This weekend we headed up to Tool, Texas to build a roasting pit for our Memorial Day pig roast. Here’s Leslie doing a test fit with “Wilbur”:
Paper-mâché doesn’t roast up very well, though, so instead we tested with a pork shoulder:
It turned out well! You can see more pics on gallery.
After 9 months of searching for contractors, picking doors, waiting for doors, waiting for contractors, and monitoring all the work, we’ve finished our first big home improvement project, which was to replace all the interior doors in our house as well as the front door.
Here’s the old front door:
And today, with a few changes to make it more us, most recently our custom designed new front door:
The whole idea started because we were annoyed by the way several of the doors in our house swung, like into the pantry, eating up 30% of its storage space, or into our bedroom so that they blocked the light switches. Also, we had several doors that just didn’t fit in their rooms, swinging way out and blocking access.
It turned out the cost of changing the swing on doors was more in labor than the cost of new doors, so we decided to replace the cheesy molded masonite doors with “Shaker” stile-and-panel doors that were much more our speed. I guess you don’t really take pictures of doors very often, because this was the only one I could find of the old doors:
And here are some pics of the new doors as they arrived:
Being painted:
Finished barn door installation:
Another interior shot:
I’ve always wanted to finish the Cap 10k under 45 minutes, and this morning I did! The official Cap10 timing was 44:05
Pictures are up from our visit to Borobudur in Java. Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world, and we visited at the recommended time, dawn. This involved a 4am wakeup call but was totally worth it:
Pictures fall behind reality: I’ve just finished posting pics from Ubud, Bali while we’ve physically just landed in Sydney.
Ubud is an idyllic paradise in the interior of Bali where we mostly gaped at staggering natural beauty and drank Bintang beer. Many pictures and even a few movies are up on gallery, please to enjoy.
We’ve been in Bali a few days now, and lo it is glorious. As I type this I look out across one of three decks in our private villa in Ubud. It would be crazy to spend too much more time here typing, and our breakfast arrives soon, so I’ll just point you toward gallery which has the first few days of pictures already up.
Oh, and check out what’s got to be my coolest Strava track yet:
Thanks to Leslie, many, many new events worth of pics are up on gallery, including at least six weddings, a ridiculous obstacle course, and the opening of the Wright Bros Brew & Brew. Have a look!
Last week we ate at a hyped new restaurant in town, Qui. It is Paul Qui’s first solo joint, which he has founded since leaving his role as exec chef at Uchiko.
The restaurant doesn’t take reservations so we arrived promptly at 5pm and were joined by Matt and Amanda who had the night off from their baby. It was no trouble to get seated by 5:30 after we’d enjoyed a custom cocktail at the trendy, locally stocked full bar. I popped up to snap a pic of the very jolly and friendly Paul overseeing his kitchen:
The food was high-end but not too pricey, and universally delicious. My favorite dish was rabbit 7 ways, which included consomme in this cute rabbit cup:
The rest of the presentation was nice too:
The food was inventive, playful, delicious, and the whole place was very down-to-earth and unpretentious. The staff seemed to be having a great time and was really into the food and the service. Paul visited our table several times to see how we were doing and gently nudge us toward the real wasabi (“the good stuff,” he called it) and to make sure we ate our cheddar cracker ice cream sandwich with our fingers and not utensils.
There are a few more pics on gallery. I would definitely visit again!
In my last installment, I discussed the hardware I was planning to buy for the build of my new home NAS server. Well, I got all the parts within a matter of days and threw the thing together, then spent my spare time over a couple of weekends setting the thing up. In this post, I’ll discuss the basic setup of the OS (Ubuntu server).
There are a lot of competent Linux distributions out there. I first got into Linux with Redhat in the late nineties, went through a Slackware phase, and finally found something I liked in Debian around 2001. Debian had an excellent package management system (apt), which made keeping all the software on your computer up-to-date. Fast forward a decade, and I’m still there, although with the Debian derivative Ubuntu. Ubuntu has the widest and deepest selection of pre-built software that I know of, and it is still a joy to work with.
You may have noticed that my new server has no optical drive. So, I had to create a bootable USB stick with the Ubuntu installer. I did this by sticking a cheap 2GB flash drive I had lying around into my OS X 10.8 Mac Mini and then firing up Disk Utility. I formatted the disk FAT with an MBR boot record (GUID won’t allow boot), then added following incantation from the terminal:
# sudo fdisk -e /dev/disk2 f 1 write exit
Which (I think) activates the first partition for boot.
Then, I used unetbootin to download and image the installer (ubuntu-12.10-server-amd64.iso) onto the disk. I popped it in the NAS and it booted right up!
I won’t hold your hand through the entire installation process. I did a no-frills install:
That's it! Ubuntu installed.
There are a lot more options out there for Linux RAID and filesystems than there were a few years ago. The last time I set up a NAS, I tried out ZFS with its whizzy volume management and snapshotting and whatnot, but discovered it was slow, unstable, and RAM-hungry. Before that I’d tried JFS, Reiser, and others. I was always bitten by their immaturity, and a lack of disaster recovery tools. Meanwhile, good old ext has always been reliable if not the most feature-rich. And, perhaps most importantly, ext is always supported by every recovery tool. So I decided to stay simple and just use Linux’s built-in software raid with an ext4 filesystem for my big media volume.
Before setting up a Linux software RAID volume, you should probably do some reading. It’s actually very simple once you figure out what you want, but figuring that out can be a lengthy process. I’ll direct you to the canonical guide that I’ve used several times in the past. For me, it boiled down to a 4-disk RAID5 array (one disk worth of parity) with a 256KB chunk size (since I mostly have large media files):
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --chunk=256 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd
And that’s it! Once the creation is started, you can start sticking stuff on the volume right away, so I went ahead and created a filesystem:
mkfs.ext4 -v -m .1 -b 4096 -E stride=64,stripe-width=192 /dev/md0
Here, the ‘-m .1’ reserves just 0.1% of the volume’s space for the root user (down from the default of 5%), and the block and stride arguments are tuned for the raid block size. See this section of the guide for info on how to compute them.
We’re greeting the spring with a raised-bed garden in our front yard. Leslie built the boxes then we worked together to mix the soil, plant, and install drip irrigation. Lots of tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce in the ground ready for the Texas heat. Bring it!
