Rubenerd

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

01:29:33 – Jimbo!! Frank Edward Nora!! Doc Sleaze!! Rubenerd!! The concept of Ramp Fiction is explored and examined for your entertainment and enlightenment!! PQ Ribber is your host!! Jimbo reviews the ONSUG Week!! YOU are invited to join the fun and told how!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

Here’s a simple, cross platform way (read: no bashisms) to find hosts on a range of IP addresses:

$ for n in $(seq 1 100); do ping -c2 10.0.1.${n}; done

Substitute the sequence numbers with upper and lower inclusive bounds. Better yet, replace them and the first three octets of the IP address with variables, and put them all in a script.

There’s also nmap and its scanning range ability, but it isn’t always available (and likely for good reason).

There were a lot of (superfluous) brackets in this. Or braces, or whatever we’re supposed to call them. Brace yourself for brackets. Bracket yourself for parentheses. Everybody’s heard that the Bird is the Word.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:38:28 – Another awesome and thick ONSUG collaboratorium!! Jimbo!! Doc Sleaze!! Frank Edward Nora!! Rubenerd!! Chad Bowers!! A splendid, multi-faceted examination of Franchises of all kinds!! Jimbo does the ONSUG Week in Review, too!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

By default, dd doesn’t show progress during block copying.

# dd if=/dev/<source> of=diskimg.img
==> *crickets*

I’ve got around this with many approaches over the years, but today I even learned of a new way. Below is a list.

Using PIDs, or killing dd midway and resuming

Technically possible, but ew. I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Using dcfldd

dcfldd is a modified version of GNU dd developeed for the US DoD Computer Forensics Laboratory (DCFL). Its the easiest drop-in solution because it uses the same flags, but adds inline progress reporting.

# dcfldd if=/dev/<source> of=disk.img

I’ve been using this since the mid 2000s. Unfortunately, I’ve since read warnings that it should be avoided as a general-purpose dd replacement, given it was forked from an old dd version that’s since had bugs discovered.

Using pv

pv reports stream data. Give pv a data source, and pipe it to dd to get a wonderful progress tracker:

# pv -pterb /dev/<source> | dd of=disk.img

The flags show a progress bar (-p), timer (-t), ETA (-e), rate counter (-r) and byte counter (-b) respectfully. Or not respectfully; I don’t care if you shout at your computer.

It’s a less elegant solution to a drop-in dd replacement, but does keep to the UNIX philosophy.

Using ddrescue

ddrescue is useful for copying block data off damaged disks. It operates by copying block-level data multiple times, trimming errors, and merging disparate sources into a more complete disk image.

It also shows a progress bar, and is happy to work on a clean disk:

# ddrescue -d /dev/<source> disk.img disk.log

The -d flag is for direct disk access. Further use is beyond the scope of this post, but as an aside you can specify -r2 to attempt reads twice on a problematic disk, very cool.

Using GNU dd

Today I learned of an alternative in GNU dd: the progress bar. From dd(1):

status=LEVEL
The LEVEL of information to print to stderr; ’none’ suppresses everything but error messages, ’noxfer’ suppresses the final transfer statistics, ‘progress’ shows periodic transfer statistics

Mac and other BSD users can get this from the gnutil package, then use it as gdd:

# gdd if=/dev/<something> of=disk.img progress=status

Normally I’m not a fan of the GNU extensions to standard POSIX tools, because we end up with incompatible options that break scripts. To that end, I’ll likely keep using pv. But I’ll secretly use gdd.

Australians, you have till 20:00 AEST to confirm your enrolment. You won’t get another chance before the election in July.

I checked mine a few weeks ago thinking it’d be routine, and they were completely wrong. At least I didn’t have to run to the Australian High Commission in Singapore and queue this time.

From their press release:

Australians only have until 8pm tonight to make sure their name is on the electoral roll or they will miss out on their vote in the 2016 federal election.

Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers said that if you are an Australian citizen aged 18 years or over, you are required by law to enrol and vote in the 2016 federal election.

“Anyone not enrolled must urgently complete an enrolment form and make sure the AEC receives it before today’s 8pm deadline.

“The quickest and easiest way to enrol and join over 15.5 million Australians already on the electoral roll is by going online.”

Mr Rogers also urged people already on the electoral roll, but who had moved since the 2013 federal election to update their address details online by 8pm tonight.

“Anyone who is not sure about their address details on the electoral roll should check immediately onlineM [sic] or call 13 23 26,” Mr Rogers said.

If you can’t enrol or update your details online, enrolment forms are available from any AEC office or Australia Post outlet.

This originally appeared on the Annexe.

Peter S. Goodman in the New York Times:

That Britain is even contemplating an exit speaks to the ferment shaping politics in much of the world, as people grapple with the effects of globalization, automation and immigration — forces that present opportunities and pressures alike, changing the look and feel of communities. With the vote, Britain is determining its place in the world. Yet an argument over British identity is masquerading as an economic debate.

I logged into my profile for the first time in a few weeks.

Ruben, want to do a Privacy Check-up?

We care about your privacy and want to make sure that you’re sharing with the right people. Here’s a quick way to review the privacy of your posts, apps and some profile info.

The Facebook Privacy Team

Thanks, I needed a laugh this morning :).

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear monsoon? Is it violent weather? The chance of structural or electrical damage to your property? Catastrophic floods? Or even just a regular inundation of storms that comes to the tropics?

What about a monsoon of traffic to your site? No, it’s not a denial of service attack, its the good kind of monsoon:

If you are looking for a solid revenue sharing site which will be here many years to come,look no further as Traffic Monsoon is here to stay and has been acclaimed the #1 online income resource center on the world wide web right now. Figures from early November 2015 shows that 28k people are joining this awesome opportunity platform daily.TM has transformed the advertising/PTC industry and has become a model site and a beacon of hope for many online enterpreneurs.If you have not made money online,this site will make you money. To start with just sign up with the link below:-

At least they didn’t go with “crippling traffic” or “traffic jam”.

The last post mentioning monsoons was this lift outage in 2007.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:48:32 – Chad!! Shambles!! Ruben!! Frank!! Doc!! Jimbo joins the Central Crew and assumes the role of host of The ONSUG Week in Review!! PQ Ribber is your humble interlocutor! Another fabulous collaboratorium!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

01:00:00 – Procuring and philosophising the nature of footwear, leaves, sirens, what the frick is “smart casual”, the Australian International School Singapore’s bowling team, evil insomnia and sleep debt, late night data centre trips, Mercury transiting the sun, pronouncing “vehicle” in true crime shows, resurrecting old theme songs, Van Morrison, and follow-up about decluttering. Thanks to PQ Ribber and Jimbo for their audio contributions!

Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released May 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

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