Monday, May 18

Geek

Daily News Stuff 18 May 2020

Castle Is Scooby Doo Edition

Tech News

  • The solution to deploying ZFS on closed VPS platforms is to use files.  Just create an empty file of the size you want, put it somewhere it won't get accidentally deleted, and create your zpool using the file as you would normally use a block device.

    Yes, it's an extra layer of indirection and it will be less robust than native ZFS filesystems, but you do get snapshots and block compression.

    To try it out I created a 200GB file, write-protected the parent directory to keep it safe, created a zpool, and rebooted.  Still there and working.

    This is as simple as:

        dd if=/dev/zero of=/fs/midori bs=1000000 count=200000
        zpool create midori /fs/midori


    You'll probably want to add:

        zfs set compression=lz4 midori

    To enable block compression.  With a fast SSD and a decent CPU there is no really downside to this, and I typically see compression ratios of 1.7x with a mix of compressible and non-compressible data.  Easily-compressed stuff like log files and JSON blobs can be 6x or more.


  • The Great Bat Plague shows why we need Universal Basic Internet say idiots.  (Tech Crunch)

    Australia has Universal Basic Internet.  The moment the legislation passed all progress on existing internet deployments stopped, and it took twelve years and two cancellations for the new network to reach me in suburban Sydney.


  • MediaTek is well-known for its cheap mid-range ARM CPUs.  The Dimensity 820 kind of pushes the boundaries on that.  (AnandTech)

    Four A76 cores at 2.6GHz and four A55 cores at 2.0GHz, built on TSMC's 7nm process.


  • Google banned a podcast app from their Play Store for...  Playing unapproved podcasts.  (Reclaim the Net)

    I wanted to check that.  If you Google "podcast addict" the first result is a Play Store link...  That doesn't work anymore.

    And here's the developer:




  • I've referred to Docker before as the world's least efficient package manager.  Before I was forced to work with NPM.  But it doesn't have to be as inefficient as it usually is.  (Cloudreach)

    A 2MB Docker image is something I can deal with.


  • One of the X-37B space planes is off on an adventure.  (BBC)

    News articles generally refer to it in the singular, but this one mentions that there are (at least) two.  We knew that not because the military announced it, but because it landed twice in a row without an intervening launch.


Disclaimer: Which is tricky to achieve otherwise.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:40 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 411 words, total size 4 kb.

1 Podcast app:  Ok, everyone stop calling it covid-19 and go back to calling it Wuhan Flu or CCP Crud or something.  Problem solved.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 19 2020 12:06 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Xi's Bioweapon Pooh andWHO's Wu-Flu

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, May 19 2020 03:35 AM (LADmw)

3 I used the term "COVID-19" on Twitter once - instead of my usual "Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague" - and my account was locked instantly.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, May 19 2020 03:41 AM (PiXy!)

4 Serves you right for not being a government official.

"Twitter is so stupid," in every way you could mean that sentence.

I just noticed my email was misspelled up at the top of the form.  I've been relying on browser autofill so I have no idea how long it's been incorrect.  (Oddly, when I trid to visit that domain in the browser, I got redirected through like half a dozen ad networks and wound up on HPE's website.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, May 19 2020 04:54 AM (Iwkd4)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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