joedid

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Lack of vision or lack of money - A TrueNAS RAIDZ expansion story.

As I sit here and watch rsync create another 10TB copy of my data for the fourth time in the last week, I'm thinking about how this could have gone differently and it's unclear as I write this if the problem was me. This is my experience converting my 4 drive mirror vdev into a 6 drive raidz2 on my TrueNAS server in my home while I work around the typical problems with a hobby, limited resources. As a home user, with a healthy paranoia of data loss, I need to be more efficient with the drives I have and a 50% loss with a mirror was proving too much. I'm going to start at the beginning so when I read this back in a few years, I remember the pain. A year ago I set up a TrueNAS Scale for the first time, and created clever names for my pools like "Isla Nublar" (Jurassic Park reference) and "Top Secret". These names have spaces and capitalization and for over a year had driven me crazy in the CLI. Also at the time, and this is the larger of the two problems, ...

Falling for Fun or Failing for Free?

My mission, to create a wall mounted toy with bottles of liquid and beads. Sensory toys can be an important part of a child's development as it helps children engage in focused learning and play. I was asked by a teacher friend to build on her concept of a wall mounted bottle filled with oils, water and objects that when rotated would fall and move. I was uncertain of how to accomplish these goals, but how could I possibly resist the challenge. The design must meet these objectives, but as anyone with children knows - durability must also be a consideration. I also did not want it to appear as I made it from a bunch of junk I had laying around. It started with a Smartwater bottle filled with oil and water, glitter and beads with the cap glued shut. These bottles are huge, heavy and tall - not ideal for a wall toy but I have to start somewhere. I also did not want an individual mount for each one as there would be 3 total, and an estimated minimum of 12 holes in the wall. I p...

Messier Marathon

Recently, we attempted the Messier marathon at the observatory. It was my first time hearing this term, and goal is to find as many of the 110 galaxies, nebulae and star clusters as possible during one night. Charles Messier was a Friend astronomer who cataloged these objects referenced by their Messier numbers. Taking astronomy photos on this night was a new experience for me and it combined two things I love, astronomy and photography. A funny part about the Messier Catalog itself is that it was created as a way to label objects that were not comets, which is what he was hunting for in the night sky. When I arrived, it was slightly before dusk and there was enough light to assemble my Seestar S50 on a tripod and my Pixel 6 on another. A few planets were visible already but the goal was to take 3-5 minute exposures of the deep sky objects that frustrated Charlie. It was my first time using the Seestar for an extended period of time and so some of this evening was spent experiment...

Can I spot the sun?

Since the nights have been so cold and snowy - I chose a sunny day to test out the solar filter included with the Seestar. A feature I knew existed but had no interested in until I saw the sunspots in a photo I took. I'm honestly amazed that I was able to capture sunspots from a pretty basic experiment with the equipment. I picked a quiet parking lot of a park near a river to enjoy a 28 degree day but with the sun it felt like 70, in a relative sense compared to every other day this winter. Calibrating the compass is no problem but I was having trouble with the leveling - you don't realize how uneven the world is until your trying to make something bubble level. There has to be a better way than adjusting each leg and hoping you got it right and this was what I found. A leveling device that can be easily adjusted at the top of the tripod. For this photo, I was able to zoom in but that added complexity with the wind now being a factor so I believe that's part of ...

I finally own a telescope.

It was a day to splurge, and I am now the proud owner of a telescope (of sorts). I have been obsessed with trying to determine what type of telescope I should buy. Each research session led me in a different direction, with different goals and a price that kept increasing. Normally when this happens, it just ends up being a few weeks of research and obsession before I realize I don't have the time or resources to act on my impulses but this day was different. The dilemma I faced dealt with a question, do I want to take photos of the sky, or do I want to use my eyeballs to look. It turns out, those are not easily done with the same piece of equipment. I often end up in a situation where my inexperience won't allow me to pick a path forward and at some point in my life I realized that means I need to simplify the goal. This resets my expectations of going all in to just dipping my toe into the hobby and so I've settled on a Seestar S50 digital telescope which allows me to t...

A better home server - NAS software trials

I currently have a very old desktop computer, in a free scratch and dent case I was given from a scrap pile. There are so many hard drives jammed into every nook, even though the case is only designed to support two additional drives. This is the server that holds my data, ISO's and backups, photos and archives from family and friends computers stored in encrypted archives. It holds recorded video and home movies I've converted from VHS to video files, moments from video games, group calls and voicemails from elderly family members. I think it's time to make an upgrade. To start, I needed a backup solution - this isn't going to be a horror story so I'll cut to the chase and state that I purchased a QNAP 4 bay DAS so I can shove some drives in there and create a second copy of my most important data. The server currently runs windows 10, but maintaining it is a nightmare, and its end of support will be here before I know it. It's not even the Pro version. Now t...