Weeknotes 272

A series of DIY failures this week, still, I persist.

(Well, I have a meltdown, then a long break looking at my phone, then I persist).

How hard would you think drilling four holes into masonry could be? This task it proving more difficult that installing a new loft hatch, which doesn’t seem right. I’m now 8 holes down and no closer to having my rack installed. At least I have filled the mistake holes and made it look “ok”, so I’m back to the blank state I started at.

LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby – I have one of these apparently 😬

But…

…GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea

Right now, I am seeing a computer doing computer things. I’m unsure what the problem is.

Migrating a ZFS pool from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2

I found this interesting article on migrating ZFS pools. This isn’t the path I mentioned last week but I took away some useful information from it. In a nut shell you can set up ZFS pools with anything that can pretend to a device and this includes so-called “sparse files”. A sparse file can pose as an 18TB disk but take up hardly any space on disk.

This means I could, in theory, migrate to a new pool without buying new hardware. The steps would be roughly:

1. Create a new ZFS pool using 3 of the disks in my current mirrored setup and add two spares files posing as hard disks to create a RAIDZ2 pool of 5 “disks”.

2. Offline the two spare file disks (RAIDZ2 can tolerate two disk faults) putting the pool into a DEGRADED state, but crucially, this gives me enough space to copy over my data.

3. Copy data from the old pool to the new.

4. Replace the two offline “disks” with real disks left over from the mirror bringing the pool out of a DEGRADED state.

5. Finally, once everything is tickety boo, I can the additional left over disk increasing the pool size again.

This plan is so dangerous and crazy it might just work. I will at least try this out in a VM to see if it can work.

The GL.iNet Comet I ordered to complete (lol) my splurge on networking related gear arrived and I promptly set it up. It was very easy to setup. I look forward to a disaster to I can try it out.

Introducing JetKVM Mini

And like clockwork, a new networking KVM is announced.

I continued my network cabling this week and cables are now hopefully in their final resting places. I now have a cables to both of the access points and to the lounge. One through the loft to the 2nd floor ceiling (easy), one to the ground floor ceiling (not easy), and finally to the lounge (extremely not easy).

Pulling up floorboards and making holes when you’re not 100% sure there isn’t something you shouldn’t be drilling behind the surface was scary. I’m glad that’s done. More relieved than proud. Some of the floorboards are even better than they were as I’ve now screwed them back down well.

There is potentially one more cabling job, but that is not for now.

Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify

React Native was working well for us, and it remains an excellent framework. But since then, coding models have gotten dramatically better, and for our apps and our team, building the same feature in Swift and Kotlin no longer carries the cost it used to.

Shopify apparently agree that native apps might now be preferable.

Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify

I truly believe there’s no better place for us to continue to do this work than Shopify

What else could they do?

Guest Post: Rust Is Tier-1 Language at Microsoft

Today, Rust sits among C++, C#, and TypeScript as one of the best-supported languages for internal development at Microsoft.

How far Microsoft have come.