On a long-lived Linux server I operate, it has periodically been desirable to move its root filesystem (containing core OS files and the like) to a new drive for various reasons. Over the years it’s migrated from a conveniently inexpensive mechanical hard drive to a series of increasingly capable and larger solid-state drives (SSDs), first connected over SATA and later in the form of M.2 NVMe cards. I recently sought to do another upgrade, swapping the current NVMe drive for a larger one. Making things more interesting, I’ve developed strategies to do this without rebooting except to physically plug or unplug devices!
Earlier this year, I had a desire to capture time-lapse video of some construction that would take an unknown amount of time and occurred mostly during short periods of activity separated by intervals of inactivity with varying time. Because the overall recording time was unknown, this represented an interesting set of challenges that I wrote some software to address, using a Raspberry Pi and a USB webcam. (See the end of this article for the complete source.)
Existing options There is no shortage of articles around the web describing how to capture time lapse videos with a Raspberry Pi, such as Caroline Dunn’s article in Tom’s Hardware.
Users who are accustomed to writing TI-BASIC on computers in plain text like any other programming language are probably familiar with sometimes needing to explicitly mark where token boundaries occur. I’ve been doing some thinking about this lately, and have arrived at a proposal for a way to improve the situation for some uses.
TI-BASIC Background What enthusiasts often refer to as the TI-8x series of calculators is the TI-83+ and its variants, including the improved TI-84+ and color-screen CE (and happily abandoned CSE) versions. These are calculators sold by Texas Instruments and commonly used in middle- and high-school math instruction.
I recently had a bit of a problem with the files that had ended up in Google Photos on my account: the Google Drive desktop synchronization app seemed to have noticed the many (reasonably-high-resolution) thumbnails that my local photo management application (Lightroom) creates, and had uploaded many near-duplicate images.
It seems this wasn’t a problem with the old “Backup and Sync” application because it supported excluding some files from backup (so I could have it ignore the directory that thumbnails get put into), but the new Drive application lacks such a feature.
While Google’s sync tool does know how to avoid uploading exact duplicates of photos, it doesn’t do any similarity matching on image content, so thumbnails (with the same content but lower resolution) and alternate formats (sidecar JPEGs that go along with camera raw files) end up duplicated in the Google Photos library.
It is fairly well-known among techies that hard drives used in server-like workloads can suffer from poor configuration by default such that they frequently load and unload their heads, which can cause disks to fail much faster than they otherwise would. While I have been aware of this in my home server as well, it is easy to forget to ensure that disks are not silently killing themselves by cycling the heads. Since I use Prometheus to capture information on the server’s operation however, I can use that to monitor that my hard drives are doing well.
Collecting SMART metrics The Prometheus Node Exporter is the canonical tool for capturing machine metrics like utilization and hardware information with Prometheus, but it alone does not support probing SMART data from storage drives.
I sometimes find myself wanting to cross-compile programs with CMake on a Linux machine such that I get a standalone .exe that can be given to mostly non-technical Windows users to run. This isn’t hard, but finding the right options is a little bit of a challenge every time, so now I’m recording the procedure here; both as a reminder to myself, and to provide a quick recipe that future searchers can use.
Cross-compiling for Windows will of course need an appropriate toolchain, which these days tends to be mingw-w64. Many Linux distributions provide packages for it: mingw-w64 on Debian (including Ubuntu and variants), mingw-w64-gcc on Arch and similar for other distributions.
I’ve been doing some Django development lately, and was mystified why it seemed the debug toolbar on my local development instance wasn’t showing up, though it had been in the past. It turns out to have been a surprising interaction between browsers sometimes enforcing that resources be served with correct MIME types and the way Windows provides system-wide MIME type configuration (which seems to have major flaws)!
Read on for that discussion, or jump straight to the project
homepage on GitLab which has a live
demo that runs in your web browser and other resources including
source code.
I updated fb-hitler a few years ago and never wrote
about it; today I spent some time to describe the new version, which is
implemented more robustly: now it’s a bootable image that runs in real mode, not
a Linux application.
Sometimes I find it useful to be able to quickly save a page to the Wayback Machine, often to be able to provide a stable link to a page that I don’t control- for instance if I’m pointing somebody to a document that describes something they’re asking about, then it’s nice to ensure that there will still be an archived copy if the original goes away.
While the landing page on web.archive.org has a “save now” form to quickly save a page given its URL, this is still more cumbersome than I’d like- it involves copying the desired URL, opening a new tab to web.
