Expired Semaphore Timeout Period

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Restaurant To Another World, episode 2.5

Slight slip in character art, as they fill the restaurant back up for two first-timers; this week Sarah was the recurring character to get a bit wonky-eyed in a scene. First up, pretty boy gets some tail, followed by an adventurer chasing a different sort of treasure, with the latter framed by a conversation with Our Chef’s dessert supplier.

I’ve decided that I need to rip a copy of the “cuisine triumph” tune, so I can play it whenever people eat my cooking.

The simple pleasures

James Hoffmann, a man who has a strong preference for light-roasted “specialty” coffee, freshly roasted, ground right before brewing, and prepared with care, just reviewed every Nespresso-branded pod he could buy. There were a number of knee-jerk defensive reactions on the trash-fire that is Reddit (I don’t even try to look at Youtube comments), but the folks on the Nespresso Discord came away grudgingly approving of his fairness. (update: except for a few of the (actual) teenagers)

(Kumoko is unrelated)

Update: HP Aero 13.3

Still liking the new Win11 laptop, but just ran into an annoying issue: trying to copy data from an SSD connected to the right-side USB3 port threw up semaphore timeout alerts, every time (error 0x80070079). Worked fine on the left, or on the USB-C port. Searching for the specific error shows it’s a long-standing generic message for driver issues with network and storage interfaces (with some very scammy “solutions” high in the search results). So, yeah, fix yer shit, HP.

Speaking of Win11…

Tentatively, I’m using Edge as my default browser, since I needed something that I could quickly set to default to wiping all cookies and local data on exit, but preserve them for whitelisted domains. The interface isn’t as convenient or detailed as the Cookie app for the Mac, but I was able to export the list from there, reformat it in Emacs, and paste it in pretty quickly.

I’ve also imported the Rocky Linux 8.4 image that I set up with my usual shell environment, and a decent set of RPMs (which is how I found the USB issue above). It’s nice that they have official instructions for WSL-ifying Rocky. Like many other custom distros, they start with a Docker image, so you end up needing to reinstall a lot of things for general-purpose use, but that also means that you’re spared a lot of the usual Anaconda cruft.

For font management, I have a test-install of FontBase, but honestly, after all the praise they give themselves on the site, it’s pretty bare-bones. I’ve been using FontExplorer X for a long time on the Mac side (they abandoned their Windows software years ago), and this is… not remotely comparable. It is, however, completely integrated with Google Fonts, putting the entire collection a few clicks away.

This weekend I want to do some side-by-side performance comparisons for Lightroom and Photoshop, and maybe test Hugo build performance in various configurations.

(…or maybe I’ll just feed cats)

Update: Synology Active Backup for Business

So far, the nightly backup job for the new laptop has been running smoothly at 3 AM each day, as long as the lid is open so that it’s just idle or sleeping, not hibernating.

(backups are kid of like maid-service, right? close enough)

Notes:

  • The server seems to ping it several times during the day, since I see log entries like this:

      Information    2021-10-24 03:03:34    The backup task Beelzebub-Default was completed.
  Information    2021-10-24 03:00:46    The backup task Beelzebub-Default has started.
  Information    2021-10-24 00:16:27    The device BEELZEBUB is offline.
  Information    2021-10-23 18:32:54    The device BEELZEBUB is offline.

  • Gripe: I had to retype this by hand, because I don’t see a way to export the log, and it’s stored as a sqlite DB in /volume1/@ActiveBackup/activity.db; there’s some sort of report generator, but I haven’t played with it yet.

  • To my surprise, when I initially enabled ABB, it decided to put the backup data on volume2 instead of volume1. Both have multiple terabytes free, but volume2 has a few more, because I only use it as the HyperBackup destination for volume1 (the disks are located in the expansion chassis). It looks like I could change this and it would move all the existing data (which would then get backed up to volume2 by HyperBackup).

  • That 3.5-minute backup time seems pretty typical, with the after-Adobe-update backup lasting only 7.5 minutes, and the massive just-installed-fallout4 backup lasting 23 minutes. This is far, far faster than Apple’s Time Machine, and since it’s agent-based rather than mounting a virtual file system on the NAS, also far, far more robust.

  • It advertises the storage used as 2.75x reduction due to de-duplication, but I think that just means “buzzword-compliant incremental backups”. It can also do compression, but that’s currently off.

  • Test restores of files and directories, either to the Win11 machine or to my Mac, have all been quick and successful.

  • I haven’t turned on hourly backups yet; I might try that this weekend. I want to tinker with trying to put most of the data for my Linux environment in the Windows file system, because the WSL2 container is a single file that has the potential to be in an inconsistent state during backups (also huge, if it gets backed up every day). I plan to test that with a scratch instance, to see if I can recover a WSL2 container that was actively being written to during a backup.

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