Metadata

The data that describes a file or a video, but isn't part of the content as such, is called metadata. Today the Gorse Fox has been going back through old family videos adding the metadata. Particular items that he wants to get right are the date of the recording and the cast of people featured. This has taken a while, but is now all but complete.

With this tucked away, the Gorse Fox started on some new videos. He has video clips stretching back 31 years and has probably only processed about 15% of them. Today he has worked through a few more.

Meanwhile, downstairs the Silver Vixen has been finishing some masks and Urban-Cub and Ellie went out to spend the afternoon at Mewsbrook Park in LA.

Shopping Online

It is the nature of doing your grocery shopping online that there are, on occasions, substitutions and even items that are totally out of stock. Today was such a case. Some tortilla wraps that the Gorse Fox had ordered weren't available so they substituted another type. The delivery driver checked that we were happy with the substitution - which we were. All was well. The driver then turned an said:

There were 43 items missing on my last delivery. All of it was hard liquor, and ten bottles of it was Sambuca.

Clearly someone is planning a party, is struggling with lockdown, or has a very serious problem. The Gorse Fox's bottle of wine each week seems rather pathetic.

Soffit so good

A chap was meant to come and clean the soffits and gutters today. Old Bill had arranged it. First he would do theirs, then Two Hats', and finally ours. He didn't turn up. Old Bill is not amused, and unless he has a letter from Boris, he'll be told where to stick it if he finally replies to the messages that have been left for him

A budding Spielberg

It has been another glorious day. Certainly the weather has helped keep people sane during this long lockdown.

Urban-Cub took Ellie out to meet up (at a suitable distance) with Cousteau-Cub this afternoon. The Silver Vixen is sat at her sewing machine, and the Gorse Fox is up in his study. The day has been spent sorting through digital copies of old video tapes to determine whether the originals need to be re-captured, or whether the quality is sufficient to work with. Several have not made the grade and the Gorse Fox has written to the chappie in Worthing who can do this transcode to see if he is still in business and able to help.

Meanwhile, he has also been looking for a quick and dirty method for making quick videos, where complex editing isn't required. Needless to say, on the Mac this is built in with the iMovie app. Better still this works both on the iMac, the MacBook and the oPad and iPhone. The Gorse Fox has rattled off a couple of quick videos this afternoon as an experiment and is very pleased with the results.

Digital Filing

Someone asked a question on Facebook this morning. It revolved around how to store files for genealogy. The Gorse Fox couldn't resist and responded:...

Storage of digital document is important. The first things to consider (for anything you stare one your computer):

1. How important is the data
2. How volatile is the data (how frequently does it change)
3. Do you need to keep old versions if it does change
4. What is the impact of losing it

This should help you decide on a backup strategy. My strategy varies according to the answers above. In the most extreme case, I have 

• Hourly backups to one external drive
• Daily backups to another (mirrored) external drive
• Daily backups to the Cloud (so there is an off-site copy)
• Weekly backups to a further drive
• Monthly backups to a drive stored up in our loft.

What me, paranoid? Yes! I spent 43 years in the IT industry and have seen too many cases of critical data being lost.

Now having said that… how do you store the data? I think it is important to come up with a naming scheme. This will help, longer-term, in finding the files. A scheme (which I have been using successfully since the mid-1980s) names files as follows:

YYYYMMDD-x (Source) Subject

The first part, YYYYMMDD, is obviously the date of the document in a sortable format.
The  -x is a suffix that could be:

• I - invoice
• N - Notification
• S - Statement
• etc…. (Make up your own scheme)

The (Source) identifies where the document came from:

• (Nat West)
• (Public Records Office)
• (Berkeley Homes)

And finally the subject of the document:

• Annual Water Statement
• Marriage Certificate 
• etc

Finally, these files are stored in a folder structure that helps me go straight to the correct place in the file system:

• /Genealogy
• /Documents and Letters/
• /Documents and Letters/Bank
• /Documents and Letters/Tax
• /Documents and Letters/Utilities

I hope this helps

Who is that masked stranger

The Gorse Fox has been out to Sainsbury's and observed how few people were wearing masks compared to a fortnight ago. They also seemed far more cavalier in terms of social distancing with the store. It's a shame that people are becoming a little blasé after all this time. It's not as if the risk has gone.

Just Checking

It was nice to get an email from Amazon. We hadn't had a delivery yesterday and they were just checking that we were all right.

Stoned

The Silver Vixen and Urban-cub have had bees in their collective bonnets regarding the build-up of blanket weed in the rill. The Gorse Fox clears it every few weeks, but the cobbles have become slimy and stained over the past few years.

This afternoon it was clearly time to address this. Large receptacles were found and, stone by stone, all the cobbles were removed and stored.

The plan is, apparently, to bleach them and re-use them. The Gorse Fox pointed out that this was a problem as the wastewater needed to be disposed of carefully. Certainly nowhere in the garden is available. We would have to use the drains at the front of the house... but the containers full of cobbles are too heavy to move easily, and will be even heavier when filled with water.

Once cleaned and the water has been filtered out of the rill and the rill cleaned, we will replace everything and add some treatment to the water to try and keep the water clear. Fingers crossed.

Cleaning

The Gorse Fox has had a domestic day. It started with half an hour of quality time with the Ocado online shopping list and then the overflow list for Sainsbury's. While this was underway, Cousteau-cub turned up with Tyson (he dog). Urban-cub and Ellie then took Tyson out for a walk, then took him back to Cousteau-cub's house. Meanwhile, she made the most of our technology up in the study.

The Silver Vixen used the Karcher window washer on the Orangery windows (latterly with some "assistance" from Ellie), while the Gorse Fox got stuck-in to an oven-cleaning exercise. Fortunately, one of the ovens can do a self-clean or a short steam-clean. The Gorse Fox made the most of the steam clean, which seemed to do a pretty good job. The other oven was still quite warm so that cleaned up fairly well with just soap and water. As usual, it was the racks that held out the most resistance, but they were no match for the Gorse Fox's persistence.

Urban-cub is suffering from heat-rash, and it's making her feel pretty rough as it feels like millions of under-skin pin-pricks. She is sheltering in the cool of the lounge and raising Amazon for possible creams, sprays, and other cures.

Just Hanging

The Gorse Fox has had a fairly uneventful day. (You might ask yourself if he ever has anything different. He is retired, he doesn’t care).

Cousteau-Cub arrived first thing and set up her equipment in the study. The Gorse Fox thinks she quite likes the space, the comfortable chair, and the reliable internet service.

The Gorse Fox played with Ellie during the morning while everyone else was doing their various ablutions. Urban-Cub also had some conference calls and had agreed to collect the Coventry Hobbit and take him to work as his knee was giving him problems.

The Silver Vixen has managed to cut out a couple more masks this afternoon while the Gorse Fox was going through a couple of boxes of old video tapes so that he could check which ones still needed to be captured and transcoded. Unfortunately, it has revealed several tapes which have no descriptions written on the covers... the question is “is there any content? Or are they just empty, unused tapes?”

BT

With a level of incompetence that only BT seem to be able to manage, Cousteau-cub has had to decamp and come here to work in the Gorse Fox's study. It seems that asking them to set up a line transfer for a house move is still the most intractable problem in the Universe.

"Please arrange the new service to begin on 3rd June."

"Ok. That'll be the 29th June" came the response a few days later.

"No, 3rd June, please"

"Ok. That'll be 10th June" came the reply.

"Oh, and by the way, our internet keeps dropping"

"Sorry, we can't look at that. Your account is locked for 24 hours while we process the house move for a day you didn't want".

In the end, she phoned the Gorse Fox in despair. The only sensible solution was for her to work here in the study - socially distanced from the rest of us.

Chasing bugs (that don't exist)

Another gorgeous day here in the South.

For the Gorse Fox, most of the day has been spent in the study. It all started with a plan to scan through some old video and split it into relevant components. The software said that a new version was available and invited him to download it. He did. That's where the problem started.

He reopened the software and went to his media library to suck in the video... but it wasn't there in the list. He looked elsewhere. It was nowhere to be found. He re-installed the software. Same result. He checked the file locations (after all, he has been moving things around). No, the files were there. So it continued until he noticed (after several hours) that the particular files were in a different video format. Moulds it be that format wasn't recognised? He transcoded one file and looked again. There it was. Doh!

The Gorse Fox has now embarked on an exercise to transcode all of the old video format clips and files into a format supported by DaVinci Resolve.

As a byproduct of this, he has realised that a number of videos he thought he had already edited, clearly haven't been.

Return from a Parallel Universe

It’s a Bank Holiday. The Gorse Fox mentions this in case it has slipped your notice. After all, with all but essential workers essentially in temporary retirement, for most it is just another day.

The Gorse Fox spent some time this morning looking at a plugin extension for an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). This particular plugin understands the syntax and format of Rexx and provides nice highlighting of the code and quickly shows any errors in your code. Very impressive.

The Gorse Fox has also found a bit of code called MetaDoctor which allows him to add metadata to the family videos. This includes chapter, people who are featured, and so forth. This is really good and greatly enhances the function that is available through the Plex server. It now means that we can watch a family video and skip straight to a given part of the film, as identified by the chapters.

After lunch we all headed for the garden to enjoy a quiet time in the sun. Again, Cousteau-Cub came round to use the garden. Not quite the spirit of lockdown, but if she wears a Dominic Cummings mask nobody will worry. To be fair, she does maintain her distance and as both she and the Silver Vixen are fairly vulnerable we do have to be sensible about things.

In a parallel universe, tonight would be our last full night in Jamaica before checking out and flying home tomorrow. At least, in real life, the weather has been excellent back here at home.

Film

It was, yet another, glorious day. The Silver Vixen continues to work on some face masks and now only has a couple more to do. Urban-Cub made the most of the sunny weather and sat out in the garden with her music (through earphones).

The Gorse Fox returned to the video he had completed yesterday. He wasn't totally happy with the way it had turned out. He re-opened the project and went through from the beginning. Some different transitions were spliced in between clips, and the old audio track was removed and the music was reselected and merged into the video. It took quite a long time to get right, but the Gorse Fox is much happier with the finished result.

The Gorse Fox then went and sat in the garden. Not quite with Urban-Cub, as she loves to be in the sun, whilst the Gorse Fox like to sit in the shade. He took the mobile phone gimbal with him. Watch so much video over the last couple of days has made him even more conscious that the quality is very much a factor of the camera operator, far more than the quality of the camera itself. He had to reacqaint himself with the operation of the device and its features, but in the end he was fairly happy that he had it mastered (at least until next needs it, when no doubt, he'll have to go through the whole process again).

Cousteau-Cub joined us for a while (suitably distanced) in the back garden. Having a basement studio flat with no outside space means she is pretty much confined. Now that they have a car she was able to get out.

Post Production

It has been a bright but very windy day. One of the Acers in the garden was blown over (in its pot) and had to be moved to a more sheltered spot until the wind dies down.

Urban-cub took Ellie across to stay with Pistol Pete for a few days then came back to make the most of the sunny weather and crashed out in the garden (in the aforementioned sheltered spot). The Silver Vixen returned to her sewing machine. She is working on the last couple of masks now. These two are spares for when ours are in the wash.

The Gorse Fox retired to the study and completed his project with the backups. We now have an analysis of the volatility and value of the various file clusters, and a cascading schedule of backups that is appropriate to each cluster. In extreme cases, the data cascades hourly to Time Machine, daily to level 1 (which is mirrored) and the Cloud, weekly to level 2, and monthly to level 3.

The Gorse Fox then settled down to a few hours of video editing. The focus of this exercise was old cone-film that had been digitised and recorded snippets of life at our home in Cockfosters in the 1960s and some clips of holidays down in West Wittering with the Gorse Fox's cousins. The first cut of this is complete but hasn't yet been screened so may need a little further manipulation.

The Gorse Fox then got side-tracked by another set of clips. These too had been digitised versions of old cine films. These stretched back into the 1950s and included his grandparents on holiday with their friends in Italy, some weddings (including that of the Gorse Fox's parents), and some further clips from Sunday morning cocktail parties, and holidays in Kent and in Canada. The film quality is dreadful, and the camera work was enough to make you sea-sick, at times. To be fair, though, people in those days didn't realise the limitations of the equipment nor the concept of steady and slow camera movement.

Cousteau-cub and the Coventry Hobbit turned up late in the afternoon. Again, they had been out for a long walk and stopped by on their way back. We sat at socially responsible distances in the garden until it got a bit chilly when we moved into the Orangery and scattered ourselves around the periphery.

Cheek!

It was another nice day. It was quite windy but pleasantly warm. When the domestic chores were out of the way, the Gorse Fox retired to the study to continue the rationalisation and documentation of his various backups. This was well under way when a plaintiff cry wafted up the stairs from the Silver Vixen.

"Should LastPass be sending me messages about attempted logins?"

The Gorse Fox dropped everything. "No! It shouldn't"

The next hour or so was spent trying to determine what was going on, and whether there was a concerted attempt to hack into our system was underway. What a cheek! The one portal we have that is open to the network is Plex Remote Access. That was immediately shutdown. The Gorse Fox then started analysing everything that was running on all our systems. Was there some Malware in the system? He was stumped.

In the end he removed the sharing features from the Silver Vixen's LastPass account and then changed the password. He logged back in to the MacBook, the iPhone, and the iPad. All of them connected without incident. No further messages were received. The sharing features were reconnected and all is well in the land.

After lunch there was the obligatory trip to Sainsbury's for items that Ocado hadn't got, and to select something for Sunday's lunch.

Once back, he returned to the study and the rationalisation of backups. He has freed up tens of Gigabytes of space so far, and has a much clearer hierarchy of backups in plan. There's still work to do, but it is pretty neat.

The nice man from Amazon turned up with some magic "nano" tape. This tape is "slipless, double-sided adhesive, reusable and washable, traceless and  when it gets dirty, you can wash it with water and dry it to regain its stickiness". The Gorse Fox is very impressed. It is currently holding several of the Raspberry Pis in position on the desk... and they aren't going anywhere!

Stoned

The local children have been painting stones and leaving them in a long line by the lake. The head of the line is a snake's head and all of the painted stones make up the body.

Ellie has been busy (under the supervision of Urban-Cub, who, in turn, was under the supervision of the Silver Vixen) and has painted and varnished two stones to add to the snake. Once they were dry we all took a walk round to the lake, examined the display, and then added Ellie's stones to end.

It's a lovely whimsical little idea for the kids.

Pegboard

It is another fabulous day. The weather is gorgeous, and the temperature is in the mid 20s. Urban-Cub and Ellie are making the most of the garden while the Silver Vixen was completing the Ocado list for the Gorse Fox to enter online.

The Gorse Fox had a brain wave overnight. What if he used some spare peg-board to secure the Raspberry Pis and their cables in his study. (They have a habit of moving around because they are so light and the cable can get caught and drag them). After the early morning chores the Gorse Fox retired to garage to retrieve said peg-board, clean it up and take it to the study. Five minutes later he realised it wasn't a brain wave. In fact it was barely a ripple. Not only was it an ugly solution, it was also impractical. Everything was taken back to the garage.

While feeling "handy" the Gorse Fox also attacked the door handle in the "en suite". It has developed a "ping". When he gets up in the night, trying hard not to disturb anyone, he grabs the handle and as the lever descends there is an audibly "ping". It drives him mad. It hasn't yet woken the Silver Vixen, but he's sure it will. Anyway, after some fiddling about and some generous use of silicone WD40 he can report that the door handle has gone back to gather and no longer "pings". It clunks. Doh!

As Ellie was having some "quiet time" this afternoon, the Gorse Fox has been back up in the study. He is starting the task of updating the documentation for his backups. (It's all very well having backups, but it helps if you know what they are and where they are stored... the frequency with which they are taken and how to recover the information if needed). Now, you won't be surprised that the Gorse Fox knows all this, but he does like to get it written down somewhere, to save hunting around.

Reorg

It has been a very successful day. The Gorse Fox had received some new shelf supports from Amazon last night. While the Silver Vixen did her Zoom Pilates, Urban-Cub and Ellie helped the Gorse Fox do a fairly major reorganisation of his study. This included putting up the new shelves, recabling, and labelling. It did take all morning and the early part of the afternoon, but the outcome is most satisfactory. The Gorse Fox even managed to get some spilled printer ink off of the keys on his keyboard.

There are a few holes that need to be filled. These are the remnants of the old shelf support system. This will get done another day. Today's focus was getting everything working again.

Maestro, the music

After various domestic chores, and a bit of play with Ellie, and a walk to the post office with a parcel containing Betty and Barney Rubble's face masks, the Gorse Fox decided to expand his Plex library a bit further. He has now copied his music library to Plex... and as he writes, the Plex server is staring to organise the information.

Apparently this can link with Alexa and with the Sonos, but the Gorse Fox will limit this exercise to one thing at a time. At the moment he knows it will me easily accessible from the various Plex clients we have round the house (TVs, tablets, and phones).

Lordy, lordy.

They don't learn, do they?

The Gorse Fox received a text message"

HSBC: A new payee was added to your account on 19/05/20. Please confirm or cancel this request via (website address).

This is the second such text like this. He didn't respond to the first one, and won't respond to this. It's a scam. How does the Gorse Fox know? Well, the fact that he doesn't have any HSBC accounts is the biggest clue.

You would think...

It's been a lovely day. Wall to wall blue skies and very pleasant temperatures. Urban-Cub and Ellie have spent much of the day in the garden. The Silver Vixen finished off a couple more facemasks for Betty and Barney Rubble. That's it now, other than doing a second mask for herself and the Gorse Fox, he believes she is finished.

The Gorse Fox has been fiddling. He started by updating some documentation but was irritated by how slow the access was to his old NAS drives from "Condor". Now, this isn't new. They seem to have been slow for a long time and appear to be getting worse. He decided to do some research. It turns out that the Apple routines for accessing a remote disk (afp) are not really as good as some of the alternatives. In fact they have deprecated the code. You would think their own code would be the best way of access on their systems, but no. It seems that Samba/SMB is quicker.

This triggered a couple of hours of testing alternatives and checking backups were still functioning. As it stands he is now using Samba and the disk access seems a lot quicker. He still needs to work out how to automount the drives on startup... but that's a challenge for another day.

this afternoon the Coventry Hobbit popped in and Urban-Cub went with him to collect a bed frame that Cousteau-Cub had bought online. It's tucked away in Urban-Cub's storage unit until the Coventry Hobbit and Cousteau-Cub move into their new house at the beginning of June.

Street Photography

One of the neighbours on the development set herself a bit of a lockdown project. The idea was to go round the development and record the pictures that people had put up in their windows, and record the people and family groups from across the estate (who were willing to pose). Urban-Cub and Ellie were captured on this, and our front window was featured because of the pictures we had displayed. The finished article was very good. The Gorse Fox suggested she submit it to the West Sussex Archive as they had been asking for people to donate diaries and pictures of their "lock-in".

Yesterday, the lady knocked and asked for permission to include our pictures as she wanted to submit to the Archive. We got chatting. She and her husband were ever so interesting. She is a self defined "amateur street photographer" and makes no pretence of anything other than her amateur status. Her husband is a product designer, working from home. He and the Gorse Fox got talking about the challenges of data management, backup, and RAID configurations, and the use of CAD/CAM software. She and the Silver Vixen talked about making masks and the fact that her husband had just come up with a new design that should make mask construction significantly simpler. This should be release in the next few weeks.

We clearly hit it off and resolved to get together once the lock-down is lifted.

And cut!

The Gorse Fox has spent much of the day at the computer (go on, tell him you are surprised). This, however, was a bit of a change. He spent several hours working on some old video that had been put together by The Bishop. He had some clunky old technology that played cine film onto a screen that was being captured by a computer. The whole process was both complicated, and very inaccurate. The Gorse Fox decided to resist the captured data and see if he could tidy up the output.

It's funny how quickly you forget. Considering that The Gorse Fox spent a lot of time earlier this year working wit the Ca Vinci video editing suite, he had forgotten how to use it when he fired it up. The first task today was to go back to YouTube and  refresh his memory on the basics. (Fortunately, he doesn't need any of the more esoteric editing features or techniques). Finally, he was ready to start editing and after a couple of false starts he has now created a new version (a reboot?) of the original. He's quite pleased with the outcome.

There are several more videos to analyse and to edit, but with the current lockdown, there's no real hurry.

Recognition

The Gorse Fox has received some recognition. He received an email from Amazon:

"You're receiving this email because you are purchasing on Amazon in large amounts. Are you purchasing for business? If so, Amazon Business may be of interest. Amazon Business is a no-cost upgrade that gives businesses access to downloadable VAT invoices, quantity discounts, business pricing and more.
Key features include:

• Wholesale prices and bulk discounts

• Easy VAT invoice management

• Payment on net 30-day terms*

Upgrade now and join the millions of businesses around the world who use Amazon Business to purchase for work."

The local delivery driver has asked about getting his own parking space.

Labels

It has been another very successful day for the Gorse Fox. He escaped to the study to look at the current method he employs for getting tags/labels from blogposts to the private blog on "peregrine". This was always clunky and somewhat of a bodge. The new code he prepared a few weeks ago which manages the transfer of blog-posts themselves, also carries the tags as part of the payload (the original Google-API based system did not). With some judicious changes to his existing code he was able to fork relevant tags/labels into a small holding file. This holding file is then processed by the original tag-merge program he had written several years back. Et Voila! It all works.

The Gorse Fox thinks that, bar some daily monitoring, all of the work is now finished on the Raspberry Pis. Next little project will probably be some more video editing.

The Silver Vixen is enjoying time on her sewing machine. She's now making some masks for herself (having made them for the rest of the family). In fact, as Urban-Cub has gone to meet Cousteau-Cub (in the open, of course) she has taken Cousteau-Cub's mask(s) along with her.

Rubbing it in

Google seems intent on rubbing our noses in it. As the Gorse Fox sits here reading the news, an alert pops up. It's Google Photos with a "Rediscover this day" message showing pictures of a previous trip to Jamaica. Just shut up! We know it's lovely, and we know we are not there.

Media, Accident and Emergency

There has been a report from the media that there is significant concern at the drop in numbers attending the A&E Departments in the hospitals. Needless to say, they are trying to make an issue out of this when actually it is totally expected by anyone with more than three brain cells.

Why aren't people going to A&E? Is it because they are afraid of getting Coronavirus or of overloading the NHS?

NO!

It's because we are on lockdown.

• There's fewer cars on the roads; so fewer accidents.
• There's no sport; so no sports injuries.
• There are no pubs open; so fewer (no) drunken fights.
• There are no clubs open; so fewer (no) drunken fights.
• People can't get about easily; so there are fewer drug deals.

The Gorse Fox despairs of our media.

A Plan Comes Together

Urban-Cub took Ellie across to stay with Pistol Pete for the weekend. For the moment the Silver Vixen and Gorse Fox are enjoying a certain degree of tranquility as she potters away on here sewing machine and the Gorse Fox taps away on the keyboard.

Today he has rebuilt "peregrine" from the ground up. All of the hassle of lat week's rebuild of "tawnyowl" paid off as today's exercise could not have gone more smoothly. The server for the private blog is now nestling back in the man-cave, fully up to date, and apparently working as required. The Gorse Fox will, obviously, monitor it over then next few days, but does not foresee any issues.

Five Miles High

The Gorse Fox woke up this morning and remembered he wasn't in a Gatwick Hotel. As he writes this blog post he also remembers he is not whizzing along at nearly 500 miles an hour, five miles above the Atlantic. It's a good job he bought a bottle of rum in Sainsbury's so that he can pretend to be in Jamaica.

Much of the morning was spent playing with Ellie and then the Gorse Fox retired to the study. He managed to complete the automatic mounting and monitoring of the NAS drives on "barnowl" and the automatic emailing of reminders from "tawnyowl".

This afternoon, there was a trip to Sainsbury's. The Gorse Fox observed that the adjustments that the Silver Vixen had made to his mask, worked well. He also noticed far more people were wearing masks, but they were being more cavalier with regards to social distancing.

Back home the Gorse Fox started to prepare for the complete rebuild of his production system for the private blog. This runs on "peregrine" and is currently flagging up warnings of some back level software (though it is still working flawlessly). As many of the changes are in the security coverage, he feels it is time for an upgrade, particularly as the whole process is so fresh in his mind, and so meticulously documented. The various configuration scripts have been updated. A new microSD has been loaded with the latest Raspbian distribution, and a new USB stick has been ordered to replace the current one. (this means that the old one can be archived away until the Gorse Fox is happy that everything is working properly).

Parallel Dimension

The day started much as usual. Then it dawned on the Gorse Fox that, in a parallel dimension, where COVID-19 isn't ravaging the planet, the Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen would be heading up to Gatwick today. We would stay at an airport hotel and then, tomorrow, fly off to Jamaica for a couple of weeks. There are times that inter-dimensional transport to alternate universes seems quite appealing.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Silver Vixen had her Zoom Pilates session this morning, Urban-Cub had several conference calls and went to post a parcel with Ellie, only to find that particular type of parcel cannot be returned through that Post Office. The Gorse Fox continued to plug away at the "tawnyowl" and "barnowl" to ensure everything was working as he wanted. This was important as mounting the NAS devices via "/etc/fstab" proved problematic on this lates release. In the end he developed a script that could run as service and be controlled by "systemd". It took a while to get right, but it now works. What he does need to do is refine it so it runs regularly, but at, say, hourly intervals.

On another note, the Gorse Fox ran the RexxCPS routine yesterday to measure the speed of Rexx on "barnowl". It was very impressive and reported 1858751 Rexx clauses per second

Tonight we will be experimenting with a version of Butter Chicken, using coconut milk instead of cream. The Gorse Fox is intrigued to know how this will turn out.

You've Got Mail

Another interesting day. The Gorse Fox spent much of the morning sorting out some household chores, but once they were finished he left the Silver Vixen downstairs working on some face masks while he returned to the study.

The first task was to rationalise the filing of the various DVD and video images so that they made more sense when shown in the Plex menus. He also fired up another of the TVs downstairs and linked it into Plex. This is beginning to look rather good. While this was going on, the Gorse Fox returned to his documentation and brought it up-to-date with all of the "barn owl" installation instructions.

There were several further items that needed tidying up. One was to re-install the mail system on "tawnyowl". This proved to be more troublesome than it should have, but it turns out that the components that the Gorse Fox had used previously have been deprecated and there is a new set of programs top install. That has now been done and the mailing seems to work. There's a bit more testing to do, but it is looking ok.

A bit comPLEX

A huge amount of today has been spent in the study. Urban-Cub had a number of large documents that needed to be scanned and saved,  and there were some that needed printing. Alongside this the Gorse Fox notched that the location of his local copy of Google Drive was incorrect and it took a while to get that sorted out.

He popped out, late morning, to collect a prescription for the Silver Vixen. It didn't take long, but he was a little irritated by the brusque, almost rude, approach from the assistant in the pharmacy. I'm sure that if she had access to a cattle prod, she would have felt a lot better.

At lunchtime the nice man from Amazon arrived with two nice parcels. A new Raspberry Pi Model 4B with $GB of memory and a new 22 inch HDMI-enabled computer monitor. These were soon assembled and powered up and the new "barn owl" was hatched. The first thing he did was to run the Rexx performance measure and sent the results to MFC. The rest of the afternoon was spent installing the Plex Media Server on "barn owl" and cajoling it into life. It now seems to be working and the Gorse Fox will experiment further this evening. Certainly he has managed to play video on both iPhone and iPad, but hasn't yet tried the big TV.

The Bishop

It is some 9 years now since the Bishop passed away. The Bishop was twin brother of the Gorse Fox's dad. Before the Bishop died, however, he had spent a lot of time going through old cine films and photos and transferring them to CD/DVD along with some commentary where appropriate. (This was particularly interesting where he discusses the time that he and the Gorse Fox's dad joined, and served in the Royal Navy). The Gorse Fox woke up last night and wondered where on earth this was. He knew he had a copy somewhere, but had no idea where.

With the new Raspberry Pi on order (and a monitor), he realised he needed a bit more space in his study. This, predominantly, was a problem because the Gorse Fox is an accidental proponent of the "messy desk" concept. He has now spent the morning tidying up and, lo and behold, has found the missing DVD. Taking no chances, he has immediately ripped it down onto his media library. It will need some editing and touching up, but at least we have it.

Oh yes, and the study is now much tidier than it was, but the Gorse Fox thinks he must consider some further shelving once the lockdown is over, and possibly a control panel on which to mount the network switch.

Oops

Well it looks like the Gorse Fox has just, accidentally, ordered another Raspberry Pi. This one will be known as "barnowl" but is unlikely to arrive before Monday evening.

Cracked

The Gorse Fox has assuredly cracked it! Everything is now working as planned and designed and his documentation is correct. He is very pleased. He has even managed to get several niggling issues sorted out with several other machines.

At the moment, he is experimenting with Plex, a media server. It's installed on "eagle" as an experiment, but if it proves useful, the Gorse Fox will get a further Raspberry Pi as the long term Plex Server. He suspects this will make access to the various family videos and films a lot more straightforward than it is at present. (And it will make another interesting project).

The Silver Vixen has been making some more face masks for when we leave the confines of home. She's made a couple for Ellie. It will be interesting to see how she get on with them.

Other than that... all is quiet on the Southern Front.

On a roll

It's been a lovely day. The sun has shone and there isn't even a hint of a cloud in the sky. Urban-cub had stayed up at Gatwick overnight but was home with us soon after nine. Ellie had slept until 8, so was still sorting herself out when Urban-cub got in. She was off to spend the weekend with Pistol Pete so there was some packing to do before she left.

The Gorse Fox retired to the study. Though the rebuild of "tawnyowl" was essentially complete, there was some tidying up to do. The most important item was to move "/var" off of the SDCard and onto a separate USB stick. This prolongs the life of the SDCard because most of the writes go to "/var"; it also means that you can have a very large device to host your database and blogging software. The process was a little time-consuming but it went smoothly and left the Gorse Fox with a warm feeling of satisfaction. There are a couple of further tweaks that he needs to complete before he can declare "tawnyowl" finished, but they can wait for another day.

The Gorse Fox has spent much of the afternoon sitting in the garden. He's been chatting, online, with Agent Mulder. We have been discussing when it might be appropriate to rearrange the Jamaica trip (which was due to start this coming Thursday). Our current suggestion is that we might consider September or October '21. Before we make any decisions, however, we would need a degree of confidence that the current pandemic is under control and we have some immunity.

It's quite noisy outside at present. Clearly, there are several celebrations underway for VE 75.

It is fairly obvious that the idea of social distancing has been widely ignored for the sake of a party. The Gorse Fox understands, but does not condone.

VE was a very significant day, even if the War in the Far East was still prosecuted for a few more months. The freedoms we have today are because of the bravery and the sacrifices of that "hero" generation. All we are being asked to do is to sit on our sofas, but apparently, this is too much for the pathetic morons who think the rules do not apply to them yet their very existence and freedom of choice is a gift of that "hero" generation.

Re-chuffed

Well, in a somewhat bitty day, the Gorse Fox can conclude that he is chuffed again. This time the clean rebuild went smoothly. This gives him confidence that when it comes time to upgrade "peregrine" he can do it with a degree of confidence and a set of instructions that work!

In other matters, Urban-cub went into work. Though furloughed, Gatwick have realised that they allowed the only person who understood their stores department to leave. As Urban-cub has some experience from a previous job, they asked if she could come in and provide some guidance and consultancy to regain control of the department. She leapt at the chance to get a mental challenge, so headed up to the Airport for a long 12-hour shift.

G-Force were back in charge of Ellie.

She was very good and actually asked for some "quiet time" after lunch (which suit us just fine). After that, she got all dressed up in her "Dora the Explorer" mode to take a walk with us around the lake. This, as usual, featured hurling food at the ducks and watching as they scrabbled over it. Once our stack of duck food was exhausted, she led as we walked all the way around, then up by "her" school (as she insists on calling it) and back round to our house.

Not so chuffed

What a frustrating day! The new SDCard on which the Gorse Fox was going to rerun all of yesterday's install scripts seems to have some errors. He has reformatted it several times and got verification errors when copying the image to the card. Then, finally, he got a clean image and started to install. This, however, hit further problems. He is starting again, again.

We did make the most of the nice weather this morning. The Gorse Fox, Urban-Cub and Ellie walked to Sainsbury's for some of the bits we couldn't get from Ocado. The Gorse Fox wore the facemark that the Silver Vixen had made. We clearly need a little tweaking, as the mask kept slipping (except when he wanted to use Face-Id on the iPhone.

While we were out, the Silver Vixen made the most of the time on a Zoom call with her Pilates crew and teacher. Two and half hours later they were still at it... though it's not clear if any Pilates took place!

Feeling chuffed

The Gorse Fox is feeling rather chuffed.

As is usual, he checked the various accounts this morning. All was as expected, at first. Then he got to the Premium Bonds and found that both he and the Silver Vixen had won this month. Not a lot, but yet another win. (We do seem to win something, between us, very month). Then he moved on to check Barclaycard (ever since he had a rogue transaction on a credit card a couple of years ago, he checks them daily). He was confused there were a number of unexpected transactions in the bagging area! At first he was concerned. Then it dawned on him that they were payments to the account, not from the account. The little bell rang in his addled mind. Barclaycard had refunded the money for the FlyBe airline tickets we had booked for Edinburgh. That's not a bad start to the day.

Most of the morning was spent doing a few household chores and keeping Ellie amused. She had been under the weather, but a dose of Ibuprofen seemed to pick her up and she was her normal self for a few hours.

This afternoon the Gorse Fox returned to the "tawnyowl" rebuild. In a rare moment of clarity he cracked the last couple of issues and the system is now running again perfectly. What a relief! Now, possibly stupidly, he's going to start the whole process again from scratch to see if he can get it to run through without any problems at all and ensure that the documentation matches the final process. That, however, can wait for another day.

Reserved

Biffa turned up at the crack of 9 o'clock with our new garden waste bin. Later during the morning the Gorse Fox went round all the little hiding places where bags of clippings were stored and emptied them into the bin. It will be nice to get rid of them and make a little space in the back of the garage again. Once the tip is reopened there is plenty more that can be disposed of... but most wouldn't glass as green waste.

The lady from Berkeley Homes knocked. She would be in the office and Urban-Cub could go along and complete the formal paperwork for the reservation of her new home. The Gorse Fox went along with her and kept an ear open for any 'gotchas'. It was a good thing he did as their scanner and copier wasn't working so the Gorse Fox had to step in and make all the copies that were required.

Much of the afternoon has been spent working on the "tawnyowl" rebuild. Though not yet finished, he has (at last) got to grips with a couple of the outstanding issues. It's not quite finished, but he suspects that he is on the home straight. It turns out (as it so often does with UNIX systems) that most of the problems have stemmed from a) permissions, b) changes in the database security, and c) changes in the format of the distribution package which created a superfluous high level directory that was mucking things up. However, that's it for today. He will get back to it tomorrow.

Not built in a day

It is clear that, like Rome, "tawnyowl" was not to be built in a day! The Gorse Fox has just started the third attempts to rebuild it from a clean image today. The problem he is hitting is several hours into the rebuild but is significant enough to screw things up. He wants to get the process working cleanly and without incident so that when it is time, and it soon will be, for "peregrine" to be rebuilt, the whole thing goes without incident.

Unlocking lockdown

The Gorse Fox notes that his security camera is providing clear evidence that people are beginning to move about much more. When first installed he might see 5 alerts between 8pm and 8am. Now that number has at least doubled, if not trebled, and most of the increase is between 8pm and midnight. If he can be bothered, he might get round to plotting a graph. Then again...

Got it

The Gorse Fox is delighted to report that, on checking all of the overnight backups, the fix that he developed yesterday has solved the problem of the hibernating disks. No, as each backup job wakes up it runs a small script to go and look at the disk and then waits for 10 seconds to make sure it has "spun up". Then the backup kicks in as usual.

Now he can return to other matters such as the "tawnyowl' rebuild and what to do, longer term, about media storage and streaming.

Study

It's been a lovely day. The sun has shone and the temperature has been a mild but comfortable mid-teen. The Silver Vixen has spent much of the day working on some protective masks. Several early versions didn't work, but after test fitting against the Gorse Fox, several times, she got the fitting right and we now have a perfectly functional protective mask.

The Gorse Fox spent the day working on the new NAS and the backup system. Overnight tests had shown that the new NAS's ability to hibernate the disks created a problem and the backup system couldn't identify the potential target devices. After some thought the Gorse Fox came up with a solution that effectively woke the disks just before the backup process was due to kick-in. We will see, overnight, whether this does the job.

Much of the rest of the study-time was spent cleaning up the new build for "tawnyowl". This is because we managed to introduce an error in the build script (somewhere) and need to re-run several build steps

Progress

The day started with Jasper using the Gorse Fox as a trampoline at 6:30. The Gorse Fox decided that was silly and ignored hime for 45 minutes and then made his way quietly downstairs. He didn't make his customary coffee as the machine is so loud it may have disturbed the various sleeping beauties upstairs and the Gorse Fox decided they all needed their rest.

Once everyone was up and about and fed, Urban-Cub and Ellie joined the Gorse Fox on a walk to Sainsbury's. More cat food was needed along with other essentials such as chocolate and wine. While we were in the store the heavens opened and it was still raining when we finished our shopping. It's only rain. So we tucked Ellie into the buggy and raised the rain cover and headed home. By halfway the rain had stopped and the sun was out. Overall it had been a pleasant couple of hours.

The Gorse Fox picked up some lovely looking hot dog sausages (Dino's) and some rolls. That was lunch sorted for the three of us, but the Silver Vixen (not a fan of hot dogs) declined the offer and munched on something healthy. (Talking of health, the Gorse Fox weighed himself this week for the first time since lockdown. He was expecting bad news, but was actually exactly the same weight as last time he checked before lockdown).

The afternoon has been spent back with the Synology NAS. Further reorganisation has taken place, and files have been flying back and forth round the network. The Gorse Fox thinks he has the basic structure right, but being cautious he wants to check everything out of=ver the next few days before he starts deleting information from the old NAS devices. He is still debating a few design decisions but may well leave one of the existing NAS devices as the master source for the various Raspberry Pi projects and coding projects. The rest of the device will probably be used as the target for Apple Time Machine backups. Like all design decisions, there are pros and cons and the Gorse Fox will (of course) document it all along with the reasoning.