I really like this image from Hebitsukai; sadly, it’s the only one that just feels detailed rather than cluttered.

Just got mail from someone offering $4K for one of my old .com domains. Tempting, since we haven’t updated any content on it in fifteen years, and I just put in 301 redirects to point anyone still using it to a sub-directory on this site.

My first question is, if a random person is really offering $4K, and it’s not just a scam or spam (the use of “cash” in the email sent up a red flag…), should I list it on a site like Sedo instead, to see if it’s worth more?

Second, how does one do this? I acquired it for free when the previous owner no longer wanted the hassle of keeping it up.

Third, “Hey, Bryce, want a piece of this? You did give it to me for free back in the day…”

In Traveller 5, you can identify as Goatse.

Drinks free of charge.

Rune Soldier.

The loosely-related Record of Lodoss War series is collected on Bluray and available for streaming from Funimation, but I doubt RS will ever get a re-release.

Fortunately I have the DVDs, although I suppose I should rip them to avoid eventual bit-rot (and load them onto my iPad for the next trip to Japan…).

(OP video after the jump, because Youtube embeds just keep getting heavier and more intrusive, and I haven’t had time to set up a “click static thumbnail to load video” wrapper).

more...

…laptop backups. I have four independent backups of my current laptop (2x Time Machine, 2x SuperDuper!), one of which is stored on a RAID 6 NAS that backs up to a second RAID 6 volume. Additionally, all source code and blog entries are under source control (Mercurial) and get pushed to a remote server; the blog also gets rsynced to two virtuals in different parts of the country. Which get backed up to the NAS.

I mention this because I just found two external drives containing full backups of my great-grand-previous laptop, plus the actual SSD pulled from it when the board failed. And then I checked the NAS, and found a disk image made from that SSD and a VMware virtual made from it.

For some reason, it doesn’t go over well at work when my first response to someone with a dead computer is, “how many hours ago was your last full backup?”

The good news is that the requirement that we encrypt laptops for people in sensitive positions provided the leverage we needed to get a PO signed for a centralized laptop backup service. Which proved itself pretty darn quickly.

Pity there’s still no cure for people who think that it’s smart to conspicuously put your laptop bag into the trunk of your car when you arrive at a restaurant in the middle of Silicon Valley…

“Popular social media site is a toxic dump”

The article refers to a specific physical location at which Instagram users are taking selfies, but I prefer to read it literally.

Every once in a while artists delete their illustrations from Pixiv or mark them private. Unfortunately, I wasn’t recording the artist’s ID in my offline database until recently, so for about 2% of my archive, I can’t easily track them back to their creator. In most cases, I suspect they’ve been replaced with updated versions, but I’d have to search by hand, like our primitive ancestors once did.

Instead, I’ll just clean them out, and use my updated scripts to track artist info from now on. If you want to try to search for them, I’ve added my offline copy of their tags (if any) to the title tooltip, and links for the ones marked private.

more...