Weeknotes 131

Another year almost over. Happy New Year.

Ben Sheldon wrote up his first impressions of Solid Queue now it has been released. tl;dr; He likes it.

Good Job, like Solid Queue, uses the database to persist jobs. I keep hearing variations on “a database is not a queue”. The majority of apps are not Shopify, so get a grip.

GoodJob is easy mode just targeting Postgres, because there are Advisory Locks and lots of Postgres-only niceties. I do not envy Solid Queue being multi-database, because it has to implement a bunch of stuff with a coarser toolbox.

This was what I was interested in too.

Upgrading GitHub.com to MySQL 8.0 – GitHub have 8000 MySQL hosts! Scale of this magnitude is hard for me to fathom.

You’re Supposed To Be Glad Your Tesla Is A Brittle Heap Of Junk

Look, pal, all I can tell you is that I don’t know how to make the thing I sold you at great expense.

😆

I’ve been attempting to securely wipe my old disks. It’s a lot more faff than you might think.

DBAN used to be the defacto way to wipe data from disks, but it is unmaintained, and apparently nwipe is the hot new thing. The easiest way to get nwipe going seemed to be to creatable a Shredos USB stick and boot from that, which I successfully did.

I knew the process was going to be time-consuming, and I didn’t want to tie up my main computer whilst it was going on so I decided to hook up the drives to a separate PC for the duration. This was wise. Even at the lowest security setting, which just writes zeroes to the disk, it is estimated to take 40 hours!

At least I managed to hook up two disks at once. One via the new USB interface I bought recently, and the other directly via SATA cable. Strangely the USB interface seems faster, which I was not expecting. Computers are weird.

Flying Toasters CSS via Anatoly Shashkin.

Christina Warren takes are look at GitHub’s custom M1 macOS runners.

I don’t know why but it surprised me that they transplant the innards of a Mac Mini to a rack compatible “sled”.

The Orion/HDMI capture combo is not working out to be as handy as I’d originally hoped. I hooked it up to a PC it doesn’t seem to show any output until it reaches Windows, which isn’t very helpful when you’re trying to get into the BIOS :-/

I’m not sure where the problem lies; it could be something PC related. And let’s face it, that’s fairly likely.

Have I done any more experimenting with jsonb columns in Postgres? You won’t believe this, no. I haven’t.

The Winterkeeper – I enjoyed this mini-documentary about Yellowstone national park.

Steven Fuller is a winter caretaker who has lived at Yellowstone national park for the past 50 years. As the cold weather approaches and the seasonal transformation begins, he hunkers down in his remote mountain cabin. But Fuller and Yellowstone face an uncertain future, with the climate crisis threatening to forever change one of North America’s last great wildernesses

Adam Buxton had Daudi Matsiko on this podcast recently and I just got around to listening today. This is lovely. Enjoy!