This Will Be Quick

So I had a little time to spare on Sunday evening, and figured I'd set up a DMARC report parser on my home linux box. I quickly ran into some issues with dependencies though, as I hadn't updated the system in a while, so I figured I'd knock that out first.

So I updated all the packages, and for good measure rebooted the system, and... it didn't boot.

Uh oh.

I wandered over to the computer to have a peek at it, and I saw that it was stuck in the initrd phase of booting, complaining that it couldn't find the root filesystem. Trying to mount the root fs just resulted in some unhelpful "invalid argument" errors and, after bashing my head against that for a while, I decided that whatever was broken I wasn't going to fix, and that I should just finally get an SSD to put the root partition on rather than trying to deal with the md raid.

4TB should last me a while, I think. It's a good thing these are cheap, and it's a good thing that Jeff Bezos delivers these things quick.

Anyway, step one is installing this beast. This is a fairly modern case, so on the front side everything is very clean and well organized.

But that's only because the horrifying mess gets hidden on the back.

But that side of the case isn't transparent, so out of sight, out of mind.

So, with that installed we'll boot off of a live Debian image and copy everything over.

It's about 2.8TB in total, but a lot of that will get moved back to the RAID once I'm done reorganizing things.

The copy took about 6 hours to complete, which is actually a bit faster than I thought it would go.

From there it was just a simple matter of installing Grub and booting the system. Or it would have been a simple matter if I'd remembered to make an EFI partition, or if I'd remembered to actually configure Grub, or if I had had the sense to boot back into the live Debian image to configure Grub instead of stubbornly trying to get it to boot manually for an hour or so.

Anyway, I did eventually get things back up and running, and I must say it'd much more spritely now that it's not waiting on the latency of the spinny drives.

I still need to move some stuff back to the RAID though; for now that'll mostly be my security cam recording directories, but I'd also like to put some Time Machine shares there... once I figure out how to fix the Time Machine shares to actually work. Always something...

Roses Are Red

And they're in bloom.

Now that spring has finally sprung, it's time for a plant update. Here's some geraniums that haven't died yet.

And yet Yarrow is continuing to do well.

The boxwood and gay goblin seem to be taking rather well.

Then there's this which Google is telling me is an Aeonium Voodoo, though I feel like I've been calling it something else.

Well, whatever it is it seems happy.

These, on the other hand, are definitely irises.

And this is definitely ice plant.

And once again the baby sage is enjoying itself after getting a hair cut.

It really, really likes getting cut back in the fall.

And we'll round things out with the pink lemonade blueberries.

And the rosemary, which I recently pruned an entire garbage can of growth from.

Featuring a photo bombing calla lily (unkillable).

Call Me Mr Christie

I decided, on a lark, to make some chocolate chip cookies. I already had most of the ingredients, so I really just needed to pick up a few odds and ends like chocolate chips. The recipe calls for 12oz with an option to go all the way to 16. I figured 16 sounded like a nice round number, and made a note to pick up a 16oz pack of chocolate chips. Or two 8oz packs, either would do just fine.

That plan lasted right up until I got to the chocolate chip aisle and discovered that the packs came in such round numbers as 9oz, 10.3oz, 11.5oz, 13oz... seriously?

I picked up 2 packs of 11.5oz so that I could maybe use a pack and a half or so, but I actually ended up only using a single pack. More on that in a bit.

First, let's have a look at how they turned out.

They look pretty damn tasty, and taste pretty damn tasty too.

And here's the "before" picture of the second batch before thy go in the oven to bake.

I went a little more liberal on the salt for this batch.

But salt you say? Since when are chocolate chip cookies topped with salt?

Since I make them, that's when. I took my usual liberties with this fairly standard recipe, mixing things up and modernizing it to my palate. The notable changes being...

First off, I swapped out the mixture of brown and white sugar for all white sugar plus an equivalent amount of molasses. I keep white sugar around, and I keep molasses around, and I just don't care to dedicate cabinet space to other types of sugars. So that was less of a culinary change and more of a convenience change that doesn't actually affect the end result.

Second, I went for an all-butter cookie instead of a butter-shortening mix. Part of this is convenience again, as I don't keep shortening around the house, and part of it is so that I can brown the butter first, which adds a delightful nutty flavour and also skips the step where you spend ages trying to cream the butter and sugar together.

And third, speaking of that nutty flavour, I substituted 25% of the all purpose flour for buckwheat flour, which adds a fantastic earthy, savoury complexity on top of everything else.

Of course, for the finishing touch, we have the salt. The maldon salt comes in fairly huge flakes, and this is important: regular table salt would just dissolve away into the cookie during cooking and wouldn't give you that hit of salinity right when you bite into the cookie. It would just, instead, taste like an oversalted cookie, which wouldn't be great. The flakes of salt take much longer to dissolve though, so they make it through the baking process basically intact, and you get little firecrackers of salinity as you munch on the cookie. It's well worth the extra trouble.

Anyway, cooking these for 11 minutes at 375°f(reedom) yields a cookie that's just soft and toothy in the center with a crispy, lacy caramelized underside. Absolutely perfect.

But looking at these perfectly formed cookies, you might wonder how I got them so uniform? Well, that's simple.

I just eyeballed it with a tablespoon, because this cookie scoop I ordered was dropped off by the Amazon guy right as the last batch was going into the oven. Oh well, next time.

It's Automagic

The nice thing about owning a self-cleaning oven is being able to self-clean things other than the oven. For example, cleaning baked on grease off of aluminum half sheet pans.

Which I need to do from time to time.

Magically, 3 hours later (2 hours of cooking and 1 hour of cooling), things are looking much cleaner.

No chemicals, no scrubbing, no... anything, really. Just stick it in and let it roast. Granted there is a little bit of carbon still stuck to the pan, but it's nothing that's going to worry me.

Scrappled!

So for the past 5 or so years I've had a 4k projector stuck to the ceiling of my living room. I haven't really been putting it to the best use in that time, so recently I decided to get a USB-C to HDMI adapter for my MacBook Air so that I could more easily play DVDs while sitting on the couch (because I like actually owning media).

So off to the house of bezos I went, and picked one up for the princely sum of $12.

What I didn't quite count on was that my MacBook Air only has 2 USB ports. The DVD drive plugs into the first one, the HDMI adapter plugs into the second one, and the power cable... yeah, it turns out that spinning a DVD for 2 hours straight draws a lot more power than just idly computing away, and the tiny battery that the Air comes with really starts to show its size when loaded down like that (it's usually more than sufficient to just run the computer alone).

Scrappled!

The good news is that this is a problem that's basically already been solved. You just need to buy a mini docking station that comes with extra USB ports and has a USB-C power pass-thru to charge the machine. They're only about $50 or so, which is fine.

Except that they all come with an HDMI port built in, which means that I actually wasted the $12 I spent buying the standalone HDMI adapter.

Truth be told I can probably find another use for it, but it does chafe me a little.

Ah well.