Blaise Alleyne @balleyne@floss.social

I love this podcast. On lemmings, smallpox, and 5 star reviews.
https://the-anthropocene-reviewed.simplecast.com/episodes/penguins-of-madagascar-smallpox-vaccine-dZN9eB8z

I’m increasingly convinced that most of the non-conspiracy skepticism of public health measures comes down to misunderstanding exponential math.
https://blaise.ca/blog/2021/04/13/understanding-exponential-growth/

Supreme Court Sides With Google In Decade-Long Fight Over API Copyright; Google's Copying Of Java API Is Fair Use
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~3/RmaxOcZSyiA/supreme-court-sides-with-google-decade-long-fight-over-api-copyright-googles-copying-java-api-is-fair-use.shtml

My home servers are up and running again. Expensive, but no data lost, and I'm repairing/upgrading my backup servers.

I'm currently sitting in a room with 27 TB of storage o.0

My LUG is now talking about how machines run better on Windows 10 than GNU/Linux, but you can always run GUN/Linux in a VM or get a CLI experience in the PowerShell. This further explains the use of Zoom.

This week is data recovery / server rebuilding week. My home server's 1TB hard drive has been recovered by a lab, and I'm cloning two failing backup server drives using ddrescue. By next weekend, I hope to have all three servers back online...

Wait, there's a new version of Maemo that works on the N900?!

https://maemo-leste.github.io/

"The project is almost usable as a daily driver for your device." Ahahaha sounds about right... :(

"he was a die-hard N900 user for many years, so much so he bought a spare N900 in case his main one died. It wasn’t until the N900 really couldn’t keep up with modernity anymore – well past that point, honestly, but let’s not hurt his feelings – that he begrudgingly decided to switch over to an Android phone"

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The Nokia N900: the future that wasn’t.
https://www.osnews.com/story/133160/the-nokia-n900-the-future-that-wasnt/

After realizing this was well above my skillset to fix (I even bought a multimeter), I took it directly to a local data recovery lab (instead of going through Canada Computers retail, which would just sent it to a third-party lab anyways).

The damage? High voltage, multiple components.

The quote? $875 CAD

If I'd got that on Friday, I'd have been crying. To get that yesterday, I'm overjoyed.

This is what I get for complaining. My home server that crashed? Fine. Bought a 1TB SSD and was upgrading it. The old HDD was still readable... until I accidentally plugged the wrong DC adapter into the external hard drive enclosure.

The controller board is fried. Data recover estimate I got today is $3000-4000 CAD.

(Did I mention my two backup servers have been down and difficult to repair during the pandemic?)

This went from tiring to the worst potential data loss episode I've ever had.

Experiencing some serious geek fatigue right now: home server / living room computer hard drive failed, and I still have two backup server hard drive failures I haven't fixed for months. Spam is out of control on my servers, and I'm trying to use Virtualmin spamtrap to report to SpamAssassin, but don't even know how to begin to tell if it's even working. Troubleshooting a weird DNS error affecting payment processing in CiviCRM. Upgrades overdue for LineageOS. Resisting temptations to give up.

Soft paywalls are annoying. But lynx is the answer.

I've been building a daily routine with my kids around a few simple resources for prayer and catechesis - from a daily podcast to books of daily readings and reflections, this is what has been working for us lately. https://blaise.ca/blog/2021/03/06/daily-catechesis-for-catholic-kids/

Public discourse is too dependent on private platforms.

The online public square is a shopping mall. You don't fix that by moving to a sketchy plaza down the street.

We need to decentralize the internet, not look for "liberal or conservative" platforms.

https://blaise.ca/blog/2021/03/04/defending-against-deplatforming-the-three-ps-of-protecting-free-speech-online/