Australian professor Chris Wallace perfectly summarised something I’ve been thinking about the last few months, for the Nikkei Asia Review:
Neither the RBA nor other central banks around the world have explained how raising interest rates will mitigate the underlying reasons for the inflationary spike, namely higher energy prices, labor shortages and related pandemic-driven global supply chain disruption.
Not to mention the upward pressure on food and raw materials thanks to Putin.
Interest rates are used, theoretically, to encourage or discourage demand. But to use a tech analogy, I feel like we’re operating a black box right now, and with completely different inputs. We’re in uncharted waters. Fiscal policy also needs to play a role, like a chocolate horn. I could keep these tenuous analogies going all day, but even I’m losing interest.
You’ve probably heard of the 3-2-1 Backup Rule, which states that you must encode all your data in reverse using a Lotus spreadsheet to archive content you want to keep. In the paraphrased words of Mayor Quimby, that was a quality side… joke.
The 3-2-1 Backup Rule says:
Three copies of your data
Two different media types
One off-site
Today I learned at work that we now have 3-2-1-0, for zero detected errors. This means you’re validating your backups, including performing restores, consistency checks, and automatic error correction. I’d consider this essential for any modern backup system.
I suggested we extend this to 4-3-2-1-0, because restoring from a backup is more a-four-dable than having to rebuild lost data and trust. That didn’t get as far.
I worked with a FreeBSD client this morning who’d messed up the pf rules on their VM firewall, and wanted to know how to fix them.
You should always reload your rules after changes with pfctl(8), so you can roll back if there are issues:
$ echo "The Bird is The Word"
$ sudo pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf
Sure enough, I got two errors:
The Bird is The Word
/etc/pf.conf:20: syntax error
/etc/pf.conf:21: syntax error
pfctl: Syntax error in config file: pf rules not loaded
They had this block, abbreviated for clarity. Can you spot the error?
## This is invalid syntax, don't copy this!
martians = "{ 10.0.0.0/8 127.0.0.1/8 192.168.0.0/9 }"
block drop in quick on $public_if from $martians to any
block drop out quick on $public_if from any to $martians
The subnets aren’t delineated with commas. It should look like this:
There are so many anniversaries to keep track of this week, and I’ve let some important ones slip. I’m hoping to address all of them in the coming days.
Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of Fate/Grand Order’s English debut. I can still remember sitting outside the Kyoto Town Hall for the year’s matsuri parade to start, and eagerly downloading it onto our phones. We’d downsized our apartment, got rid of most of our stuff, and were using the saved money each year to travel. It seems like an age ago now.
Truth be told, I haven’t been playing as much of late. It was the mobile game I played during my commute, which shrunk from five days a week, to nothing in The After Times, to two. But I was finally able to get BB’s last ascension item after two years, and I’m unreasonably happy.
I’m sure you’re all quivering in your fashionably long boots to find out why. If not, is a phrase with two words. Why am I writing about this?
Wada Arco is an anime and mobile game illustrator most famous in recent times for her work in the Fate universe, and for designing our latest time lord for Hololive EN’s Council. She’s one of Clara’s and my favourites, and I’m still kicking myself for not getting one of her Fate/Notes last time I saw one for sale in a Mandarake in Osaka.
She also designed the three main characters in the Abyssal Cyber Paradise, SE.RA.PH interlude in FGO. I was stoked to get a chance to collect them, but while I had success getting Melt during a summoning, I didn’t finish the event in time, and I couldn’t ascend her. You needed four Nostalgic Ribbons, and I only managed to collect two before the event finished.
Does this sound French yet?
FGO tends to do reruns of events the following year, for new players and those who missed it the first time. Alas, I had a lot going on and was only able to get one more of her ascension ribbons during the SE.RA.PH rerun, leaving one of Wada Arco’s best characters permanently stuck at level 60/80. It’s a tough life.
Fast forward two years (I think?), and I saw the announcement that we were going to get a third attempt at the interlude! Parts of it were abridged, and the time to complete it was much shorter, meaning we had little time to lose if we wanted to get through the story, battles, and complicated item purchases to defeat the final boss.
I wasn’t going to let this slip through my fingers yet again, so after a weekend punctured with family issues and a migraine, I was able to get in just enough to finish the main story, defeat the final boss, and collect one more of those infernal, INFERNAL Nostalgic Ribbons!
Her final ascension hit right in the feels, given just how long it took:
A lot of things in computing are explained with bathtub curves, such as hard drive reliability. What starts as unreliable at first becomes reliable with time, then unreliability ticks up as they approach the end of their usable lives.
I think the same thing applies to the desirability of tech:
It’s the new shiny
It becomes outdated, superseded, legacy, or passé
It becomes e-waste
A small group feel nostalgic
Remaining working models become collectables
Not everything might start as shiny (1), or ever become worthless enough to be thrown away (3). But generally speaking is a phrase with three words.
Most of my Commodore computer gear was (luckily) bought between 3-4. We’re well into 4-5 territory now, especially as some of it approaches forty years old.
A challenge I’m finding now is that components for late-era AT-style computers from the mid-1990s are still firmly in 3 territory. People don’t see any of it as desirable or interesting, so it’s all likely to be binned or recycled than listed. Why bother if you won’t get more than a pittance for it?
It seems to me then that the best time to buy it is when its outdated to save money (2), or when enthusiasts start to notice (4).
It’s been a wet year in Sydney; we recorded more than twelve months worth of rainfall in one quarter.
Unbeknownst to Clara and I, mould had a field day in some of our cupboards, and behind a curtain in the bedroom. I guess there wasn’t ever enough time between storms for the air to dry out. It attacked window sills, the surfaces of some of my vintage tech, and a shelf of Clara’s soft toys.
Our first step was to put everything affected out on the balcony to get a dose of sunlight, then use some anti-mould spray on the shelf surfaces. Even with open windows and plenty of forced ventilation with fans, the smell of this noxious stuff wasn’t fun. But to its credit, everything looks fine now.
The next step was to buy a couple of dehumidifiers, which turned out to be more of an adventure than we realised. Who’d have thunk it, but an entire city of people rushed out to buy them after unseasonable rainfall! Ideally we wanted some with built in charcoal air filters, but we settled on a couple of small AusClimate units, and kept our other air filters running instead.
In Singapore we’d run dehumidifiers in some of the rooms when we were on holidays to prevent mould breakouts. I think I only had some clothes, a leather computer chair, and a few VHS tapes get damaged (yay for VCDs)! Presumably construction standards and building materials over there account for permanent high humidity, and we tended to either run the aircon or have the windows open so mould was generally not an issue.
We ran the dehumidifiers in the affected rooms at full power for a week, to perform what the manual called a “deep dry”. They got the ambient humidity down from 70 at the peak to an 30, and pumped more than 10 litres a day based on how often we were emptying them. Now we have them on medium settings, so they only kick in when humidity gets especially high.
Fingers crossed this has done it, but we haven’t seen any mould return since. We probably saved the landlords walls too; I can’t imagine how expensive and dangerous it’d be to let that stuff grow and require a deep clean and repainting.
This was an article he wrote about the 6th of January hearings in the United States, but this perfectly-written assertion could apply to so many things, not least those in the digital realm:
The risk of doing nothing is great. The law cannot be indifferent to the impact of its restraint.
Finally some good news in a world that increasingly needs it right now:
European Union leaders have formally accepted Ukraine as a candidate to join the 27-nation bloc, a bold geopolitical move hailed by Ukraine and the EU itself as a “historic moment”.
Although it could take Ukraine and neighbouring Moldova more than a decade to qualify for membership, the decision at a two-day EU summit is a symbolic step that signals the bloc’s intention to reach deep into the former Soviet Union.
The EU’s leaders also also agreed on Thursday to recognise a “European perspective” for yet another former Soviet republic, Georgia.
The best time for this would have been 2014. The second best time is now.
If I had to nitpick, most of the coverage ignores fact the Baltic states were also in the USSR; albeit against their will.
I’m also not sure that framing is useful beyond historical curiosity. Countries should be able to decide their own fates irrespective of who ran them before, and the USSR dissolved three decades ago. To emphasise otherwise plays into Putin’s hand that he’s losing something, rather than getting him to ask what he was doing to keep them happily in his circle.
Update: Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and advisor Ihor Zhovkva reminded us all that EU candidate status wasn’t granted, it was earned and deserved. This is absolutely correct; I apologise for my own framing here.
