It has been a long time since I blogged about the invaludable hard drive reliability data that Backblaze has been publishing quarterly since 2015, so I checked their blog and found ndy Klein’s Star Wars themed Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2022, as well as his fascinating How Long Do Disk Drives Last?. Below the…
I do enjoy reading most of Dave Rosenthal’s blog entries (some are about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship). But occasionally Dave has an outright, practically useful entry on some every day technology. Like hard drives for instance. So today, he’s got the published findings from Cloud back-up soln. provider Backblaze indicating their failure rate on a range of hard drive makes/models. One conclusion I’m keenly aware of is failure rate of HDDs generally (lasting up to 6 yrs. and 9months as a median value). So taking that as the margin of safety, I may now start looking for replacement units to cycle into the mix on that interval, or “slightly” shorter (say 6 yrs and 6 months). Seagate 6TB seems to be the winner overall, and if I try to use it more as a less used, warm storage, maybe that’s good enough. In my case Warm storage might be something I occasionally touch to archive stuff. But I’m not using it for hourly/daily backups (to me that’s hot storage).
Inbound foreign tourists will have to comply with numerous requirements. Earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, while giving a speech in London, pledged his intention to begin opening Japan’s borders this summer, with the eventual goal of making entry into Japan for inbound overseas travelers as smooth as other G7 nations. On Tuesday […]
I guess “something” is better than nothing when it comes to tourism in Japan. But I will not be able to visit under these new restrictions. Looks like I will need to spend another year away from Japan. It will be 3 years away this coming June 2022.
Says Japan’s coronavirus countermeasures have proven successful. Since you’re reading SoraNews24, we’re going to go out on a limb and guess that you’re interested in Japan, and would like to come to the country to see it for yourself. Unfortunately, if you’re a tourist, that hasn’t really been an option for the last two years-plus.…
I haven’t been in Japan since June 2019. I used to travel there at least once a year prior to that. Sometimes traveling two time each year. But now things have changed, Covid19 blocked entry to anyone not on a student or workers visa. Traveling to visit my wife’s family is considered tourism, and not allowed. But that may finally change this Summer 2022, 3 years later. I may get to visit Japan again. Hopefully this will work out, but I guarantee flights will be expensive due to fuel costs. It’s going to cost a lot of money if my wife and I both go this Summer.
This all too true for the community where Arian and I both live. Whether it’s the city or the tightly coupled suburbs (more often suburbs) there’s no so-called “district” wherein residents elect to pay higher property taxes to their town or village for simple accessibility like actual sidewalks, or street lights or even trash collection. I will admit City of Rochester DOES at least do that across the miles and acres within the city limits. But step across that line, and this is what happens, the neglect and cruelty of neighborhood that has elected to forego paying into a “sidewalk district”. Sad, sad, sad.
Reclaim Hosting is extending it’s product offerings to include more generalized Instructional Technology and not just Domain of Ones Own and Reclaim Hosting. It’s that and more. Check it out in the YT video below:
I got married in 2006. It was great, we’d decided to get married on a ski slope in Canada. We flew out with a group of friends, skied around for a week or so, got married on a slope, had drinks and food, skied some more and came home. Piece of cake! Or at least…
And think too about scale. This is not for a one-off, bespoke event instance. Try doing something for 600+ classes being taught across a 150 acre campus. I have one small bit of this repsonsibility, scheduling automated recordings in 50 classrooms and submitting videos for captioning for classes where there are standing accommodation requests. This semester alone we’ve seen an appreciable inflation of recording requests 40 more than last semester. And, during last semester we saw a giant increase from our single most busy semester prior to that Fall 2019 when we had a grand total of 20 scheduled recordings and 1 or 2 classes needing captions. So lets assess this numerically 2019, 20 classes, last semester Fall 2021, 60 classes and now this semester Spring 2022, it’s 100 classes and 15 with accommodation requests needing captions. Needless to say our staff (meaning me, a team of 1) has not grown or increased. And complaining about it doesn’t seem to be motivation for anyone in charge. So until a big disaster occurs, a ball gets dropped, or god-forbid I get sick and have to leave for a time, this all hinges on me. And that’s just for one small fraction of the overall pieces (our Classroom Tech support folks are bearing the brunt of the support and maintenance issues). So yes, think about the growth, try to get ahead of it, otherwise burn-out will occur.
No surprise really that China, who has depended on 5% economic growth every year (or more in the early days), is slowly winding down the wild west, frontier days of their Internet behemoths, Weibo, Tencent and Alibaba. These companies gained dominance, now they can consolidate and cut costs by dumping workers. It’s all about the marginal returns now in China’s cloud services industry.
There are still plenty of remarkable “digital artifacts,” as I thought of them while I was combing through Ukrainian social media posts for Black Square—for instance, a Kyiv rockabilly musician posted a video of himself in his fatigues, crouching in a hallway, singing a song he wrote about Javelin missiles set to the tune of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.”
Reading these lines absolutely breaks my heart in a way Jeff Tweedy and Wilco and Capitol Records could never do. It’s funny and sad duality conveys just how messed and artificially fraught the Russian invasion of Ukraine really is. All Putin need do is tell the troops to pull out and this misery has at least slowed down a bit instead of continuing to rise along some asymptotic wall going to infinity. Every individual Sophie Pinkham mentions is a novel and essay unto themselves, universes dwell there. The only upside is the misery and despondency of barrel bombs and endless destruction of buildings/apartment blocks hasn’t reached the scale of Syria. Let’s hope it doesn’t ever get that far.
Yes luggage rolly-wheels do suck stringy fibres up into them. I also notice this with office chairs too. One could build a wig out of all the human hair wrapped around the axles of all the Herman Miller chairs in the offices where I work.
But the way I came upon it was via a discussion between educators at UW-Bothell, who are trying to adopt more “open technologies” for teaching. Alternate paths to the Learning Management System are desired, in an effort to make learning and the process of learning more visible, less containerized and siloed generally. There’s an interesting talk shared by Jim Groom of a short presentation he gave on a historic antecedent to educational blogs, digital scholarship that was termed “Eduglu”. Link to that blog post + video is here:
My attempt to embed a link on WordPress.com isn’t working. But the link from here should work.
Within that talk right near the end, Chris Lott steps in and talks about the behaviors, phenomenon occurring when open tools are used and a community or interactive space builds up around them. The “hope” is a Ray Oldenberg-like 3rd space will manifest itself. The 3rd space is numerically located after 1.) Home and 2.) Work. It’s the space where you can engage communally with neighbors, locals, it’s not exclusive or private. However it’s not virtual and that’s vitally important, as even Ray Oldenburg points out in this interview with Steelcase.com (the office furniture manufacturers – who BTW are heavily invested in non-virtual offices).
So Steelcase were really trying to get expert opinion that supports their business of equipping physical offices in rented/leased buildings managed by property owners. It’s a by-product of capitalism as practiced in the 20th Century, as-is Ray’s book about 3rd places. Without the suburb, the office, why do we need a 3rd place? It really calls into question the whole “system”, and who is it really benefiting? Suburbs were places that took in people escaping cities (wealthy white people), offices existed for the benefit of housing the white collar workers who smoothed the daily transactions of business, even as that became automated (more whiteness). So who are the target market for 3rd spaces? It’s most likely privileged white folks who need an escape from home and work and a greater need for belonging outside those 2 spheres. I think I would elect instead to simplify and pare down. I don’t need no stinking 3rd space to further compartmentalize or double my personality into work self, home self and 3rd place selves.
Instead I would rather re-integrate and become whole again and be myself in one space, and that would leave the Home. That sounds a little insular, selfish and self-centered I know. But I have been able to experiment with that a bit while working from home temporarily from March 2020 to August 2021. And I hope to get more chances to work from home in future too. That to me is the best compromise of all. And gives me all the places I need. It’s enough, ’twill do.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 