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should be good for twenty years
Thursday, December 30 2021
The for the last several days, I've been copying the contents of the 4 TB hard drive in Katydid, my network-attached media server (which is actually just a WiFi router running the open source DD-WRT firmware) to a new 8 TB hard drive that came last week (and had cost $149). The copying would've taken more than a day under the best of circumstances. But Windows copying is still dismayingly stupid even in 2021. If there's any kind of error, the whole process stops and waits for user input instead of (and this wouldn't be hard to implement) simply logging the problem and continuing. In the case of this particular copy, some of that waiting for user input began while I was in the Adirondacks, meaning the computer did nothing for many hours until I returned home. There's also another issue I'd like to address: the meddlesome nature of current Windows operating systems. I have a lot of utilities whose intention is to bypass registration, validation, and other annoyances designed to force users into paying for software. These utilities are utterly harmless for me to use, yet Windows now flags them all in the same category as viruses and malware. But it's my computer, and if I decide to have utilities that do things Microsoft doesn't like, that is a decision I have made, and my computer is my servant. It must do as I say. So a lot of the "errors" in the copying process were Windows losing its mind about utilities I have chosen to have and that I wanted to copy to the new hard drive. It turns out you can turn off Windows 10's "real time virus protection" in order to do these copies, but then you're vulnerable to real viruses. (And "real time virus protection" seems to come back on on its own for some reason.) [It turns out that I'm wrong about this. Even with "real time virus protection" turned off, files with names like keygen.exe not only don't get copied, but the originals seem to get deleted.]
At some point today when I wasn't super busy, I swapped in the new 8TB hard drive onto Katydid and was delighted to find that it worked perfectly right away, without any configuration. The old hard drive tended to be a little flaky after power outages, though that might've been a problem with the Katydid router and not the hard drive. But if it was the hard drive, hopefully the new hard drive won't have this problem even as it gives me twice the storage. According to my extensive NewEgg order history, I'd bought the old 4TB hard drive in January of 2017 ($146.99) as an upgrade from a 3 TB media hard drive delivered in August of 2013 ($128.99). Since it took nearly five years to not-quite fill up the extra terabyte in the 4 GB drive, I can expect the additional 4 TB in the 8 TB drive to take on the order of 20 years to fill (assuming, and this is a bad assumption, that media files stay about the same size and my rate of consumption of them does not increase).
It was a foggy, somewhat warmer-than-normal day, and I had to do a fair amount of work in the remote workplace tracking down weird discrepancies in property tax values for 23 parcels in Rockland County.
This afternoon I tried to take the dogs on a walk down the Farm Road, but only Neville came. Some guy in a small Chevy hatchback (it featured branding about a pipeline company on it) came up behind me on the Farm Road, made a U-turn at Georges' house, and left. Soon thereafter, I heard shooting down at the bus turnaround. Had this guy been scouting out places to shoot? So after I got back to the house, I drove down Dug Hill Road to see what was going on at the bus turnaround. There were two vehicles there, neither of which were a small Chevy hatch back. A woman was getting in her truck as I passed, and I leaned on the horn, something I do whenever I see assholes at the bus turnaround. After I made my U-turn and headed back up Dug Hill Road, there was only one truck at the bus turnaround (and it was across the road from it). I didn't hear any more shooting the rest of the day. I have feeling if everyone who hates the shooting leaned on their horns whenever they passed people shooting there, it would become a lot less popular as a de facto gun range.
This evening while Powerful was chatting on the phone with one of his young thrift store charity friends (not one of the ones who evicted him from their apartment after less than a week when he'd just received a heart transplant), I cooked a couple American Flatbread Vegan Harvest frozen pizzas in the oven. I made one for me that was completely covered with mushroom slices (and a few slices of sweet peppers) and one for Powerful (with many fewer mushroom slices and a few more peppers).
Meanwhile, Gretchen reported from the cabin that the chuckleheads had finally gotten the generator and battery to collaborate. But now there was a new problem: the gases from the boiler seemed to be blowing directly into the microwave vent, which was allowing enough carbon monoxide into the cabin to occasionally trigger the alarm. It wasn't dangerous, but it was annoying. Gretchen "fixed" the problem in the most improvised manner possible, taping a baffle of styrofoam to the wall to redirect the boiler fumes somewhat.
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