Author Archives: Shawn
Service Civility
As a member of the ARRL, I get lots of email about radio (most of it sales material for their books and swag), but this afternoon I got a letter reiterating the core values of Amateur Radio. The most telling is the last paragraph: Amateur Radio is about development of communications and responsible public service. […]
Panic! At the Filesystem
Replacing disks in a software RAID is a nerve-wracking, stress-inducing, ITIL-remembering, backups-checking activity. And I’ve done it six times in the past week. First round was to replace the 5 disks in my FreeNAS box to upgrade the storage from 8TB to 16TB. Thankfully, ZFS is a stupendously rock-solid volume manager and filesystem. It has […]
New Year, Old Life
At the beginning of 2021, I’ve taken to actually using the full potential of my living space. All of these pieces of entertainment gear, which have previously been scattered and disused in my last apartment, are now together, connected, and usable. As such, I’ve started pulling old audio tapes from the mothballs. For a time […]
Bifroster
Last thing I wanted to do on my holiday weekend was defrost my frost-free freezer. Seems the thermostat that controls the defrost heater is a little…busted. It’s time either for a surreptitious repair (by locating my own replacement part) or to file a maintenance request (since I don’t own this fridge). Really, it depends on […]