I filled up my paper notebook I use to keep recipes. I typed it up and edited it. It’s available for free online, as a .txt or .pdf file: https://github.com/za3k/cookbook/releases
Note that most of these recipes are from online or printed sources. Some are written by me, family, or friends.
Between 2020-03-14 and 2020-12-03 I ran an experimental computer storage setup. I movied or copied 90% of my files into a content-addressable storage system. I’m doing a writeup of why I did it, how I did it, and why I stopped. My hope is that it will be useful to anyone considering using a similar system.
The assumption behind this setup, is that 99% of my files never change, so it’s fine to store only one, static copy of them. (Think movies, photos… they’re most of your computer space, and you’re never going to modify them). There are files you change, I just didn’t put them into this system. If you run a database, this ain’t for you.
Because I have quite a lot of files and 42 drives (7 in my computer, ~35 in a huge media server chassis), there is a problem of how to organize files across drives. To explain why it’s a problem, let’s look at the two default approaches:
Neither approach adds any redundancy, and 42 drives is a bit too many to deal with for most things. Step 1 is to split the 42 drives into 7 ZFS vdevs, each with 2-drive redundancy. That way, if a drive fails or there is a small data corruption (likely), everything will keep working. So now we only have to think about accessing 7 drives (but keep in mind, many physical drives will spin up for each disk access).
The ideal solution:
I decided a content-addressable system was ideal for me. That is, you’d look up each file by its hash. I don’t like having an extra step to access files, so files would be accessed by symlink–no frontend program. Also, it was important to me that I be able to transparently swap out the set of drives backing this. I wanted to make the content-addressable system basically a set of 7 content-addressable systems, and somehow wrap those all into one big content-addressable system with the same interface. Here’s what I settled on:
The plan here is that it would be really easy to swap out one backing blockstore of 30GB, for two of 20GB–just copy the files to the new drives and add it to the unionfs.
Here’s what went well:
Here are the implementation problems I found
But the biggest problem was disk access patterns:
So although I could have tried to fix things with double-indirection, I decided there were some other disadvantages to symlinks: estimating sizes, making offsite backups foolproof. I decided to migrate off the system entirely. The migration went well, although it required running all the drives at once, so some hardware errors popped up. I’m currently on a semi-JBOD system (still on top of the same 7 ZRAID2 devices).
Hopefully this is useful to someone planning a similar system someday. If you learned something useful, or there are existing systems I should have used, feel free to leave a comment.
Although the below directions work on Raspberry Pi, they should also work on any other system. The brother-provided driver does not run on arm processors[1] like the raspberry pi, so we will instead use the open-source brlaser[2].
Edit: This setup should also work on the following Brother monochrome printers, just substitute the name where needed:
Also, all these steps are command-line based, and you can do the whole setup headless (no monitor or keyboard) using SSH.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install lpr cups ghostscript printer-driver-brlasersudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install lpr cups ghostscript git cmake libcups2-dev libcupsimage2-devwget https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser/archive/v6.tar.gz && tar xf v6.tar.gzcd brlaser-6 && cmake . && make && sudo make installsudo lsusb or sudo dmesg. (author’s shameful note: if you’re not looking, I find it surprisingly easy to plug USB B into the ethernet jack)sudo lpinfo -v | grep usb to get the device name of your printer. It will be something like usb://Brother/HL-2270DW%20series?serial=D4N207646sudo lpinfo -m | grep HL-2270DW to get the PPD file for your printer.sudo lpadmin -p HL-2270DW -E -v usb://Brother/HL-2270DW%20series?serial=D4N207646 -m drv:///brlaser.drv/br2270dw.ppd-p HL-2270DW is just the name I’m using for the printer, feel free to name the printer whatever you like.sudo lpadmin -p HL-2270DW -Esudo lpoptions -d HL-2270DWsudo lpoptions -p HL-2270DW -o media=letterecho "Hello World" | PRINTER=HL-2270DW lp -o media=letter (Make sure anything prints)cat <test document> | PRINTER=HL-2270DW lp -o media=letter (Print an actual test page to test alignment, etc)cat <test document> | PRINTER=HL-2270DW lp -o media=letter -o sides=two-sided-short-edge (Make sure duplex works if you plan to use that)/printme directory gets printed. For the 2270DW, I also have a /printme.duplex directory.Links
[1] brother driver does not work on arm (also verified myself)
[2] brlaser, the open-source Brother printer driver
[3] rpi-setup, my convenience command-line script for headless raspberry pi setup
[4] stack overflow answer on how to install one package from testing in debian
I made a website to give you countdowns and let you know whether an episode is out: http://isrickandmortyout.com/. Been up since before season 4, but I forgot to post it until now.
I stopped using OBS a while ago for a couple reasons–the main one was that it didn’t support my video capture card, but I also had issues with it crashing or lagging behind with no clear indication of what it was doing. I ended up switching to ffmpeg for live streaming, because it’s very easy to tell when ffmpeg is lagging behind. OBS uses ffmpeg internally for video. I don’t especially recommend this setup, but I thought I’d document it in case someone can’t use a nice GUI setup like OBS or similar.
I’m prefer less layers, so I’m still on ALSA. My setup is:
Here’s my .asoundrc:
# sudo modprobe snd-aloop is required to set up hw:Loopback
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm {
type dmix
ipc_key 99
slave {
pcm "hw:Loopback,0"
rate 48000
channels 2
period_size 1024
}
}
}
My ffmpeg build line:
./configure --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-nonfree --enable-libxcb --enable-indev=alsa --enable-outdev=alsa --prefix=/usr/local --extra-version='za3k' --toolchain=hardened --libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu --incdir=/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu --arch=amd64 --enable-gpl --disable-stripping --enable-avresample --disable-filter=resample --enable-avisynth --enable-libaom --enable-libass --enable-libfontconfig --enable-libfreetype --enable-libfribidi --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopus --enable-libpulse --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx265 --enable-opengl --enable-libdrm --enable-libx264 --enable-shared --enable-librtmp && make -j 4 && sudo make install
And most imporantly, my ffmpeg command:
ffmpeg
-video_size 1280x720 -framerate 30 -f x11grab -s 1280x720 -r 30 -i :0.0
-f alsa -ac 1 -ar 48000 -i hw:1,0
-f alsa -ac 2 -ar 48000 -i hw:Loopback,1
-filter_complex '[1:a][1:a]amerge=inputs=2[stereo1] ; [2:a][stereo1]amerge=inputs=2[a]' -ac 2
-map '[a]' -map 0:v
-f flv -ac 2 -ar 48000
-vcodec libx264 -g 60 -keyint_min 30 -b:v 3000k -minrate 3000k -maxrate 3000k -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 1280x720 -preset ultrafast -tune film
-c:a libfdk_aac -b:a 160k -strict normal -bufsize 3000k
rtmp://live-sjc.twitch.tv/app/${TWITCH_KEY}
Let’s break that monster down a bit. ffmpeg structures its command line into input streams, transformations, and output streams.
ffmpeg input streams
-video_size 1280x720 -framerate 30 -f x11grab -s 1280x720 -r 30 -i :0.0:
Grab 720p video (-video_size 1280x720) at 30fps (-framerate 30) using x11grab/libxcb (-f x11grab), and we also want to output that video at the same resolution and framerate (-s 1280x720 -r 30). We grab :0.0 (-i :0.0)–that’s X language for first X server (you only have one, probably), first display/monitor. And, since we don’t say otherwise, we grab the whole thing, so the monitor better be 720p.
-f alsa -ac 1 -ar 48000 -i hw:1,0:
Using alsa (-f alsa), capture mono (-ac 1, 1 audio channel) at the standard PC sample rate (-ar 48000, audio rate=48000 Hz). The ALSA device is hw:1,0 (-i hw:1,0), my microphone, which happens to be mono.
-f alsa -ac 2 -ar 48000 -i hw:Loopback,1:
Using alsa (-f alsa), capture stereo (-ac 2, 2 audio channels) at the standard PC sample rate (-ar 48000, audio rate=48000 Hz). The ALSA device is hw:Loopback,1. In the ALSA config file .asoundrc given above, you can see we send all computer audio to hw:Loopback,0. Something sent to play on hw:Loopback,0 is made available to record as hw:Loopback,1, that’s just the convention for how snd-aloop devices work.
ffmpeg transforms
-filter_complex '[1:a][1:a]amerge=inputs=2[stereo1] ; [2:a][stereo1]amerge=inputs=2[a]' -ac 2:
All right, this one was a bit of a doozy to figure out. In ffmpeg’s special filter notation, 1:a means “stream #1, audio” (where stream #0 is the first one).
First we take the mic input [1:a][1:a] and convert it from a mono channel to stereo, by just duplicating the sound to both ears (amerge=inputs=2[stereo1]). Then, we combine the stereo mic and the stereo computer audio ([2:a][stereo1]) into a single stereo stream using the default mixer (amerge=inputs=2[a]).
-map '[a]' -map 0:v :
By default, ffmpeg just keeps all the streams around, so we now have one mono, and two stereo streams, and it won’t default to picking the last one. So we manually tell it to keep that last audio stream we made (-map '[a]'), and the video stream from the first input (-map 0:v, the only video stream).
ffmpeg output streams
-f flv -ac 2 -ar 48000:
We want the output format to be Flash video (-f flv) with stereo audio (-ac 2) at 48000Hz (-ar 48000). Why do we want that? Because we’re streaming to Twitch and that’s what Twitch says they want–that’s basically why everything in the output format.
-vcodec libx264 -g 60 -keyint_min 30 -b:v3000k -minrate 3000k -maxrate 3000k -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 1280x720 -preset ultrafast -tune film:
Ah, the magic. Now we do x264 encoding (-vcodec libx264), a modern wonder. A lot of the options here are just what Twitch requests. They want keyframes every 2 seconds (-g 60 -keyint_min 30, where 60=30*2=FPS*2, 30=FPS). They want a constant bitrate (-b:v3000k -minrate 3000k -maxrate 3000k) between 1K-6K/s at the time of writing–I picked 3K because it’s appropriate for 720p video, but you could go with 6K for 1080p. Here are Twitch’s recommendations. The pixel format is standard (-pix_gmt yub720p) and we still don’t want to change the resolution (-s 1280x720). Finally the options you might want to change. You want to set the preset as high as it will go with your computer keeping up–mine sucks (-preset ultrafast, where the options go ultrafast,superfast,veryfast,faster,fast,medium, with a 2-10X jump in CPU power needed for each step). And I’m broadcasting minecraft, which in terms of encoders is close to film (-tune film)–lots of panning, relatively complicated stuff on screen. If you want to re-encode cartoons you want something else.
-c:a libfdk_aac -b:a 160k:
We use AAC (-c:a libfdk_aac). Note that libfdk is many times faster than the default implementation, but it’s not available by default in debian’s ffmpeg for (dumb) license reasons. We use 160k bitrate (-b:a 160k ) audio since I’ve found that’s good, and 96K-160K is Twitch’s allowable range. `-strict normal`
-strict normal: Just an ffmpeg option. Not interesting.
-bufsize 3000k: One second of buffer with CBR video
rtmp://live-sjc.twitch.tv/app/${TWITCH_KEY}:
The twitch streaming URL. Replace ${TWITCH_KEY} with your actual key, of course.
Sources:
I did a survey of the cost of buying hard drives (of all sorts), CDs, DVDs, Blue-rays, and tape media (for tape drives).
Here are the 2020-01 results: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2020-01.sc.txt
2019-07: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2019-07.sc.txt
2018-10: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2018-10.sc.txt
2018-06: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-06.sc.txt
2018-01: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-01.sc.txt
Changes this year
Some conclusions that are useful to know
I’ve been keeping a time log since somewhere around 2011. A time log is a journal with a complete record of everything I do. I’ve become very consistent about it, so this seemed like a good time to write up my current habits for anyone interested.
This is going to be a mixture of information about life-logging, how I organize things, and my current schedule, because they’re not really separate things.
There’s an interesting story about how I systematically broke everyone one of my habits, and it took me 17 years to get in a daily routine after that, but that’s a story for another time.
If you’re curious, I’d guess it takes me 2 hours a week spread out to do my life-logging, 1 hour to type it up, and 1-2 hours to do my weekly review. In my mind the original life-logging doesn’t cost me anything because it’s so automatic, it’s zero-energy, and it has some psychic benefits. By psychic benefits I’m talking about the same kind of thing you get from GTD–you’re not constantly thinking about or trying to remember things that are already written down in a trusted system. Typing it up and review are not free.
I keep a written (pen and paper) time log which I normally just call my “log book”. Each entry has the current time and what I’m doing. I typically record an entry either when I start an activity, finish one, or notice I’ve switched activities. I’m on volume 9.
Today’s page starts like this (italics are censorship or words added for clarity):
| Date: 2019-12-17, Tue | |
| 12:02pm | Woke up on my own slightly before alarm. Dream about […]. (7h12m sleep) |
| [100ml yellow rockstar recovery. (33mg caffein, 400mg taurine–from front material)] | |
| Morning data log (see below) | |
| Brushed teeth | |
| 12:55pm | Cancelled torrent verification–I already know this will fail |
| Responded to gnu coreutils ‘date’ thread | |
| health stuff | |
| 2:02pm | Trying qutebrowser. Feels very productive. |
| 2:04pm | [Coke Zero Vanilla, 1 can] |
I’m not fastidious about what the time represents. The questions I most often ask are “when did this happen roughly” and “do I have any big portions of my day I’m not time-logging”. I’m less concerned with exactly how long I spent doing each particular activity.
There are some things I try to consistently write down every single time, including:
[]_. I’m switching to write these in a computer-understandable way but it’s a work in progress.[], the rest is freeform.Here are things I don’t write down:
At the front of the book I have a table with guides to abbreviations, ingredients in things I have often (ex. caffein amounts or recipes). In the back is my bookkeeping section (see below).
I am currently using the Leuchtturm1917 gridded notebook, with date labels at the top of the page. I’ve been experimenting with felt micron pens–I’m looking for something that can write easily, but won’t smear when I close the book. I’ve used Moleskins in the past–I stopped using them because 2 of 5 split at the spine for me. Leuctturm seems a bit better but more expensive–time will tell.
One a week, I type up my time log up to the last page. I’m working on my backlog slowly. This lets me search more easily. I have plans to someday cross-reference better in a computer system (for example, include nutritional info, link to youtube videos, etc).
Fun fact: b-oo-kk-ee-ping is the only word in the English language with three consecutive double letters. Bookkeeping is keeping a record of what you earn and spend, or what you buy and sell.
For the most part, I pay for everything using a credit or debit card, which I’ve been doing since 16 so that I have a financial record for my own benefit. Most banks offer an easy export. I get paper copies, then once I download the PDFs from my bank, throw out the originals (I’ve checked one or two match the PDFs by hand). I use mint.com for the purpose of having a CSV export from my bak statements. I used to put this export online (currently broken, check back soon).
Starting a few months ago, I started keeping a weekly record by hand. Every time I spend money, I’ll put a $ symbol in my time log,
2:21am Amazon $
and add a bookkeeping entry (real thing is prettier).
2019-12-15, Sun
[ ] Amazon -29.21 -236.07
Choline citrate, 500g
The entry includes:
Since I use the same book for my time log and my bookkeeping, bookkeeping goes from right to left, two pages per week. At the end of the book, I keep
During my weekly review process, I copy this information to my (digital) weekly review and add it up by category to check against my budget. I used to check it against my bank statements, but it takes forever and it’s easier to just be really good about writing down everything to start with. Checking totals and category totals is pretty time consuming the way I do it, I’ll probably automate it soon.
Budget
My current categories are:
My current schedule is weekly:
Friday: Review day.
I’ll do a weekly review, and a monthly one if it’s the last weekly review of the month. Then I’ll type up the timelog up to that point in time. For my weekly review, which I do on my computer, I write down
Reflection/things learned: Did anything major happen? Did I learn any new facts? This is my time to look at the big picture and thing about how my life is going lately and where I’d like it to go. Also, if anything especially good/bad happened, I try to think about why and how to make things go well next time.
Finances. I copy down my expenses for the week and total them by category.
I haven’t done batch cooking in a while, but I’m also trying to run out my food supplies because I’m about to move, so we’ll see if it sticks around.
Every morning, I record:
I don’t think it matters that much how you do these measurements, but it’s important to be consistent (for example, weight with clothes on/off?)
If I have a specific habit I’m trying to pick up (say, brushing my teeth twice a day or meditating) I might record that for a while too each day. I used to record a mission for the day, but I dropped the habit.
I put all my computer logs in a single combined format, and sync them to a single location, starting in 2019. The format is basically <date> [<log name>:<computer name>] <Log entry>. I don’t have a great process to view logs yet.
I log which hours I was asleep. I live alone and tend to fall asleep first thing after closing my laptop in bed, or at least with a video playing in the background, which makes this relatively easy. I keep a computer log of whether I’m using my keyboard (I almost never do anything with just the mouse) for each minute using a custom-built keylogger (it records activity but not passwords).
Then I run it through a custom script (included in link) which says which broad periods I was active. The biggest inactive period in a day is when I was asleep.
~ $ sleep?
Report period: 2019-12-17 00:00:00 – 2019-12-17 16:21:06 (16:21:06s)
Inactive: 2019-12-17 04:50:18 – 2019-12-17 12:02:58 ( 7:12:40s)
I was asleep from 4:50am to 12:02pm. I make sure to write down when I wake up into my time log in case I don’t use the computer first thing. This has been much better at guessing when I fell asleep than anything else I’ve tried.
If you don’t fall asleep at a computer, I have some ideas around using a motion sensor (cheap webcams can see in the dark)
I use Chromium as my only web browser. I export the history and bookmarks every time I do a backup, and put it all in a standard log format (basically time + URL). Currently I only record each history entry once.
For futureproofing, I archive every webpage I go to on an irregular basis (about once a year). Archiving pages doesn’t work super well but it’s better than nothing.
I watch my movies using noice, either directly on my television, or streamed from my media server to my laptop. When I start watching something, it automatically gets logged (including what the movie is, the path, how long it is etc). Same for when I stop, so I know if I quit early.
Youtube is included in my chromium history (see above). Sadly I’m not sure I can get ‘how much of this video did I watch’ from my format–only that I visited the video.
For futureproofing, I automatically archive every youtube video I watch.
This one is pretty simple. My Linux shell history (everything I run from the command line, which is basically everything I do outside a browser) is saved, forever. This one goes back to 2011 for my laptops.
I scan all documents I write, mail I get, etc. and generally throw out the originals. I organize everything by hand, and keep everything as image files.
I use a flat folder structure, which is to say I have a “scans” folder and then a bunch of folders in it like “taxes – 2019”. No nesting. This was my main takeaway from GTD for Hackers and I use flat folders for most digital organization.
I use the Doxie Go feed-through scanner (doesn’t need a computer, writes directly to SD which I love). I recently got a Canon Lide 400 flatbed scanner (works on linux) which I use to scan bound books like my time log.
As far as I know I came up with this stuff independently. I’ve read plenty of time-management resources (which tend to be good) and experimental journaling resources (which tend to be… scarce?).
Most of this should apply for any linux system, other than the driver install step. Also, I believe most of it applies to DeckLink and Intensity cards as well.
My main source is https://gist.github.com/afriza/879fed4ede539a5a6501e0f046f71463. I’ve re-written for clarity and Debian.
desktopvideo_11.3a7_amd64.deb.lsmod | grep blackmagic should show a driver loaded on debian.lspci | grep Blackmagic (I think this requires the driver but didn’t check)sudo BlackmagicFirmwareUpdater status will check for updates available. There were none for me.Blackmagic DeckLink SDK 10.11.4/Linux/includes. Let’s assume you move that to ~/BM_SDKBuild ffmpeg from source. I’m here copying from my source heavily.
wget https://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-4.2.tar.bz2 && tar xf ffmpeg-*.tar.bz2 && cd ffmpeg-*sudo apt-get install nasm yasm libx264-dev libx265-dev libnuma-dev libvpx-dev libfdk-aac-dev libmp3lame-dev libopus-dev libvorbis-dev libass-devBuild.
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib/pkgconfig" ./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --pkg-config-flags="--static" --extra-cflags="-I$HOME/ffmpeg_build/include -I$HOME/ffmpeg_sources/BMD_SDK/include" --extra-ldflags="-L$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib" --extra-libs="-lpthread -lm" --enable-gpl --enable-libass --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libfreetype --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopus --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-nonfree --enable-decklink
make -j $(`nproc)`
sudo cp ffmpeg ffprobe /usr/local/bin/
Use ffmpeg.
ffmpeg -f decklink -list_devices 1 -i dummy should show your device now. Note the name for below.
ffmpeg -f decklink -list_formats 1 -i 'Intensity Pro 4K' shows supported formats. Here’s what I see for the Intensity Pro 4K:
[decklink @ 0x561bd9881800] Supported formats for 'Intensity Pro 4K':
format_code description
ntsc 720x486 at 30000/1001 fps (interlaced, lower field first)
pal 720x576 at 25000/1000 fps (interlaced, upper field first)
23ps 1920x1080 at 24000/1001 fps
24ps 1920x1080 at 24000/1000 fps
Hp25 1920x1080 at 25000/1000 fps
Hp29 1920x1080 at 30000/1001 fps
Hp30 1920x1080 at 30000/1000 fps
Hp50 1920x1080 at 50000/1000 fps
Hp59 1920x1080 at 60000/1001 fps
Hp60 1920x1080 at 60000/1000 fps
Hi50 1920x1080 at 25000/1000 fps (interlaced, upper field first)
Hi59 1920x1080 at 30000/1001 fps (interlaced, upper field first)
Hi60 1920x1080 at 30000/1000 fps (interlaced, upper field first)
hp50 1280x720 at 50000/1000 fps
hp59 1280x720 at 60000/1001 fps
hp60 1280x720 at 60000/1000 fps
4k23 3840x2160 at 24000/1001 fps
4k24 3840x2160 at 24000/1000 fps
4k25 3840x2160 at 25000/1000 fps
4k29 3840x2160 at 30000/1001 fps
4k30 3840x2160 at 30000/1000 fps
Capture some video: ffmpeg -raw_format argb -format_code Hp60 -f decklink -i 'Intensity Pro 4K' test.avi
The format (raw_format and format_code) will vary based on your input settings. In particular, note that-raw_format uyvy422 is the default, which I found did not match my computer output. I was able to switch either the command line or the computer output settings to fix it.
Troubleshooting
Sources:
I’m experimenting with using Jekyll in place of wordpress. If you want you can check out [dead link] which containly my weekly review process.
If and when I do migrate, all the posts here will be magically migrated and the URLs will stay the same so links don’t break.
Edit: I discontinued this experiment. It’s too hard to migrate the old stuff and keep it looking good, and I’d rather keep everything in one system.
I did a survey of the cost of buying hard drives (of all sorts), CDs, DVDs, Blue-rays, and tape media (for tape drives).
Here are the 2019-07 results: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2019-07.sc.txt
2018-10: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2018-10.sc.txt
2018-06: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-06.sc.txt
2018-01: https://za3k.com/archive/storage-2017-01.sc.txt