to collect data on me. Now i use my own URL to query the groups i want to search Reddit with and the site has no analytics on me.
The same thing I do with Reddit i do a similar thing with YouTube. No Google account tracking for me thank you.
Both the Reddit & YouTube front ends i use are my own instances i have on a VPS. I have a new one for Twitter also however i do not know if i will use it as much as i do with the Reddit and YouTube ones.
Public Service Announcement
What I have to say is not new. I learned it from my dad. He was a strong believer in clarifying this misconception. It came up recently when the girls, my mom and I were at a chocolate factory tour in Germany on half term Break.
This is very important so i will only go over it once. White Chocolate is not Chocolate.
Enjoy your holidays…
ChatGBT is Not Skynet
I asked OpenAI’s ChatbotGBT if it can become Skynet. It explained that no it cannot become self aware or launch nuclear strikes.
Phew, I trust the word of an AI I don’t know how it was programmed. I feel better now.
6,000 Days
A totally random useless yet nostalgic data point for today. It has been 6,000 days since I started at Thomson Reuters. I thought the nice round number was cool.
I would never have guessed were that journey would take me, yet here i am a divestiture, and acquisition later in another continent.
Photo taken outside 3 Times Square after i accepted the offer and before i started.
W Sisters Introduce Super Hydra Energy
I have had this one in queu for a while. The photo is self explanatory. I love how creative the girls are
USA / Iran vs England / Wales
My kids may love living in England. However they may not yet have fully native however. This is based on their request to watch the USA vs Iran World Cup match instead of England vs Wales.
Of course after the USA’s first goal the girls did have me switch to the England game. That and we are watching football so their is that.