Seriously, Samsung? I pay three grand for a new fridge and I can’t put magnets on the door? Who doesn’t use fridge magnets?

“Alexa, play ‘My Freeze Ray’.”

"​'My Freeze Ray', by Various Artists."

…

“Alexa, play the next song.”

"What do you want to play?"

“The next song from that album.”

What would you like to play next?"

“The rest of that album.”

"What do you want to play?"

“Forget about it.”

(all Hue lights in the house come on at full brightness)

One of the quirks of my house is that the kitchen “island” is angled to create more space in the breakfast nook. This means less space to get in and out of the kitchen, especially since the pantry door and the refrigerator are right there.

As part of my minor remodeling, I’m going to replace the 28-inch pantry door with closet doors that don’t open out so far, but that still leaves a bottleneck getting past the full-depth fridge. The solution to that problem turned up yesterday when I was browsing at Lowe’s: the first counter-depth fridge I’ve ever not hated.

It’s a good 7 inches shallower than my current one, which will make it much easier for multiple people to use my kitchen at once. The interior layout’s more sensible, too. Not cheap, but this is precisely the sort of thing I took some equity out of the house to buy.

Last time I was in a rush because the old fridge had died while I was out of town, so I took the best-looking thing Sears had in stock. Apart from a persistent fan noise that they could never get rid of, it’s served me pretty well for nearly 12 years.

I sort-of bought a new dishwasher as well (current one’s ~18 years old), but they won’t actually sell it to me until someone comes out and measures to make sure it will fit. I went with a high-end Bosch, largely for the promised noise reduction.

Update

Yes, the tech confirms that the industry-standard slot in my kitchen will fit an industry-standard-sized dishwasher. Now I can actually buy it and schedule the install.

Success!

As installed, the new fridge gives a full 8 inches more room to get in and out of the kitchen. Unfortunately, the stainless doors are non-magnetic, so I have to get some 3M clips to attach recipes, etc, to it. I can use the sides, but the space is limited.

The things you learn from Arlo:

3:00 PM, USPS: large box left in middle of porch, visible from street.

3:01 PM, ONTRAC: medium box left on top of first box.

4:28 PM, UPS: previous boxes moved out of sight from street, neatly restacked with new box.

Theme: “just cleaning out the leftovers again”.

more...

One thing I’m doing with the new Synology NAS is making sure that everything is successfully migrated from my ancient Infrant ReadyNAS NV+.

There are two basic reasons for this:

1. The NV+ uses a non-standard power supply, and both of the ones we had at the office eventually burned out, requiring a temporary swap of mine until the data could be retrieved and migrated elsewhere. Mine’s still good, but if it goes…

2. While the firmware has been updated to cope with the most famous SMB security hole, it’s otherwise an ancient version of Debian on a custom SPARC chip, and even with the RAM upgraded to 1GB, it’s painfully slow at serving up files. It has decent write speeds, but when it comes time to get your terabyte of data back off, it takes forever, especially if you’ve got lots of little files.

I figure the copies should finish by the weekend. Maybe. On the bright side, it’s so slow that the Synology has plenty of bandwidth left to handle copies of every other old drive in the house…

Update

After letting it chug along overnight, it’s averaging a steady 2 MB/s. With 500 GB to go, that’s just about 3 more days. This is so ridiculous that I had to double-check that it really is getting a full-duplex gigabit connection and not falling back to something like 10-megabit/half. No, it’s not the network; it’s just that mind-bogglingly slow. When this is all done, I’m going to reset it to factory defaults and do some testing.

Screw it, it’s sneakernet time!

I grabbed a spare 1TB USB drive, formatted it as EXT3, mounted it on the old ReadyNAS, and told it to back up the largest of the volumes (301 GB). It’s rapidly catching up to the aborted rsync job. As a bonus, the built-in backup job uses Perl. 😜

Finished!

The 301 GB sneakernet finished considerably faster than the rsync job, and my other ReadyNAS just took a few hours, so I now have all my eggs in one basket.

And my basket is now running: find . -not -name '.*' -type f -size +4096 -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum to figure out just how much duplication there is in the ~6 TB of files (not counting the 2 TB of Acronis, SuperDuper, and Time Machine images…). I figure there will be at least six copies of this video:

Update: nine copies of it. 😊