Over the past year, I’ve been on my own Rust journey. I started with a couple of small prototypes and worked through parts of The Rust Book. That led to experimental features in projects at work, which have now evolved into foundational libraries written in the language. I hope to eventually write a lot more about that.

In addition to the technical benefits of the language, Rust has been fun, and it has made me a much better software developer and systems designer. That’s probably worth another post as well. Someday. Maybe.^[1]

One of the biggest reasons is the satisfaction of owning and holding a physical thing. Even though I’m not currently listening directly to the discs,^[1] I do enjoy the tactical part of the experience. Scavenging at second-hand book and record stores can be pretty exciting - you never know what you might or what might catch your eye. We’ve found some gems in the local bins.

I’ve also had great luck on eBay. Since I’m primarily collecting for ownership, I can concede on the condition of the case, inserts, etc. as long as the disc is intact. That’s yielded some great deals.

I purchased a three-disc lot of Liquid Soul albums on eBay last week and they showed up today. I already owned one of the albums, but the price for the set of three was too good to pass up.

When I unpacked the discs, I noticed a notch in the spine of one of the cases.

I inspected everything closely, and all the discs looked like they were in good shape. In fact, the cases were all much better than I was expecting… except for that notch.

Out of curiousity, I went back and looked at the original listing, and the photo clearly shows the notch.

Since I’m primarily collecting for ownership, the notch didn’t really bother me, but I was still curious, so I started Googling.

Fortunately, someone on r/whatisthisthing asked the same question a few years ago, and the answer is: it’s a cut-out

Cut-outs are typically wholesaled to retailers as non-returnable items, meaning that the store cannot send them back to the distributor for a refund. The marking also serves to prevent the retailer from attempting to sell the discounted item at the original full price.
…
Except for the physical damage to the liner notes and/or outer case, the actual disc (LP or CD) is generally unharmed by the cut-out process, and sounds exactly the same as the originally sold recording.

Huh. Well… today I learned!

Back Side

Spine

Front

Don’t let my cut-out copy lead you to believe these albums aren’t great - they’re fantastic. Stream them on your platform of choice and hear for yourself.

• Liquid Soul - Here’s the Deal
• Liquid Soul - Self Titled
• Make Some Noise isn’t available on streaming platforms,^[2] so check out their take on Salt Peanuts/Chocolate Covered Nut

This year, Santa brought me a set of big speakers and a receiver for our living room. It’s the setup I’ve wanted for years - primarily to be used for listening to music. Since our living room is open to other parts of the house, music played there easily fills our primary living spaces.

We have a couple of kids who are starting to get in to music - as avid performers and listeners. They’re individually exploring their own musical tastes, while also sharing in some of our family favorites. For a while, we’ve been trying to enjoy communal listening experiences, especially as the kids discover new sub-genres and artists and want to share. Before the new living room system, these (brief) sessions were usually AirPlayed through a HomePod Mini in our kitchen… not exactly a stellar experience.

Our music primarily comes from Spotify, and we’ve recently settled in to a family plan. Everyone has their own profile, allowing them to build their own libraries and feed the AI recommendation beast separately. I also have a collection of digital purchases and ripped media I enjoy with Jellyfin, but that’s a different blog post.

Spotify is mired in controversy, but the alternative was very disappointing, so it’s what we use.

Listening Together

Spotify Connect is what drives the integration in many smart devices. TVs, speakers, and other Spotify-enabled gadgets (like my Onkyo receiver) have a built-in Spotify client that streams audio directly from their servers.

Unlike AirPlay, where data passes through another device (either an iPhone or Macintosh), data is delivered directly from Spotify’s servers to the playback device. The Spotify apps shift into a remote-control mode transparently, as if it was playing audio locally. That makes it easy to use either the phone or desktop apps to control music on the stereo.^[1]

With Spotify’s Jam feature, it’s also possible to share the queue of these playback sessions, allowing anyone who is participating to add, skip, or control tracking on songs in the queue. Participants can use their own device, so their libraries (including favorite albums, songs, and playlists) are readily available and can easily be referenced when adding music to the shared playback queue.

This really comes to life when you have multiple people sitting down and enjoying music together. They’re able to use their own phones to choose what’s next, and be inspired by what’s playing right now.

It’s pretty cool, and it Just Works.

The Internet of (Dumb) Things

Folks who have known me a while might be surprised that I connected my receiver to the internet. I’m not a fan of services and devices that unnecessarily decay over time because of the diverging needs of users and businesses. As more manufacturers subsidize low-cost electronics with on-device advertising and analytics, I try to avoid purchasing those devices. When I can’t avoid it (like TVs), I simply don’t connect them to a network.

I just don’t think everything needs an IP address. I’ve come to really prefer what have become colloquially known as “dumb” devices - those without network capabilities that retain their original design, function, and performance.

I’ve opted to not connect my Onkyo receiver to the internet. Like I’ve done with my TVs in the past, I’m leaving it off my home network, and instead connecting devices to it I have more trust and confidence in (and that I can easily remove or replace).

For Spotify Connect, the device I’m using is a Raspberry Pi 3B.

Wait… what? 👀

Raspotify To The Rescue

It probably deserves its own post, but the TL;DR version of my solution is that I installed Raspotify on a Raspberry Pi connected to my receiver.

Raspotify is powered by librespot, an open source implementation of the Spotify Connect receiver. Installation is fairly straight-forward for those who are comfortable in a Linux/Unix command line environment, and things work pretty well out of the box.

When it’s up and running, it behaves just like a device with Spotify built-in. It shows up in the Spotify apps, and can be accessed by any Spotify Premium user on the same local network.^[2]

I’ve opted to do some customization to the service. The audio level that comes out of the 3.5mm audio jack on my Raspberry Pi was much weaker than other devices I tested.^[3] After confirming the output levels were properly maxed out in alsamixer, I switched to the HDMI port on the Raspberry Pi, which required a simple update to the /etc/raspotify/conf file:

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LIBRESPOT_DEVICE="hdmi:CARD=vc4hdmi,DEV=0"

I used the following command to figure out which devices librespot was able to detect, then dropped the identifier into the config above:

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$ librespot -d ?

After that change (and tracking down a suitable HDMI cable), things worked great.

Nerding Out

Of course, I had to nerd out a bit. librespot supports event notifications by calling a provided executable whenever when events fire in the service. There are quite a few different types of events produced, so I started experimenting.

I created a script at /usr/local/bin/librespot-event.sh, made it executable, and updated /etc/raspotify/conf with the following:

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LIBRESPOT_ONEVENT=/usr/local/bin/librespot-event.sh

After some initial experimentation with simple things like piping env to logger and peeking at the values, I realized there were a lot of possibilities (and quite a bit of potential complexity). After some Googling, I stumbled on this Python script with some thorough logic around event types that produced JSON accordingly.

Then it clicked! I could publish that JSON on my local MQTT broker, making the data accessible to other integrations in my home. However, I wasn’t excited about futzing with python, and liked the idea of keeping things in a shell script.

Soooo… I asked ChatGPT to convert the python to bash and use jq for the JSON parts. It did it almost perfectly, and I asked for a simple correction, which it was successful in making.

After that, I added some environment variables for MQTT and watched the events start flowing through my network.

Here’s my librespot-event.sh script if you’re interested in taking a look.

And here’s what some of the events look like when I subscribe with mosquitto_sub

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{
  "event_time": "2024-12-24 23:05:30",
  "event": "track_changed",
  "common_metadata_fields": {
    "item_type": "Track",
    "track_id": "06jYhkarVbcRsKcQaTZXJz",
    "uri": "spotify:track:06jYhkarVbcRsKcQaTZXJz",
    "name": "Winter Blessings",
    "duration_ms": "250713",
    "is_explicit": "false",
    "language": [
      "zxx",
    ],
    "covers": [
      "https://i.scdn.co/image/ab67616d0000b27306afd8641a8e72354c5b01eb",
      "https://i.scdn.co/image/ab67616d00001e0206afd8641a8e72354c5b01eb",
      "https://i.scdn.co/image/ab67616d0000485106afd8641a8e72354c5b01eb",
    ]
  },
  "track_metadata_fields": {
    "number": "1",
    "disc_number": "1",
    "popularity": "63",
    "album": "Winter Blessings",
    "artists": [
      "The Three Queens",
    ],
    "album_artists": [
      "The Three Queens",
    ]
  }
}

I’m not doing anything with the events right now, but I can envision a bunch of different things for the future.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it - our roundabout way of getting Spotify Connect on a receiver that has the capability natively. 🙃

If you have any questions or ideas, I’m always happy to chat. You can find me at @thaddeus@mastodon.social or other places online.

Features

The app is deceptively simple, with just a handful of launch features:

• Live streaming for tens-of-thousands of stations around the world
• Automatic song identification: artist, track, and artwork display
• Song playback history, with links to view in Apple Music
• Personalized station catalog, with a global, searchable database of stations, as well as the ability to add custom URLs, artwork, and station information
• Station sync across devices through iCloud
• System integration with Siri and Now Playing controls

In some ways, it’s a little embarrassing to talk about how long it took to go from the idea to this week’s launch. I’ve previously written about the story behind BMBX. If you read that post, it becomes clear pretty quickly that it definitely isn’t a Ninety Days app.

When I step back and think about the journey, however, it’s a good example of how difficult it is to create minimal, simple products. There are dozens of subtle decisions that contributed to the minimalistic experience that BMBX presents, as well as a lot of behind-the-scenes details that make things look simple, when they’re really not.

That work took time: hundreds of test builds, lots of feedback from friends and TestFlight users, and dozens of sketches, stickies, and shower thoughts to land on the simple experince that BMBX 1.0 is.

Also… life gets in the way of hobbies. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Price

The hardest part of getting the app released was non-technical: it was pricing.^[2]

I believe software is valuable. Digital experiences have been devastatingly commoditized by venture capital, advertisers, and mega corporations that use loss-leaders to build their enterprises. These behaviors distort user expectations of software and the value users place on it.

I knew BMBX wasn’t going to be a source of meaningful revenue for me. I’ve had apps that made interesting money, but even those weren’t “quit your day job” money, and radio streaming is already a commoditized space. I also really didn’t want BMBX to be motivated by money. I built it because I wanted it to exist, and believed others would enjoy and appreciate it as well.

So that’s why BMBX is free.

In some ways, this feels really fair. The content the app delivers doesn’t cost me anything personally. Everything is publicly available online, and the database powering the station discovery is a community-supported effort. Syncing and initial station catalog features are driven by iCloud, so I don’t have any server costs associated with running the app.

The app is definitely standing on a lot of shoulders.

But I also believe there’s value in what I’ve created: a simple, elegant streaming app for music that integrates with my phone’s features, and brings some unique features to the table. And it’s a strong foundation to build out other features.

Some of those features will require some kind of purchase. More on that another day.

What’s Next

For now, I’m enjoying having released a new app after taking a break for a couple years. I’ve started working on a couple of bug fixes based on user feedback, and have started sketching out more concrete ideas for features I kept in the backlog for 1.0.

The backlog also includes quite a few ideas about some blog posts I want to share. I learned quite a bit during the development of the app, and built some ideas in the project code I think others might find interesting.

Thanks to everyone who has tested the app, and shared feedback and ideas along the way. It’s been a blast to build, and I’m looking forward to continuing to work on it. It’s an app I use every day, which makes it easy to stay enthusiastic about it’s improvement.

… thought leaders are in full force with quips like, "it will be really easy to be left behind.

That’s gatekeeping, and it’s a lie.

I was thinking specifically about the growing hype around AI when I wrote that. While the hype hasn’t subsided, it has become clear to most people that the large language and diffusion models that constitute the “artificial intelligence” space right now are increasingly approachable. The notion of “prompt engineering” as a required skill will soon vanish.^[1]

This week’s future of computing

That post came to mind this week when tech attention shifted to Apple’s Vision Pro, which customers began receiving a couple days ago.

There’s some reality distortion happening; others have been in the mixed-reality space for a long time, but Apple is receiving a substantial amount of credit for creating something very different. Admittedly, their first efforts are impressive, and offer a glimpse of new computing paradigms. However, they’re hardly the first in this space, and the barrier to entry is staggeringly high for most people.

Tim Cook says it’s tomorrow’s technology today.

The problem I have with Tim’s assertion is that it implies it is the only technology - that spatial computing is the future. It’s absolutely going to be an interesting part of the future, but spatial computing will not be the singular experience for computing.

Ask ambient computing how that worked out.

Not left behind

The second, larger issue, I have with the topic is that there’s a push (even within indie developer circles) to make sure your app experiences are customized for this new platform. The prompt being, you don’t want your users to not be able to experience your app in a spatial environment.

Here, the implication is that you’ll either miss out on critical sales, or that other experiences will steal the attention of current or prospective users and you’ll never have a chance to win their usage or business.

In that post I go on to say:

“Imagine being 10 years old right now, and having some old dude say, you need to learn [tech of the day] or you’ll be left behind.”

That’s not how technology works. You can join at any time, with any past experience, and start learning something new. There’s a place for you.

There’s still going to be a place for you. It’s okay to sit on the sidelines for the first round and be a spectator.^[2]

The Macintosh was 28 years old when I started my first professional job targeting the platform. Against all odds, I managed to learn enough to be paid a healthy salary doing that work, in spite of being born just months before the Macintosh was released.

Don’t sweat it. You won’t be left behind when the future of computing arrives.

For example, may websites today (including my own blog), require the use of HTTPS connections. This is a fairly standard practice across the internet today, but for older browsers like Safari on OS X Tiger, this is a problem. The SSL protocols supported in that browser are no longer used by most modern webservers due to vulnerabilities that are mitigated in newer versions.

When you try and load a modern website over HTTPS in an old version of Safari, you’re greeted with an error message like this:

Safari can’t open the page “https://th.adde.us” beacuse it couldn’t establish a secure connection to the server “th.adde.us”.

An Idea

While I was setting up a network connection on the G4 yesterday, I took a detour through a couple of the lesser-visited tabs like AppleTalk, reminscing about days of old. Then the Proxies tab triggered an idea.

What if I set up a proxy on my local network that handled HTTPS, and then provided an insecure interface for the iMac to connect to?

… in effect making it possible for the old version of Safari to communicate with modern web servers?

After a few minutes of Googling, I found a fork of macproxy, a Python script that implements a simple proxy that does exactly what I had in mind.

Macproxy Docker Image

To be totally honest, Python is kind of a mess these days (IMHO). I always seem to have the wrong version on my system, a messed up virtualenv, or some other kind of compatibility drama. Like Ruby, Python feels really complicated if you don’t use it every day, so I try and avoid it for the most part.

Since I use python so infrequently and Macproxy has pretty clean requirements (python3 and a small handful of modules), it seemed like a good candidate for a container. I’ve been using Docker a lot recently at work to deal with these kinds of scenarios and it’s been wonderful.^[1]

So I wrote a Dockerfile.

I ran the proxy on my Macbook Air for a few minutes with Docker and tested it with the iMac. It worked great, and I was pretty excited. But I didn’t really want to run the proxy on my laptop all the time.

I really wanted to be able to (easily) run it from my Synology NAS.

So I published an image on Docker Hub.

With the image published, I was able to simply search the Docker registry for my image, which I could then Download right in the Synology Docker app.

Once downloaded, creating a local container with the image is a breeze.

By default, the proxy listens for connections on port 5000. My Docker image supports passing command line args to the script through the PROXY_ARGS environment variable, but I’m opting to map port 5000 to 8081 on my NAS.^[2]

iMac Configuration

With the image published and a container running on my local network, I turned to finalizing configuration on the iMac.

For the Web Proxy (HTTP) Server, I specified the hostname of my NAS (storage.local)^[3], as well as the port number I’d mapped to the container (8081). With this configuration applied, the iMac will now send web requests from Safari through the NAS using an insecure connection^[4]. The proxy will relay requests to the upstream host via HTTPS, then modify the responses it receives and send them back to the iMac.

Success! 🎉

Macproxy also strips a handful of HTML tags and modifies the source a bit with help from the BeautifulSoup module, so most pages look fairly vanilla, but they’re usually somewhat usable (especially when a solid document hierarchy is in place with basic HTML).

With this in place, I was able to download a copy of LineIn from Rogue Amoeba’s Legacy page without having to use modern devices.

Now it’s time to find a copy of my blog from 2004.

Long live Web 1.0.

A few months ago, my friend Jeff asked if I’d be interested in one. I couldn’t believe it, and jumped at the chance.

The fact that I let a G4 iMac slip away has bothered me for years, especially as my nostolgia has deepened. The “lamp shade” has become more than just an iconic version of that product line - it’s a reflection of how provocative Apple was at the time. The G4 iMac was originally released in January of 2002, not even three full months after the first iPod, so it very much embodies what really made Apple special back then.

The harsh reality, though, was the Macintosh product line was lagging behind in terms of performance, especially for desktop systems. The web was starting to become more complex and applications were much more sophisticated, so even casual users demanded more speed. Just as the PowerPC was running out of steam, Intel and AMD were in an arms race.

Apple knew it, and famously released Intel-based products in 2006.^[2]

Hardware Updates

This iMac is in incredible condition, but even the most cared-for devices need some maintenance after 20 years. Fortunately, there’s a large community of enthusiasts that are interested in maintaining these devices, so aftermarket parts are abundant.

When this computer was built, the AirPort card was an optional upgrade, but the lack of ubiquitous wifi made them fairly uncommon features to include. Fortunately, they’re easy to come by these days on eBay, and an easy upgrade to complete thanks to the pre-populated antenna cable. I was happy to see the user-accessible RAM slot was occupied, bringing this system to 768 MB of RAM. Curiously, these machines use both 200-pin and 184-pin RAM modules. I’d love to know the story about that decision.

Battery

When I gave the computer an initial test run after bringing it home, the operating system complained about an incorrect system time, so I knew the battery was probably drained and ordered a replacement. This was an easy bit of maintenance work since I was already deep inside the computer.

I was fortunate to find these 1/2 AA batteries, which are almost identical to the originals.

Hard Drive

Jeff gave me a heads up that the hard drive was failing, so I knew I’d need to do some work on the machine. Hard drive replacement is one of the trickiest jobs on these computers, but it also gives you such a deep appreciation for the integrated design required for these systems since it takes you pretty deep into the machine. I ordered a 500 GB drive with an IDE adapter and mounting sled from MacSales.

The drive installed pretty easily, but definitely wasn’t designed specifically for this application. Here are a few quirks I ran in to:

• The sled’s mounting holes don’t align with standard 3.5" IDE side-mount locations, so I was only able to attach it with two screws.
• The IDE-to-SATA adapter board is compact, but is slightly taller than the IDE drive it is meant to replace. The clearances are pretty close, especially since the IDE ribbon cable loops upward - which isn’t a problem with the original drive, since the connector is on the bottom of the back.
• There’s a bit of excess wire for the power connections, and they could potentially wander up into the fan in the top of the computer. I opted to tape them down to the sled after a few test fits, just to be safe.

Software

Since all of this surgery has to be done with the patient face-down, it isn’t clear how you’d do any testing without reassembling… so I buttoned everything back up and hoped for the best.

Jeff was kind enough to share a handful of discs with the iMac, including installers for Puma (10.1) and Tiger (10.4). My plan was to run Tiger, so that’s the disc I inserted first. The installer launched (after powering up and holding down the C key). However, when it came time to select an installation target disk, the installer beachballed. I tried a few times, with the same result. After a few failed attempts, restarted again, booted from the installation media, and then launched Disk Utility, hoping I could just format the drive and then proceed. Unfortunately, Disk Utility also beachballed when it attempted to detect the disk.

At that point, I started to worry the disk was bad, or that I’d messed something up.

On whim, I swapped the Tiger disk for Puma and tried again. Amazingly, the installer breezed right through. The system rebooted, and a few minutes later I found myself staring at a clean 10.1.5 installation.

I was really impressed that Puma correctly identified the capacity of the drive. I wish I would have spent a few more minutes poking around; I’ve never actually used Puma… my first in-depth Mac OS X experiences were on 10.3, so it would have been fun to look around for a few minutes.

Instead, I was feeling energized, so I tossed the Tiger disk back in and ran the installer from inside Puma. It gave me the option of either moving the current system folder to the side or formatting the drive. The Previous System Folder feature is one of those Mac OS things that was always enviable as a Windows user, but I opted to format the drive to see what would happen.

Thankfully, the Tiger installer worked correctly this time, and I was running 10.4 about 20 minutes later.

Testing

Obviously the first thing I did was text my pal Mario and share my excitement. We were able to sign in to a Jabber server^[3] and enjoy the beautiful iChat UI like it was the mid-2000s all over again. I also installed iLife '04, in anticipation of this machine’s upcoming workload.

After some silly chats, it was time to move the iMac back into my home office and give it a test drive for its real purpose: capturing home movies from VHS tapes.

It seems a little counter-intuitive to be using a machine this old to be doing a task that is easiliy accomplished on more modern hardware, but that’s a story for another time.

So there it is - a revived G4 iMac. A few things I was surprised by along the way:

1. Mac OS has supported larger disk volumes for a long time. HFS+ (or Mac OS Extended) file systems supported unthinkably-large disks back in the early 2000s. 10.0 - 10.1.5 supported up to 2 TB, 10.2 supported 8 TB, 10.3 was 16 TB, and 10.4 was a staggering 8 EB.
2. Spinning drives hurt our computing experience more than we realized. I’ve known this to be true for a long time, and comparing a failing 3.5" IDE drive to an SSD isn’t fair… but this computer is so snappy now.
3. I’m increasingly frustrated by how much e-waste we produce through the incessant upgrade cycles of phones and computers. This machine remains a nice computer, and could easily fulfill many modern computing tasks, but its software is no longer maintained, leaving it largely incompatible with the world around it. Fortunately, there are lots of projects aiming to help make the modern internet more accessible to older computers.

Jeff - many, many thanks again for this treasure. It was such a pleasure to see it come back to life with new energy and I’m sure it will be a thrill to use any chance I get.

I was constantly learning from the many senior people in our department, observing and supporting their work on some incredibly impressive things.^[1] What made them really unique was that they were all willing to teach. They were generous with their time and patient with their explanations, which made them invaluable to my personal growth.

But this isn’t about my time at Intermec. It is about a phrase one of the Principal Engineers on our team would often say in moments of frustration:

“Do what I want, not what I said.”

This was never aimed at a person on our team; his quip was always directed at the computer in front of him. He was badgering the compiler and code he had just written, or the command he’d just typed in a terminal window.

His frustration was that what he had in mind didn’t match what it actually did. He knew the computer was merely executing the request he’d provided - and that the real issue was that he’d made a mistake in communicating his desired outcome. He would have to change the structure or syntax of his code or command and try again in order to achieve his goal.

Computers always do what they’re told, right?

Command Line Tools

This post from Julie Evans showed up in my timeline this afternoon, and got me thinking about that Principal Engineer.

Julia is right - the output from dig is particularly arcane, at least in terms of being able to easily integrate with other tools.

But command line tools have a tendency to be esoteric. One of my personal favorite mistakes is usage of service on Linux:

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~$ sudo service restart nginx
[sudo] password for thaddeus: 
restart: unrecognized service

The astute reader will recognize that I’ve flipped the service_name and command parameters around in that command. However… my intent is pretty clear.

I have absolutely muttered the words, “oh just do what I want.” while using command line tools.

Does GPT Understand?

Well, it turns out there are some computers that appear to understand what I’m trying to do.

I asked ChatGPT the following question:

What am I trying to do when I type “sudo service restart ssh”

Here was the response:

When you type “sudo service restart ssh,” you are attempting to restart the SSH (Secure Shell) service on your computer.

Let’s break down the command:

• “sudo”: It stands for “superuser do” and is used to run the command with administrative privileges. By using “sudo,” you elevate your user permissions to execute the following command as the superuser or administrator.

• “service”: It is a command used in Unix-based systems to manage system services. It allows you to start, stop, restart, enable, disable, and manage various services running on your computer.

• “restart”: It is an argument passed to the “service” command, indicating that you want to restart the specified service.

• “ssh”: It refers to the SSH service, which is responsible for secure remote access and communication with your computer using the SSH protocol.

Therefore, the complete command “sudo service restart ssh” is used to restart the SSH service, which may be useful if you need to apply changes to the SSH configuration or if you’re experiencing issues with SSH and want to restart it to resolve them.

Hilariously, it doesn’t correct the mistake I’ve made, but it does correctly explain what I was attempting to do. Other incantations of similar mistakes produce similar results: ChatGPT can produce the correct syntax for my desired outcome pretty consistently.

But…

It’s Not Understanding

If there was actual understanding, it would have also corrected my mistake.

To me, this is a really interesting application of GPT technology. Fundamentally, GPT, like other LLMs, isn’t actually understanding, but instead predicting what you want to hear.

Today’s “AI” is like the friend who lies to you and says exactly what you want to hear. It will happily tell you those shoes look great, or that you were right… even if you were wrong.

However, sometimes what you want is actually the right outcome. Here’s another take at the service restart request with ChatGPT:

Give me a bash command to restart nginx. Return it without description or other information so I can pipe it to /bin/sh

Answer:

sudo service nginx restart

Dang. That’s pretty cool. It did a good job of predicting what I wanted, and gave me exactly what I needed in a format that’s usable in my described context.

Maybe it can do what I want, exactly the way I say it.

While personal documents, photos, and other files are increasingly distributed across third-party services in the cloud, finding secure, no-fuss, cost-effective backup solutions is still surprisingly difficult. Fortunately, this setup has been almost perfectly that: no-fuss and cost effective after almost three years of use.

I made some improvements in 2021 after we refreshed a couple computers. To help with planning, I sketched out this diagram in Linea Sketch.

A few things have changed from that original post, but much has remained the same. Below is an edited version of the post that matches what I’m doing right now.

Requirements

When I set this up a few years ago, I had some pretty specific requirements:

• Multiple machines: we have a family iMac, and a couple of Macbook Airs that need to be backed up. Everything runs recent versions of macOS.
• Large storage: our family Photos.app library is over 1TB. We’ve begun to use iCloud Library to improve access across devices. However, I’m unwilling to trust iCloud solely with this data, so we have full-resolution versions on the iMac, and thus need destinations that have at least that much capacity
• Automatic: this needs to run continuously and cannot depend on plugging in USB drives or remembering to run a script
• Encrypted: data stored on third-party systems must be encrypted
• Offsite: I want to be sure we have a copy offsite (ideally in another city/state) in case of natural or other disaster that could affect our home in the future
• Immediate Access: if something happens to my computer, I want to be able to restore immediately, without having to wait for a recovery disk to be shipped to me
• No-fuss: I don’t want to mess around with complex scripts, fiddle with config files, or other fragile DIY contraptions. While I love *nix, I don’t want to read a man page to figure it out.
• Versioning: being able to rewind time and get a past version of a file is great. In reality, I use this to peek in on backups occasionally… just to double-check recent updates have been backed up properly

Backup Data

I don’t back up applications, OS files, or anything else I can reproduce from the App Store or internet; my backups only contain data I can’t (easily) replace. A good backup allows me to treat a computer and its OS as a commodity.

I keep some scripts to install apps I use and set preferences with defaults in my $HOMEDIR, so I can also selective about config backups, since I can recreate a machine with a fresh OS and my restored data. I only choose a couple of directories within ~/Library for inclusion (Mail.app mailboxes, notably).

Software

I use Arq 7. I’ve been a paid user since Arq 5 and am a big fan of the software.

Arq’s feature list is extensive and easily covers all of my requirements. I gave their trial a spin a few years ago and was very excited with how it worked. I paid a one-time cost for the full version of the application.

The application runs quietly and offers plenty of flexibility. This version of the app has been solid, efficient, and stable. I have yet to upgrade to the latest release, due to common issues the developer is well-aware of, but look forward to the improvements in version 7 (expected late this year or early next). I’ll be happy to pay for an upgraded version when its ready.

Destinations

I’m using multiple backup destinations: one cloud-based and one onsite. I chose to have a mix for redundancy, flexibility, and cost.

Offsite Storage

I subscribe to Wasabi, an affordable, S3-like service for offsite storage. Arq supports Wasabi natively, so setup is a breeze. Wasabi’s current pricing is about $11/month for 2TB of immediately-available storage.

Both of our computers push to buckets configured on Wasabi (each with different keys to limit data exposure, should the keys be compromised). Arq encrypts data before sending it to Wasabi, so there are multiple levels of data protection here.

Our initial push from the family computer to Wasabi took a few weeks. Arq dutifully chipped away at the upload process without ever saturating our home internet. I was initially concerned about uploading this much data, but it went without a hitch. Once a backup is seeded, Arq pushes incremental changes to its destinations, so there is only a swell of data pushed when we import a large number of new photos or other large media.

Onsite Storage

I also have a local backup destination. In 2021, I ditched the Linux machine I’d built and bought a Synology DS1621+. I loaded it up with six 12TB Seagate Ironwolf drives and haven’t looked back. We also use it for long-term storage of documents and offloading large files and media.

Arq is configured to use the Synology as a network storage location. It can automatically mount the remote volume, so I don’t need to make sure macOS is configured to mount/remount the volume if I’m away from home when the job runs. Arq will happily resume backups once I’m back on my home network and the device is available.

Final Comments

Having onsite storage is great - it’s fast, rock solid, and available if I need quick access to an old version. The offsite, cloud-based backups in case of local disaster, but enjoy the quicker access my local NAS provides me.

I’ve had a couple of opportunities to test this system over the past few years; a few times for Macbook keyboard repairs and some other file recovery needs. Remember - test your backups!

Have some questions? Reach out to me on Mastodon. Good luck, and may your backups be safe, up-to-date, and unneeded!

“We now expect the AR Glass to be postponed to 2025-2026, due to design issues,” Pu wrote

I’d suggest reframing “design difficulties” to something like “lack of use case.”

But it’s striking that nearly a decade after Google Glass became available to ‘Explorers’ in the US, companies are still struggling to make the form factor work, despite the considerable technological improvements we’ve seen in the intervening years.

The technology hasn’t been the problem for a while.

Via Slashdot