Daily Shaarli
August 23, 2021
This is how many modern file system backup programs work. On day 1 you make an rsync copy of your entire file system:
backup@backup_server> DAY1=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
backup@backup_server> rsync -av -e ssh earl@192.168.1.20:/home/earl/ /var/backups/$DAY1/On day 2 you make a hard link copy of the backup, then a fresh rsync:
backup@backup_server> DAY2=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`
backup@backup_server> cp -al /var/backups/$DAY1 /var/backups/$DAY2
backup@backup_server> rsync -av -e ssh --delete earl@192.168.1.20:/home/earl/ /var/backups/$DAY2/“cp -al” makes a hard link copy of the entire /home/earl/ directory structure from the previous day, then rsync runs against the copy of the tree. If a file remains unchanged then rsync does nothing — the file remains a hard link. However, if the file’s contents changed, then rsync will create a new copy of the file in the target directory. If a file was deleted from /home/earl then rsync deletes the hard link from that day’s copy.
In this way, the $DAY1 directory has a snapshot of the /home/earl tree as it existed on day 1, and the $DAY2 directory has a snapshot of the /home/earl tree as it existed on day 2, but only the files that changed take up additional disk space. If you need to find a file as it existed at some point in time you can look at that day’s tree. If you need to restore yesterday’s backup you can rsync the tree from yesterday, but you don’t have to store a copy of all of the data from each day, you only use additional disk space for files that changed or were added.
I use this technique to keep 90 daily backups of a 500GB file system on a 1TB drive.
One caveat: The hard links do use up inodes. If you’re using a file system such as ext3, which has a set number of inodes, you should allocate extra inodes on the backup volume when you create it. If you’re using a file system that can dynamically add inodes, such as ext4, zfs or btrfs, then you don’t need to worry about this.
With its iconic “brrrrrt” sound and painted-on teeth, it is easy to distinguish the A-10 Thunderbolt II (affectionately referred to as the Warthog)—the plane built around a gun. Despite the love from its fans and high accuracy for close air support (CAS), there is still continuous debate as to whether to retire the A-10.
For starters, the plane is quite old. Created in 1977, the A-10 has seen its share of upgrades. Just one year after being created, it was upgraded with the Pave Penny laser pod, which can “sense reflected laser radiation from a laser designator.”1 Other upgrades include Global Position System navigation systems, multifunction display, and precision engagement upgrades. Each of these keeps the A-10 up to date with current technology, so why are there plans to retire it?
It is because it is still considered outdated and is “the oldest and least-ready aircraft” to modernize.2 However, the benefits of keeping the A-10 around outweigh the negatives. //
There are alternatives to using the A-10, but the Warthog still prevails through its many planned retirements because of its training requirements, design, weaponry, and ability to fly low and slow. The opinion by and large is that the A-10 is outdated, but this plane constantly proves why it has been around this long. No other plane is built like the A-10 or can do everything the A-10 does, and the US Air Force does not have any plans to bring any other plane to that standard. That is why no other plane would be able to truly replace the A-10.
Ethiopian Airlines has been the fastest-growing airline in Africa over the past decade or so. It has succeeded where many other airlines have struggled, largely due to a strong plan set out in 2010. In December 2020, it won the best African airline award in the Decade of Airline Excellence Awards. How has it risen to this level?
Jesse Kelly
@JesseKellyDC
Tried to warn everyone drastic measures should have been taken back when that pipeline got hacked. We paid a ransom and the administration basically said, “not much problem”.
We just DRIP weakness under Biden. They’re all coming for us now.
Jacqui Heinrich
@JacquiHeinrich
🚨BREAKING, thread:
The State Department has been hit by a cyber attack, and notifications of a possible serious breach were made by the Department of Defense Cyber Command.
7:52 PM · Aug 21, 2021
Sebastian Gorka DrG
@SebGorka
“America is Back”
The techno-uptopians keep promising us technological solutions to our myriad critical problems that either don’t appear, don’t solve the problem, create many new difficult problems, or keep getting delayed far into the future (fusion-based energy comes to mind). What they never seriously ask us to do is change the way we live. That must be a major reason their “solutions” find such a large audience of ready believers.
author David Zweig asserts that the supposed science supporting the imposition of mask mandates isn’t as solid as the left would have us believe. For starters, he brought up a large-scale study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which analyzed the spread of COVID-19 in schools.
Zweig writes:
A few major news outlets covered its release by briefly reiterating the study’s summary: that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools.
However, the summary left out an important factor:
Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective.
The author points to similar results found in European nations such as Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and others. Each of these nations has not required children to wear face masks. The article notes that “there’s no evidence of more outbreaks in schools in those countries relative to schools in the U.S.” //
Even more interesting is the fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) has provided guidance regarding mask-wearing that conflicts with the CDC’s recommendations and has found that forcing students to wear masks may actually have a detrimental effect on their development. //
Over the course of several weeks, I also corresponded with many experts — epidemiologists, infectious-disease specialists, an immunologist, pediatricians, and a physician publicly active in matters relating to COVID — asking for the best evidence they were aware of that mask requirements on students were effective. Nobody was able to find a data set as robust as the Georgia results — that is, a large cohort study directly looking at the effects of a mask requirement. //
The notion that the CDC would suppress information demonstrating that their narrative regarding masks for children lacks merit is telling. The reality is clear: The CDC and the left want your kids wearing masks whether they work or not. Why else would they hide this information?
bsandor said:
My guess is, I should not try to recycle drives like this, and if I do, maybe there's something I should do to the disk before re-using it in another ZFS system.
zpool labelclear device is likely what you are looking for.
The landlord association, understandably, has pulled no punches in immediately returning to the Supreme Court for relief. They argue that; “[a]s five Members of this Court indicated less than two months ago, Congress never gave the CDC the staggering amount of power it claims … the unqualified power to take any measure imaginable to stop the spread of any communicable disease.” In discussing the equities, they note that, in the past three months since the district court’s order was originally stayed, “the government has … distribute[d] rental assistance; health care providers have administered roughly 65 million additional vaccine doses; and the total cost of the moratoria to lessors, amounting to as much as $19 billion each month, has only increased.” The landlords emphasize that, due to the government’s sovereign immunity and the judgment-proof nature of the tenants, the massive wealth transfer accomplished by the moratorium will never be fully undone.
The landlords conclude by focusing on the larger issues at play. They properly highlight that the Executive Branch is taking advantage of the inherent delay that litigating matters before the Judicial Branch entails in order to cynically buy time to achieve policy goals in a way the courts think is unlawful. They note that it took 26 days for the Supreme Court to resolve the previous appeal in June and that it has now been 17 days since the CDC decided to extend the moratorium past July 31. They warn correctly that, unless the Supreme Court promptly vacates the stay, “Congress will know that it can legislate through pressure campaigns and sit-ins rather than bicameralism and presentment, the Executive Branch will know that it can disregard the views of a majority of Justices with impunity, and this Court will know that its carefully considered rulings will be roundly ignored.” This result is far more damaging to our nation than even the staggering financial losses suffered by landlords, in truth. Hopefully, the Supreme Court – or at least some of the Justices – will speak clearly to this issue as well in the course of bringing down the curtain on the moratorium.
Because you can't sell cars that have a 1 in 150 chance of randomly going boom.
A less discussed and yet critical issue involving the comparison between TVs and monitors is sub-pixel structure. Each and every pixel on any full-colour display is made up of a number of sub-pixels. The most common structure is known as RGB, which indicates red, green and blue subpixels in that order.
Almost all PC monitors are RGB – indeed, for computing, anything other than standard RGB is a problem. That’s because operating systems like Windows rely on sub-pixel structure to render fonts accurately and smoothly.
Many TVs also use RGB, but some stick with BGR (blue, then green and then red), and it means computing applications and browsers largely aren’t ideal – while more complex RBGW systems found on some TVs also tend to reduce detail and sharpness.
If a TV uses an IPS panel, it’s probably RGB, while a VA panel could be either RGB or BGR – but as TV makers don’t always list sub-pixel information, this can be much harder to discern with small TVs than with PC monitors.
This is a revisitation of a post that I published in 2011, with the title “The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox“ Here, I am expanding the calculations of the previous post and emphasizing the relevance of the paradox on the availability of energy for planetary civilizations and, in particular on the possibility of developing controlled nuclear fusion. Of course, we can’t prove that nuclear fusion is impossible simply because we have not been invaded by aliens, so far. But these considerations give us a certain feeling on the orders of magnitude involved in the complex relationship between energy use and civilization. Despite the hype, nuclear energy of any kind may remain forever a marginal source of energy.
Post revised and readapted from “The Hubbert hurdle: revisiting the Fermi Paradox” — Published on “Cassandra’s Legacy” in May 2011
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/10/hubbert-hurdle-revisiting-fermi-paradox.html //
It seems clear that planets are common around stars and, with about 100 billion stars in our galaxy, organic life cannot be that rare. Of course, “organic life” doesn’t mean “intelligent life,” and the latter doesn’t mean “technologically advanced civilization.” But, with so many planets, the galaxy may well be teeming with alien civilizations, some of them technologically as advanced as us, possibly much more.
The next step in this line of reasoning is called the “Fermi Paradox,” said to have been proposed for the first time by the physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s. It goes as, “if aliens exist, why aren’t they here?” Even at speeds slower than light, nothing physical prevents a spaceship from crossing the galaxy from end to end in a million years or even less. Since our galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, intelligent aliens would have had plenty of time to explore and colonize every star in the galaxy. But we don’t see aliens around and that’s the paradox.
Paradoxes are often extremely useful scientific tools. They state that two contrasting beliefs cannot be both true and that’s usually powerful evidence that some of our assumptions are not correct. The Fermi paradox is not so much about whether alien civilizations are common or not, but about the idea that interstellar travel is possible. //
But let’s imagine that an alien civilization, or our own in the future, avoids an irreversible collapse and that it moves to nuclear energy. Let’s assume it can avoid the risk of nuclear annihilation. Can nuclear energy provide enough energy for interstellar travel? There are many technological problems with nuclear energy, but a fundamental one is the availability of nuclear fuel. Without fuel, not even the most advanced spaceship can go anywhere.
A swap is nothing but space or file on a disk that can used as virtual memory. In FreeBSD and Unix-like operating systems, it is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. When a FreeBSD based server runs out of memory, the kernel can move sleeping or inactive processes into swap area. A dedicated Swap partition goes a long way to avoid system freeze but if you notice you are running out of RAM or your applications are consuming too much of it then you may want to setup a swapfile. This guide helps you add a swap space on FreeBSD based Unix server.
A significant number of Joe Biden’s top foreign policy advisors – including his Director of National Intelligence and National Security Advisor – participated in an event advocating against the “containment” of the Chinese Communist Party, with funding coming from various Chinese Communist regime-backed sources, The National Pulse can reveal.
The news comes as analysts review Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, and raise questions as to the intent of the White House in diminishing America’s role in the world. //
Organized by the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) 21st Century China Center since 2019, the annual “China Forum” has counted some of the highest-ranking officials of the Biden White House in attendance.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, “Asia Czar” Kurt Campbell, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner along with Rush Doshi and Julian Gewirtz, who lead the National Security Council’s China desk, and Melanie Hart and Mira Rapp-Hooper, who play a comparable role at the State Department, were in attendance.
One of the fifteen “key takeaways” from the 2019 dialogue – whose “sponsors” included Kurt Campbell himself, as well as Qualcomm, the Asia Group Foundation, East West Bank, and one further “anonymous” source – advocated that “competitive coexistence, rather than confrontation and containment, is the best path forward” in the context of U.S.-China relations. //
While the 21st Century China Center’s website page documenting its donors and institutional partners has been deleted, archives reveal the center was – and perhaps still is – partnered with several Chinese Communist-Party linked companies such as state-owned technology firm ZTE.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170908224439/http://china.ucsd.edu/support/institutional-partners.html
Over two decades ago, Warren Buffett lectured at the University of Florida's school of business and gave students life lessons on happiness, careers, finances, and relationships.
Buffett urged students to do the things they know will enjoy throughout their lives and gave good counsel about making business connections with likable people. "I only work with people I like," Buffett told students. "If I could make $100 million with a guy who causes my stomach to churn, I'd say no."
I urge you to work in jobs you love. You're out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don't like because you think it'll look good on your résumé.
Hardware failure and a careless user feeling adventurous with powerful utilities such as dd and fdisk can lead to data loss in Linux. Not only that, sometimes spring cleaning a partition or directory can also lead to accidentally deleting some useful files. Should that happen, there’s no reason to despair. With the PhotoRec utility, you can easily recover a variety of files, be it documents, images, music, archives and so on.
Developed by CGSecurity and released under the GPL, PhotoRec is distributed as a companion utility of Testdisk, which can be used to recover and restore partitions. You can use either of these tools to recover files, but each has a job that it’s best suited for. Testdisk is best suited for recovering lost partitions. //
Although initially designed to only recover image files (hence the name), PhotoRec can be used to recover just about any manner of file.
Even better, PhotoRec works by ignoring the underlying filesystem on the specified partition, disk or USB drive. Instead, it focuses on the unique signatures left by the different file types to identify them. This is why PhotoRec can work with FAT, NTFS, ext3, ext4 and other partition types. //
The greatest drawback of PhotoRec – if any tool that can seemingly pull deleted files out of the digital ether can have a drawback – is that it doesn’t retain the original filenames. This means that recovered files all sport a gibberish alpha-numeric name. If this is a deal-breaker for you, consider using Testdisk first to recover your lost files.
To Install Testdisk open a terminal window and first update the software repositories before installing testdisk.
A fund started by radio host Glenn Beck raised more than $20 million in less than three days to help evacuate Christians from Afghanistan.
The Nazarene Fund is gearing up to extract approximately 5,000 people, mostly women and children, from Afghanistan as the country descends into chaos and the Taliban take over, according to The Blaze. //
According to their website, The Nazarene Fund exists “to liberate the captive, to free the enslaved, and to rescue, rebuild and restore the lives of Christians and other persecuted religious and ethnic minorities wherever and whenever they are in need.” //
"The Taliban is stopping you, checking your phone. If you have a Bible app or anything to do with Jesus on your phone, you’re instantly being killed. They are setting Christians on fire, those who have converted because they’re the worst, according to the Taliban.” //
“Please pray for these people,” Beck added, who later said most of the millions in donations were small ones.
This is a dishonest and despicable spin that no one, not even the author, believes. It is partisan hackery, it is stupid. But that, in a nutshell, describes our “foreign policy experts.”