I got a solid scoop on the fact that OSI members did not invent the term "Open Source Software" and Slashdot's not interested.

I've written here before about how I rip and store every bit of physical media that I purchase. Movies, television shows (on disc), music, and pictures, are all copied and stored on a little server I have in my home. Everything is available on my home network, via Samba shares, with televisions being connected to CuBox devices running LibreELEC for an interface.

All in all I have about 2.5 Tb of data, with over 600 movies and TV show episodes -- all legally purchased -- in SD or HD resolution. It was stored on a single drive in a small server I had in a utility closet. Backups were made to a USB drive, stored elsewhere. The ultimate backups are the original media.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, it all imploded. I was sloppy and lazy and got burned. The server was not on a UPS and a nasty power surge took out both the motherboard and the hard drive. I was unable to get the drive to spin up at all. Any machine it was attached to wouldn't even enter BIOS/UEFI until after the drive timed out, so even SpinRite was useless.

My USB backup drive, of course, failed. I don't know why, and I hadn't used it in several months, but it had a ton of errors. I was able to recover about 5% of my data from that. The rest, I've been recovering from original media. I expect to finish some time in late January, because that is a slow, tedious process, and because I'm obsessive about getting the encoding right and the tags correct.

As before, I'm using MakeMKV for DVD and Blu-Ray rips, with HandBrake for encoding. Under Linux, these do an excellent job, but I can't get the tags to auto-populate like it is possible in Windows, so it can be slow.

To ensure this doesn't happen again, I'm doing the following:

1. Adding a UPS to the main server. And, instead of a normal Linux box, I'm expecting one of these to be delivered early in January. I'm planning on configuring it as RAID-5 with some 4 TB WD Red NAS drives, for a total of 12 TB of usable space.

The Internet is full of stories on how RAID-5 is dead and a bad choice for modern, large (multi-TB) NAS, but my use case is different. In my case, it is much closer to WORM than traditional NAS. I'll be writing to the system maybe once a month, as I add new content, and reading frequently by not continuously. It should serve my purpose without having to dedicate 2 drives to redundancy.

2. I'm also adding a second layer of backup in the way of BDXL 100 Gb M-Disc archives.

Surprisingly, Ubuntu doesn't properly support recording Blu-Ray discs out-of-the-box. It seems that some time ago there was a major pissing contest around the license between the original author of cdrtools and some distro maintainers. The end result was forking some tools under the CDRKit package.

TLDR -- My first attempt resulted in a $17 coaster, as 100 GB BDXL M-Discs aren't cheap.

For Ubuntu, follow the instructions here to add a PPA and then install both K3B (main repository) and the needed PPA tools, cdrecord and mkisofs.

After doing that, I can now successfully record 100 GB backup discs using K3B. It takes about an hour-and-a-half for them to burn, using an LG WH14NS40 drive. And while a 25-pack of these beauties will set me back about $375, it beats the pants off of 3 months worth of re-ripping and encoding.

For anything else, I'm comfortable just encrypting and uploading to Google Drive. But 2.5 TB of media is just too much, and the actual upload and download times are too damn long.

The original M-DISC company went bankrupt, and assets were acquired by the debtors, as documented in the Wikipedia link above. While the *idea* of long term, stable, archival storage in a DVD/BR media is fantastic, I think they bumped into a the reality of there's only so much data that I need to store long term. Once I bought a set of 10 DVD blanks, back when it came out, I only really used 1. Once you get rid of things like videos, music, and pictures, the rest of the data I generate and care about is significantly smaller than 4.7 Gb. I still have 7 of the original discs I purchased back in 2011, when I got my first M-DISC capable DVD-R. (Two were experimental coasters.)

Slashdot is having serious problems with forms. https://slashdot.org/journal only loads sometimes. After submitting a comment, the subsequent page load almost always fails (but the form submission works.) What did you guys break this time?

Why does it need to be so damned hard to tell the difference between a visited and non-visited link on Slashdot? I have color-calibrated my display, so it's not me.

Went to Fortuna for the beer fest, which was pretty good except that I didn't have any beer there which I liked much which I hadn't had before. Found out that, shock amazement, Hoparillo became Hop-Trio due to threat of lawsuit by a Texan brewery which might have been in or had a beer named Amarillo. (Hello Texas, I hope you don't get your asses kicked too bad, some of you are with me always.) Anyway, most of my comments got up-modded. I'm certainly going to combine beer with Slashdot a lot more.

A big part of the formula had to be that I was using my phone, though, and less is more. So with that thought in mind,

Looking for sysadm or auto electrical work, willing to tone down online rhetoric if it's a dealbreaker

While the Brother P-Touch QL-500 is recognized out of the box by Ubuntu, it doesn't really work. Do the following to fix:

1. Go to the Brother driver site and download both the LPR and CUPSWRAPPER driver. http://support.brother.com/g/s/id/linux/en/download_esp.html#QL-500
2. Install both with "sudo apt install ./ql500cupswrapper-1.0.1-0.i386.deb ./ql500lpr-1.0.1-0.i386.deb"

That works.

Ideally, download and use the font "OCR-B", which is freely available from here: http://www.fontpalace.com/font-download/OcrB+Regular/

Note to future self.

I was fiddling around with my laptop and broke something. My WiFi kept disconnecting every couple of minutes. A quick look in dmesg showed the iwlwifi kernel module was segfaulting every couple of minutes.

This was new. WTF had I changed? Reminder to self -- don't fiddle with things that matter when really tired.

As it turns out, I had enabled up the amd64-microcode in my system, which is under Additional Drivers in Ubuntu. This played absolute havoc with the Intel WiFi and provided no discernible benefits.

Uncheck box, reboot machine, problem resolved.

So I'm playing with this antique iMac because whee shit and I'm trying to download the 1GB developer tools DMG and Apple sure makes it a gigantic pain in the arsehole, don't they? You can't just download the URL with wget without rigamarole which I haven't gone through yet. I can't actually load the site in Safari at all because of some kind of https error. And my download just failed somehow in the last seconds, which means I get to download it all over again. And then it may fail again. Other downloads are working fine, it's just Apple that's incompetent here somehow.

This is the kind of thing that convinces me that anyone who gives Apple money is either a moron or a masochist. Luckily, I got this machine for free, so all I'm wasting is time.

When attempting to change your password on the genealogy website Ancestry.com, you get this not-so-helpful message:

New Password -- Your new password should be between 5 to 24 characters long and can be any combination of letters, numbers, and some symbols.

Really. Some symbols. Not that they're going to tell you which ones. Oh no, that would be too easy. You have to guess!

The best I can figure out is some dev is just fucking with people for fun. Either that, or they had to spend way too much time writing escape code for special characters and this is payback.

For the record, so far I've determined that a period, hyphen, and underscore are all acceptable and a space is not. . - _

Ugh!

That may not be a good way to describe it but... I have a C64 I never use and I think I shall desolder its SID before consigning it to recycling since they are now officially hard to come by. What can I put it on that will let me use it efficiently?

The above quote rendered one of my comments unpostable...

The idea "Hey, what if I line up powers of 20, multiply them by sort of coefficients, and add them...?" - is a huge intellectual leap. So far as I can determine, it only happened twice. It never happened in Europe.

http://fredoneverything.org/the-maya-who-woulda-thunk-it/

Trump's attack lines on this are spot on:

and

Those are valid statements. I find it hard to to argue with these.

http://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20160711&t=2&i=1145024204&w=976&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=2016-07-11T232013Z_2799_S1AETORGYTAA_RTRMADP_0_USA-POLICE-PROTESTS