I have a magic number.
It’s been a number that I invented as part of an experience with a scientific calculator when I was in the 8th grade (circa 1994-1995). The calculator I possessed had the ability to convert between different number bases, specifically between decimal, binary, octal, and hexadecimal. Being the child I was I saw potential with using the calculators hexadecimal alphabet and writing letters and numbers together.
Read MoreAround October of 2021 I was running out of disk space on my 6TB hard drive that I had acquired back on November 2015, so I decided to upgrade to the newest and greatest storage solutions of all time: 14TB of block storage! I went ahead and purchased a WD Elements 14TB USB 3.0 external hard drive, proceeded to format it down and get it ready for storing all my useful content.
From October 2021 to July 2025 I completely filled that volume up, and just recently hit the 100% usage. What to do? By the looks of the graph I figured that out without having to delete any files…
A minor adventure, yet one worth documenting. I’ve been wanting to get MariaDB updated on my VPS for the longest of time but do it in a way with precompiled binaries so I have some control over what I run and, if needed, some flexibility with versions without having to dnf/yum/apt-get things in and out.
To note I tested this on my test machine running 4.18.0-348 and it wasn’t quite happy with getting 11.8.2 rolled out onto it. I realized that the home test machine is a bit old so I had to defer to 10.11.13. Once that was all done I fired up a virtual Rocky9 host running 5.14.0-* and, with the same instructions with the test machine successfully got 11.8.2 slammed on that with no data loss.
Another “Today I Learned”, except I was more “doing” than learning. Back in 2024 I was happy to find that the camera I invested in to monitor my kids doing homework back in the COVID days supported RTSP. I made a note to see if I can take it a bit farther, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the DCS-8526LH was eating Micro-SD cards and I was losing valuable information I wouldn’t be where I’m at now.
Enter the “Home DVR”…
Read MorePreviously on Optimizing Video: 2021 Honda Odyssey RES I had a beautiful ffmpeg 1-liner to convert videos to “space-saving-letterbox-loving-USB-sized” videos to be played on my Vehicles Entertainment System. Unfortunately, some of the videos continued to fail to play to the point where the system would reset and would need me to cycle the vehicles power to cold reboot the entertainment system.
Suffice to write it’s led to much trial-and-error, with much more excitement on success.
Read More