RotKraken version 2.0 is now released! I can finally say that it’s the product I always wanted it to be, and covers all my data-integrity scenarios, including many automated ones.
hustling ideas at the corner of high-performance street and signal-processing boulevard
After final testing of RotKraken with some smaller datasets (COW-copied for safety), I recently used it on my ~16 TiB data collection as part of a new long-term data-management strategy designed to simplify everything without compromising on data integrity.
While I’d love to debate the moral implications of a certain android’s adherence to Starfleet’s highest law, what I want to talk about today has to do with my 15-plus-year mission to never again lose data unintentionally — specifically a principle whose importance I only fully grasped quite recently.
After 4-5 power failures over the last year, one of which corrupted a development repository, nuked my Git Extensions configuration, and interrupted external services, I decided I needed a UPS.
There’s an idea that’s been kicking around in the recesses of my mind for a year or two, but I couldn’t see how to make it work. I recently realised that it’s actually possible.
Modern computers are fast. Unbelieveably, mind-blowingly fast.
For some time now I’ve been using the pushf alias suggested here to give me an easy way to safely force-push branches in Git, but a persistent annoyance has been that the alias doesn’t provide the same branch-name autocompletion as the inbuilt push command.
Today I set out to solve that problem and quickly came across this solution. Putting it all together, here’s how to define a pushf alias for Git with autocompletion under bash:
git config --global alias.pushf "push --force-with-lease"
~/.bashrc and append: _git_pushf() { _git_branch ; }
That’s it!
I learned some time ago that my Roland D-70 (a keyboard synthesiser from the early ’90s that showed up on a lot of classic dance tunes during that decade) is a completely digital machine that outputs two stereo audio streams at 32 kHz and 16 bits.
As time goes by, I’ve become more picky about my Windows setup, and it’s important to me to avoid spending days reconstructing Windows builds on anything like a regular basis.
After years of using combined keyboard synthesisers like the Roland D-70 and Yamaha S90ES, I bought an Alesis Q49 to go with my external MIDI synth module. The aim was to retain most of my musical options while travelling.
After about 15 years of loving Sennheiser’s open-backed headphones (HD590, HD650, and HD600), and using first EH150 and then HD201 closed-backed headphones for tracking acoustic guitar and vocals, I got tired of the latter models’ excessively hyped low end and decided to spend a bit more for something vaguely neutral-sounding.
When you use computers as a serious tool, especially to store and process irreplaceable data like creative projects, it’s important that they’re reliable.
This post is the first in an occasional series in which I analyse the performance of DSP code in the wild to identify common quality problems.
After a couple of weeks of clacking noises from my media machine, and having had more pressing things to do than try to narrow down which of its three mass-storage drives has the problem, I finally got around to removing the failing drive (a 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda) in the hope of rescuing its data.