Month: April 2020

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Family Photo Chest Part 6: Beginning the Catalogue

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am coming back with my monthly photo chest project. Let’s get started!

There’s a reason this project is being given the slow milking treatment. It’s a monumental task, and I don’t even have all the hardware necessary for the full project. While it would be fun to build a small machine from scratch, I need to keep scale in mind. This isn’t some arbitrary task I have infinite focus for decades on.

At present, I am looking into Network Attached Storage (NAS) to host the files. NAS can come in a small variety of few forms, but all the ones I’ve looked at appear to be small computers with lots of hard drive space. On the lower end, you have monolithic units where you can store stuff, while something a little more sophisticated will have anywhere between 2, 4, 8, or even more bays you can plug individual hard drives into. Some come ready to use with drives preinstalled, while others expect you to use your own drives. Often, you will find they have some sort of special software to manage the NAS system as a whole.

Admittedly, I am still specing out the system with my father. We are leaning in the direction of getting four 8TB drives specially designed for NAS applications, specifically from Western Digital’s red line.

The NAS controller is still a bigger unknown. We’ve had one for years, but I’ve always found their controller software a bit annoying to deal with, so I’ve only bothered getting it to work about five times — ever. However, I suspect knowing a bit more about its underlying structure will make it easier to deal with in the future. At the same time, I still want something I can connect to on whatever terms I deem fit. One lowball priced bay was quickly blacklisted over this consideration.

In other news, the photo trunk has been unloaded and we have started building an extensive catalogue of what we have, starting with school photos.

But before the real work could begin, a couple decades can really do a number on the smell in a confined space. It was so bad, I had to use a box fan to pull air out of the chest into the room and another fan to exchange the air room with outside. Needless to say, when my mother needed the room for drying face masks, the procedure was put to a halt. It took a couple days, but it’s down to bearable levels.

The bottom of the trunk felt a lot better organized than the top tray. There were two handbags and a cardboard box we could pull out. The rest was mostly almost empty albums and framed photos. One of the handbags contained a lot of school pictures (mostly) in their original envelopes, so we decided to begin there.

Using my freshly untethered laptop, my father set up a spreadsheet. To help speed up measuring pictures, he laid down some tape and marked off the inches. For my part, I already had a lot of the school pictures sorted into a bucket, and we’ve been going through that bucket, documenting everything we have. The plan is to work on it a little each day.

Final Question: How would you go about bringing order to near chaos?

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Loss

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am working on upgrading ButtonMash to a decently sized hard drive. Let’s get started!

I am humbled to know that Creepers_n_Cream has been a well-loved server. I’m actually impressed at how well God has blessed my efforts given I put it together on a budget of nothing but what I had laying around. We’ve had somewhere between twenty and thirty unique accounts stop by, and we have about ten regulars in our community.

With abundant use comes abundant taxation on the hardware. Even though the RAM situation has been stable since I implemented G1GC not all the bottlenecks are fully addressed yet. The CPU gets pegged if more than a couple people are on at a time, and 60 gigabytes of hard drive space only goes so far when you aren’t deleting old weekly backups.

A few weeks ago, I woke up to the server crashing royally. It had finally finished topping off the tiny hard drive I gave it to start with. My family discussed it, and we eventually ordered a one terabyte solid state drive to install.

The first step is to get the operating system installed. Unsure where my original MineOS installation media went, I located a thumb drive and it mounted as sdd. It had a bunch of old Minecraft servers I could offload.

With the drive void of contents, I pulled up a tutorial on burning .iso disk images to thumb drives from the command line in Linux. As soon as I saw the dd command, I remembered a warning that it might as well stand for “disk destroyer.” Its actual name is Data Duplicator. Aside from working in the command line, there was nothing new about this situation.

Following the tutorial, I wrote a vFAT file system to sdb. Oops, I spelled it “sufo” instead of “sudo.” Correcting my typo, I tried again…

…

…

sdb…

…

…

I used the lsblk (list block) command to bring up all partitions of any disks connected to the drive. I felt the color drain from my face as I inspected the table.

I had heard the warnings. I had double checked. Years worth of memories –gone– in only a minute. This is why you always isolate potentially destructive work by using a computer you can easily rebuild; always minimize the chance of damages with an air gap! Always!

I had goofed. At least I hear this is the mistake you only ever make once. In the fallout, I checked around for a backup, and I found something from last December. It doesn’t have much, but at this point, I just have to trust my past self that I got the stuff that’s most important. As luck would have it, of my three most important personal drives, that was the only one I actually have any sort of backup for, and it’s the only one that wasn’t still in daily use.

I continued with putting MineOS on the terabyte SSD. I used my main tower, but its external Wi-Fi card didn’t register, so I put the project down for now while I focus on recovering my hard drive.

As of writing, I still don’t fully understand the damage, but I’ll try explaining it as best I can. Most of the data is still there. All that really happened was that I shredded the hard drive’s internal map and laid out a fresh one, marking everything ready for redevelopment. If I can somehow survey the abandoned data, I should be able to rebuild the original map.

Fortunately, there are recovery tools I can try. The one I’m trying to work with right now is called TestDisk. I believe it should be able to achieve a full recovery, if used correctly.

But that’s the thing. I don’t know how to use it correctly. I’m terrified that I’ve only got one shot, and if I miss, it’s possible the failed recovery process will cause farther damage, and I won’t be able to try again.

I’m hardly the first person to nuke a hard drive by accident. There are other options around, but I’m still scared that I won’t get a second chance once I try any one of them. The best case for me would be if I found someone else who had written a vFAT filesystem over an NTFS filesystem and replacing two visible partitions, but the creation of such a tutorial would be pointless, as there are way more possible combinations to the point that there isn’t enough demand to justify the supply.

I need to put this project down for a while. I’ve reached out to the Third Workshop, but with the pandemic on, “after school” STEM programs are online only. Otherwise, I have a couple topics I can develop for the next couple weeks. I really want my drive back.

Final Question: What was the biggest computer blunder you’ve ever made?

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I’ve Got No Strings

Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I carried out a very special and long-awaited project. Let’s get started!

For the one or possibly two people who have read almost everything I’ve ever posted, you will know that I had my laptop’s power port break on me roughly a year and a half ago, give or take (I have a vague memory from that time involving a Christmas tree, it’s been more than a year, and likely less than two).

My father and I stripped my laptop down and got it functional again, though when we tried installing it, the cord was extra long and something at the hardware level refused to charge the battery. Ever since then, the BIOS has been beeping at me every boot that the power adapter cannot be determined.

Several months ago, we decided to take another swing at repairing the laptop correctly this time. I pulled out the broken power port and we were able to grab the part number off it. Looking online, we found a match and bought it.

That part took quite a lot longer than it should have. The package had a hand written label that matched the part number, but when I opened the package, yes it was a power port, and the length looked to be about right, but the connector had seven pins to my laptop’s five. We took a closer look at the company who sold us the part and found they were operating out of China when their name heavily implied they were American distributor. My father asked for his money back, but has yet to receive a reply from these suspected small-scale fraudsters.

After another, much shorter round of waiting, we got a genuine part from a real supplier with a real part label this time. The only difference I spotted were different colors on the wires leading up to the pins, though they were effectively a palette swap from the original.

We grabbed a PDF of the service manual for my tablet and my father printed out the top-level instructions detailing the order of our specific tear down job. I got impatient to start, so I started pulling screws.

I did most of the work myself this time. When we got to the power jack, I used the original as a guide to find the proper routing the cord is supposed to take. I took the opportunity to dust off some hard-to-reach places while they were more exposed than not.

During reassembly, I tried to only tighten screws as tight as they needed to be, in case of any additional work in the near future. The most nerve wracking part was while replacing the screen; I kept catching and more than once did I hear what sounded like something breaking. I also spotted where one of the status LED’s was mostly gone from a tiny circuit on the front. Just the tiniest bit of red could be seen where it should have been, but not on any of the other lights.

Final assembly felt like it took the longest. Not only did I forget to connect the keyboard electronically the first go around, but I had already put the top plate on when I remembered I still had four screws to replace below the keyboard. At one point, I accidentally dropped a screw through a broken screw hole. With a little shaking the “loose conductor” fell right out.

Once everything was tightened back up, I put the battery in and connected everything. Moment of truth. The BIOS didn’t complain. Debian said it was charging, but it was stuck at 0.0% for a while. I swapped batteries and booted to Windows, and everything seemed to indicate things were going well.

It was back in Debian when I saw it. Net battery gain on the smaller battery from 51% to 54%. Prayers answered. We explored the idea that the larger battery might have been damaged from being discharged for so long, but I eventually got a similar confirmed charge point on it.

It was only a small formality to unplug my running laptop and use a little of that fresh battery power.

Repairing your own electronics gives you a much better understanding of how everything works. Even if you aren’t interested in what happens within each circuit board, it still lets you diagnose it better in the future.

Final Question: Have you ever repaired any of your own electronics? If not, have you ever looked inside anything just to look?

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3D Printing Against the Pandemic

Good morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am joining the fight to the best of my ability using my 3D printer. Let’s get started!

The CCP Corona Virus has been spreading around the world for months now. Medical supplies have run short, and hoarders reduce availability further. Across the world, people on the front lines are turning to improvised equipment to mitigate the chances of transmission. And when the CDC says that even a bandanna over the face can help, you know it’s serious.

As part of the effort, companies have been bolstering the medical field with products they can adjust their assembly lines to produce. But even with the increased production rate, the demand still greatly exceeds the supply, and will continue to do so as long as an abnormally spike of people are being treated.

Enter: everyday people. With a major percentage of the population stuck at home, people have been seeking out places where they can join the fight. The Folding@Home project has mustered over an exaflop of computing power from donated CPU and GPU time. Seamstresses, such as my mother, have been sewing masks, and 3D printer communities are printing parts that hospitals need.

Good intentions are nice and all, but amateur craftsmen need to realize that quality is an important factor. That is where online communities come in. My mother connected with a local group who is making masks for hospitals. Even though she is giving her masks directly to family, friends, and church members instead of the group, she has learned to make a mask that should be almost as good as the gold standard N-95 masks.

And that brings it up to now, where I just joined a similar group where I can learn what works and what doesn’t work. For me, I need to get my print quality back up, as I discovered when I went to print a number of bias tape folders for the above-mentioned group.

I can’t just use the slicer I had going before because of my recent transition to Debian on that computer, and vanilla Cura doesn’t come with all the settings pre-tuned for my model.

After I finish tuning my printer in, I’d like to look into building face shield parts to compliment my mother’s work, but I’ll see what is needed most when I get there. I’ve already run half an experiment involving layer height and printing temperature. A group should be able to help me calibrate my machine faster.

Final Question: What can you do to help in this fight?

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