Hawaii - Going To

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, June 21, 2021.

I flew with family on Southwest. We took three flights. The first was from Tulsa International Airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada. The airport actually is in Paradise, Nevada. Flight SWA1746 was 2 hours and 40 minutes long. The second was from McCarran to Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport in San Jose, California. Flight SWA974 was 1 hour and 15 minutes long. We picked up the last party member in San Jose. Then we flew from San Jose to Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keahole. Flight SWA768 was 5 hours and 43 minutes long.

The planes were a Boeing 737 Max 8, a Boeing 737-700, and a Boeing 737-800. Of the three planes, the 737-700 is too small. The 737-800 was too small for the five-hour flight to Hawaii. All of the flights were full or nearly full.

Photos will be in a separate post.

©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


Possible Factorio Gameplay Series

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, June 8, 2021.

I am thinking about recording a series of gameplay videos of Factorio. It will probably be a modded series. Likely based around Krastorio 2. To save time I will not restart my current play-through. Thus it will start halfway through.

©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


Lenovo Thinkpad X120e - Windows 10 Pro

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, June 7, 2021.

First, a surprise. It actually works. I do not mean that it barely works. It runs reasonably well. As least as well as Xubuntu 21.04 did. It is still slow. The X120e has 4GB of DDR3 memory, and it has a dual-core 1.6GHz processor. It was never going to win any performance awards. Right now, my biggest complaint is the screen size and resolution. I want a 15.6-inch 1920x1080 display on it. The 11.6-inch 1366x768 display on here is way too small for doing a lot of work.

©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


Update to Reasonable Options for Backing Up a Nas in 2021

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Wednesday, May 26, 2021.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the options boiled down to tape or an external hard drive. I chose to use an external hard drive. So far, that option is working okay if I ignore the fourteen to fifteen-hour-long initial syncs of the drives.

At a sustained write speed of one hundred and fifty-two megabytes per second, the entire NAS pool takes nearly fourteen hours to sink initially. I doubt I can get sustained write speeds much higher without spending several thousand dollars. I am not even sure if they make seven Tebibyte SSDs.

A Tebibyte is the base two version of a Terabyte. Excluding storage device sizes Tebibytes and Terabytes are identical. However, the difference is why a formatted storage device is always smaller than its listed capacity. The formated capacity is given in Tebibytes, but the listed capacity is in Terabytes.

That one hundred and fifty-two megabytes per second write speed translates to a wire speed of 1.275 Gigabits per second on the USB 3 bus, which is pretty reasonable for a mechanical hard drive using the full performance options available on USB 3.

©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


Current Thoughts on PHP 8.0 and Wordpress

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, May 18, 2021.

Right now, I am testing this blog on PHP 8.0;

So far, migration hasn’t been that big of a problem. Well, save some issues with passwords. I am not sure if the PHP native hash plugin, PHP 8.0, or a combination of the two is the issue.

I have got it fixed, however. So far, I am enjoying using WebAuthn instead of the normal login procedure. I will probably do a separate post over it.

©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


New Phone

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Sunday, May 16, 2021.

After four years of good service, the battery on my iPhone 8+ finally got to the point it needed replacing. After reviewing the options and expecting my new phone to survive for four more years. I decided to get the 256GB iPhone 12 Max.

The bigger screen is excellent. However, it is taking some adjusting to.

©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


Reasonable Options for Backing Up a Nas in 2021

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, April 26, 2021.

What are your reasonable options for backing up a 16TB NAS in 2021?

External Hard Drive?

Pros:

Cons:

Tape?

Pros:

Cons:

©2021 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


Fifth Two Week Posting Challenge Review

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Thursday, October 8, 2020.

I missed the fifth two weeks outright and only got a few articles in during the fourth two weeks. Adjusting over to my new job has been difficult. A lack of non political topics really hasn’t helped either.

©2020 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


Matomo Impressive and Useful

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Tuesday, September 22, 2020.

I discussed migrating from Google Analytics and Jetpack to Matomo in a previous post. Though I haven’t used it for a significant amount of time I am finding it very useful.

There are two ways you can self-host Matomo. As a plugin for WordPress or as an independent web application. The WordPress plugin is the most accessible and most straightforward option for analytics on one WordPress installation. However, if you administer more than one website, the dedicated web application is a better option.

The only real difficulty I ran into was getting GeoIP working. That is due primarily to a lack of Debian packages for the correct PHP extension and no clear subheadings for system managed updates of the GeoIP databases.

#Assuming Matomo installed at /var/www/html/matomo
#Assuming geoipupdate places the databases in /usr/share/GeoIP/
cd /var/www/html/matomo/misc/
for DB in `ls /usr/share/GeoIP/*.mmdb`
do
ln -s /usr/share/GeoIP/$DB ./
done
#All .mmdb databases are now linked to the system databases updated by geoipupdate.

©2020 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved


Explanation for the Absence

Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, September 21, 2020.

I spent last week working on passing my Life Provider exam for Oklahoma. I have now passed it. It will take another week to get my license but I will be a licensed life insurance agent soon.

©2020 Robert R. Russell — All rights reserved