Zero Insertion Force

I can remember when laptop computers had clip on batteries that were easy to exchange. Then the fashion slipped towards thinner types where the battery gets spread around the innards of the machine. Apple is a case in point with their MacBooks, which contain six slimmed down batteries linked together.

Cue the Right to Repair initiative in Europe, which affects white goods costing, say, £400 but doesn't extend to computers costing, say, £1000 plus.

Then think of the parts in a computer requring renewal. 

The most obvious is the battery, which will become less effective after about 200 duty cycles of charge. It wouldn't be too difficult to have a plug in battery connector so that even a fiddly 6 part battery could be changed, but that would be too obvious. 

Instead the machine has a threaded battery woven into the motherboard, and it sends data to the computer's motherboard along a 6 line cable with is about as thick as a magnetic recording tape (ie thinner than paper). It plugs into a Zero Insertion Force socket on the mother board.

It is not designed to be end-user serviceable, instead requiring a costly visit to the main store to get the battery swapped over. 

Note the S-shaped thin tape which is part of the battery replacement process. 

Right to repair? I don't think so. 

Angel - a

I'm still working out the main elements of The Watcher about a being watching earth's timeline. Then I stumbled across this little movie. 

It could be 'la fille sur la pont', in disguise, or even a heavily stripped back version of the story in The Fifth Element. Cute Girl meets Messy Boy. 

They both have secrets which gradually reveal. It's a light, fun watch, with unreliable narration from the first frame. Then it becomes the story of how a small-time Moroccan in Paris befriends a hot blonde woman with a world-beating attitude. 

 And a Monochrome Paris is rich with poise and just the right kind of danger.

watcher

I decided to take a break from writing novels after Jump. My Ed Adams amazon page is now embarrassingly comprehensive. I'd somehow got into the groove and managed to write a selection of stories and then I used Jump to link them all together. 

It is still possible to start anywhere in my collection of novels, which I didn't write in the correct sequence in any case. 

I think in a couple I had to go back and add a sentence by way of a link to a later plot-line. 

But now I'm restless and that Bruce Holwerda picture from the front of a notepad has started the next novel bubbling in my brain.

a ton of topsoil doesn't go so far

The garden adaptations are making an interesting project. We've stripped away the original grass to the extent that it reminded me of that bit in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

In fairness, we only laid the original turf as a temporary measure, but that was three years ago. Previously, when we'd left the area as 'mud' it soon turned to swampland with extensive weeds. You can just make out some of the ex farm land attempting to grow whatever was on the field before we landed.

But now the time has come. We need to go all angular and designer colours. It is remarkable what a simple splash of Dusky Gem and some railway sleepers can do.  

Fargo Series 4 - It's a little more complicated

I've been box-setting “Fargo” recently, admittedly some time after it was released to the world on Channel 4.

Now we are in 1950, in gangsterland Kansas City, where one stream of gangsters takes over from another on an almost continuous conveyor-belt of violence. 

It is a gangster saga, with some earlier incarnations of people who show up in other Fargo Series. I liked the touch of it being out of sequence, so you have to join the dots in both directions.

 

Everyone wants to be an American, but the mixture of Jewish, Irish, Black and Italian mobsters illustrate that the American Dream had to be hard won. There's scenes of extreme prejudice and Kansas – a city – still manages to look somehow small time.

But its organised crime which is being manipulated darkly from Sardinia and New York. A Mafia and a Black syndicate head toward out-and-out warfare, despite the opposing bosses sitting together in one another's offices or on park benches trying to cut deals.

 

However, it is a complex weave, with threads snaking out of an episode and then reappearing much later. One for the note-takers in places.

 

The casting is excellent, with plenty of stock characters propelling the story along. There's several set pieces which are redolent of other Coen Brothers movies and the monochrome episode features a dog, a twister tornado and a pair of boots sticking out from what could be under a building. I don't think we were in Kansas anymore for this segment, although most of the forward propulsion of the narrative stopped to allow this episode to be dropped into the sequence.

 

It can all be interpreted as allegorical, although there's some concentration needed to find some of the points. 

 

I couldn't decide, by the end, if the right people had their comeuppance and I was rooting for one person to make a surprise return. Alas no, though. Although the one who did return managed to finalise something in the way of a Coen movie.

Nobody

I watched the movie Nobody, which stars Bob Odenkirk (Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) as an action hero, in the style of, say, Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

He plays an accountant at an engineering firm whose house gets invaded by robbers with guns. As a setup it is pretty well done and sharply edited.  Odenkirk also feels the various knocks and bashes he gets and spends a fair amount of time on the ground.

It reminded me of simpler times, when a movie was a movie, rather than a franchise. And it ran for the B-length of 90 minutes, so I guess it was impressive to get everything squeezed into the snappy run-time. 

And let's face it, it's an unrepentant action-movie, more of a black comedy than, say, a revenge thriller.  

This was a long way from the Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad, and I guess Odenkirk deserves kudos for taking on action movies at this stage in his career. 

The lengthy US 2:59 trailer is a bit of a spoiler as well...

Speedy

Well, the boosted ethernet connections worked. Now I have a 2.5Gb Lan running across the house on what I am guessing is Cat 5e cabling. 

It was actually very simple. I just need to plumb in one of the little QNAP boxes at the far end of the cable run and then at the receiving end the signal magically jumped up to a higher speed. 

That may not sound too impressive, but it means copying a hard drive's files drops from about an hour to a few minutes. Now I have my contingent backup system located a long way from the main systems.

getting wired

It started with Cat 5 and then Cat 5e . The cables that everyone uses to connect their wired ethernets together. Nowadays many people don't even bother with wires, preferring everything to be beamed over wifi. 

They are the ones who will eventually lose their photos because they forgot to back everything up. 

I've got cabling as well as wi-fi and some of it is built into the house.

Hmm. 

The electricians who wired it used Cat 5e cabling, which can run at up to 1Gb. I've noticed though, that on the long run between upstairs and downstairs, I sometimes get a negotiated 100Mb (ie 1/10 of the speed). 

That is where the length of the cabling starts to have an effect and is why more recent specifications up to category 8 are increasingly include better shielded cable twisted into pairs. It is quite different from the ancient Category 1 bell-wire.

Now I can't really justify having the house cabling ripped out, so I'm looking at other solutions. Roll-up IEEE802.11bz. It incorporates a clever way to squirt faster speeds down a lower speed-rated cable. Get the Category 8 effect from a Cat 5e cable.

The downside is that no-one supports it yet, or at least doesn't publicly feature it in their advertising. I looked around and found that 'Multi-Gigabit' seems to be an alternative name for a similar technology. And thus I found a little box which can slam 2.5Gb down a 1G cable. 

I hope it works!

Synology NAS with Final Cut Pro - Using Sparsebundles to make everything work.

Another post about the LAN changes I'm making at rashbre central. 

I still do quite bit of video editing but wondered about running the video edits across the LAN. The Synology server is quite fast, with up to four times 1 Gigabit ethernet links and about a half Gigabyte of cache memory. 

I have run a directly attached Drobo 5 with Thunderbolt, but I sense that the physical device is now becoming a little erratic, so the Synology solution should be more reliable.

Except that Final Cut Pro gives an error message when Network Attached Storage is used as the source for editing.

Luckily, I remembered what is, in effect, a hack.  I can create a sparse disk image on the NAS and then mount it to the iMac I'm using as if it is a local drive. Then I can add libraries from FCP directly to the sparse image. With 'proxy' switched on in FCP, it will use a 'proxy image' (ie smaller version) of the files I am editing and then only reassemble the full sized edit when it is time to 'Share' it.

I should add here that there are other solutions to this which involve changing the SMB settings on the iMac and typing a bunch of commands into the Synology server, during which at least one red screen pops up.

I'll regard this as a solution 'for the rest of us', which is intuitively easier to understand and for which the various files created are always restorable.

So here's what I've been doing:

1: Create a new sparse image using Disk Utility, on the LAN Server: I can make it a sparsebundle which takes up little space but specify a much bigger size (like 2 TB) so it has somewhere to expand.  This is my creation of the 'My example disk image' into a folder called VV_Video on the Synology NAS.

2: Now I can use the freshly created sparsebundle (ie disk image), which will have mounted itself automatically, as the target for an FCP editing session. And because it mounts to the iMac, it looks like a local file. It won't be 2TB either, but much smaller (20Mb?) and will grow as more files are added to it.

3: In FCP, I can create a New Project on the newly mounted "Disk" - ie the sparsebundle.

4: Then I can ingest video with the Proxy setting 'On' and away we go with happy editing. I can observe that the speed and 'scrubbing' through the video is as as fast as anyone would need it. It's not discernibly different from the Thunderbolt attached Drobo.

5: A spin off advantage is that I can now name my various video projects in separate disk images in VV_Video and keep all of the other files together. There is a real danger of becoming organised.

6: Happy days, although be aware that this is a hack and ideally will be replaced one day when  Synology and Apple talk to one another about video.

Boxed in?

Still on my reconfiguration of servers, I realised a silly thing. I was keeping a spare drive in a cardboard box, on a bookshelf, in case one drive failed. I took a look at the server.   Surely I could configure it with a hot spare instead? 

Duh. 

UK OK?

I received this notification today. We now have new and immensely useful bureaucracy associated with being outside of Europe. Our new domestic goods regulation regime is in place. 

Instead of using the CE marking to sell certain products in Great Britain, industry must take action before 1 January 2022. to get everything retested for conformity to UKCA.

At the beginning of the year, the UKCA (i.e. not GBCA) marking was introduced for selling goods in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales). There are now only six months to go until the UKCA marking becomes mandatory for most goods being sold in Great Britain that currently use the CE marking. 

For Great Britain products to continue being sold in Great Britain from 1 January 2022, it is essential to ensure product compiance with the UKCA marking as soon as possible. 

Do I hear the sounds of cut and paste?

Knock-on effect

[Technical alert - bypass this post if not interested in computer topics ] 

I use my computers for a variety of tasks like music, video, photography, authoring, plus the regular tasks that people get up to like email and browsing. No wonder I've accumulated some data over the years.

So I knew that the replacement of a large amount of my disk storage required a more detailed rethink of the rashbre LAN. Old mainframe systems used to have so-called batch runs which could take hours or sometimes days to run. I'm hoping to stay away from this for rashbre central.

The existing Drobo disk storage units have a one Gigabit ethernet connection, but the new Synology has 4 Gigabits. which can be bound together. That's an obvious thing to do, except I need (a) fast Category 8 LAN cabling (b) enough slots on my switch to be able to plug them all in. Yep, done - and with fancy coloured cabling too so I know which are the really fast links.

Then I have to think about the size of disks to be used. The Drobo units are set up with 5 times 6 Terabyte disks. I used to use a certain financial sum as the sweet spot for disks, but I now realise that 6 Tb is about the maximum I want to be copying around, at least until the rest of the infrastructure catches up.

It also means I can dip into my spare disk drives to start the population of the Synology unit.

Then I'll be interested in adding in a couple of RAID1 M.2 cache, which could speed the whole disk access to the device. They are like 2 mini-disks dedicated to caching the access to the device and using two means they are read-write RAID1 compliant 'fail-safe'.

Then, for the main disk units, I'm using the Synology SHR hybrid variety of RAID which allows a Drobo-like mix-and-match of drive sizes with less waste than a vanilla RAID configuration.

I've also got to think about 3-2-1 backup. That's the approach which says have 3 copies of data (the working data and 2 backup copies) on two different media (disk and tape) with one copy off-site for disaster recovery. Except tape is a bit old-fashioned and I'll have two variants on different disk formats.

That's where a Drobo can still be useful: to run the second backup, suitably off-site.

...And I realise that this is the type of post for which 'blogs' were originally invented!