2014 Personal Data Storage

Posted on by lhl

A few years ago, I went ahead and built a NAS w/ 4x2TB drives, about 7TiB of usable storage (interestingly enough, 2TB drives are the same price as they were 3 years ago). I had a separate 2x3TB external setup for backup, as well as way too many external drives (about 10TB of loosies). Later, I also inherited another microserver (w/ the same 4x2TB setup) from work as we switched to two Synology DS1812+‘s in the office. And I also have an old Drobo Gen 2 that’s still ticking along.

As you might surmise, my personal storage situation has been… loosely managed. I have a spreadsheet that helps a bit, but it’s always a mess as I run out of space on a drive and the nice clean schema gets all out of whack. Recently I decided to try to get a better handle on things, and acquired 5x4TB of external drives to help rejigger things. This was a good start, but as the drives on my main NAS were giving up the ghost, and as I was digging through my backups, backups of backups, and other duped files, I realized I probably needed a new NAS to help work things out.

The state of dedupe/file organizing tools is the topic of another long blog post. I’ve used Disktracker off and on, which is ancient, and not quite what I want, but seems to indexing tens of millions of files the best. The general state of desktop file management/indexing/duping is quite sad however, especially if you’re interested in consolidating and comparing entire folder structures/partial drive backups. (as far as I can tell, there’s no good tool for that).

In any case, after a late night of clicking around, I decided that as the Drobo 5N was pretty reasonably priced, and that as my old Drobo was still working fine after almost 6 years, and people online (and Drobo themselves) seemed to think that the performance was much improved, that it might not be a bad way to go. I picked one up about two weeks ago.

So, how is it? Well, for general large file copying, it seems fine (I can get about 80MB/s transfers on my netwrok). However, my primary use case involves lots of rsyncing and dealing w/ small files, and here, the Drobo 5N is, as far as I can tell, pretty pathetic. You can read some more details, but even with the mSATA accelerator (I am using a 128GB Plextor M5M which is specc’d for 76K write IOPS), rsyncing maxes out at all of about 700 IOPS.

I *just* finished rsyncing my Drobo Gen 2 yesterday, and I have a 4TB drive that will hopefully be done in the next day or so.

Still, this setup I think is good enough as I prep for moving about. We’ll revisit this in a few years, I guess.

Some Cognitive Biases

Posted on by lhl

Saw a fantastic quote tweeted the other day, an excerpt from a book entitled Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics. While the book has mixed reviews, the biases are worth taking a gander at…

Here are some of the most common cognitive biases identified by social scientists.

Availability Bias
Perseverence Bias
Source Confusion
Projection Bias
Self-Serving Bias
Superiority Bias
Planning Fallacy
Optimism Bias

Do any of them privilege the truth? The answer is no. Not one. They privilege survival.

Here’s the rundown:

  • Availability Bias – overweighting importance based on memorable/dramatic/easily recalled occurrences
  • Perseverence Bias – a type of confirmation bias continuing to believe things that have been proven wrong
  • Source Confusion – misattribution of a source of a memory
  • Projection Bias – projecting your own motivations (priority, attitude, belief) on other actors (including your future self!)
  • Self-Serving Bias – the tendency to see oneself in a favorable light. “It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors”
  • Superiority Bias – the “above average effect” – overrating positives, underrating negatives
  • Planning Fallacy – programmers are probably intimately familiar with; a type of optimism bias where task difficulty/length is underestimated
  • Optimism Bias – believing that you’re less at risk of something bad happening than others

A better book on this stuff might be Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is a psychologist that won the Nobel Prize Winner in Economics and collaborated for over a decade with Tversky to do seminal research on cognitive biases.

Hello Blog

Posted on by lhl

Somehow, we’re just about to head into the third month of 2016. Tomorrow (and I didn’t even realize this until I looked at my archives) will clock in the 16th anniversary of my blog at this domain (it actually started a few months earlier as a “class” blog while I was playing around with Blogger and followed from various personal webpage journaling/.plan file updates from a few years even before then).

OK, besides too many parenthetical digressions, what does it mean? Well, for one thing, it’s that I haven’t been updating this much lately. The numbers don’t lie there:

Where does my online posting time go these days?

  • When I things I want to share, it probably goes on Twitter, or occassionally on Facebook (mostly, my FB feed is just auto-posted tweets, though). FB comments can sometimes get involved.
  • I’m in *way* too many Slacks groups.
  • Mostly because of /r/oculus, I’m on reddit more than I really should be.
  • I post on a few other forums, on Hacker News most, commonly
  • I’ve been keeping a public Hackpad (along with several thousand private notes in Evernote, and an increasing number of Dropbox Paper notes)

While I gave Medium a tire-kick a while back, I decided that it wasn’t really my thing. The text-box wasn’t the problem with my lack of long-form writing, rather, it just hasn’t been a super high priority among the other things I’ve been doing.

That being said, I have some plans to change that a bit this year. The first step was this new coat of paint, which honestly, didn’t take quite as long as I had feared. I’d like to pull in my tweets into my blog as well, but some preliminary research shows that that’s a project in itself, especially if you’d like to rehydrate/render tweets properly. So that’s a P2.

I have a couple bigger pieces I’m working on, which should also summarize some of what I’ve been up to lately, but for now, here’s a little interview that Kit recently posted.

Pardon the Dust

Posted on by lhl

It’s been much too long since this blog has seem some love, but I’ve finally decided to give it a bit of a wipe down rather than give up entirely and move to Medium or something like that.

I originally tried switching to a content theme like Casper, but at the end of the day, since there were a fair number of customizations I wanted to make anyway, I decided to start with an _s based theme. Since I’m base16-based in most of my work environment, I figure I’d have a go w/ those colors.

  • New theme is on Github, nothing fancy, but you can see the commit log
  • The only thing that took a bit of headscratching was with some weird zooming on the index page in Mobile Safari. Turns out, it doesn’t like long links and will just zoom to the width. My final solution was to add some CSS word-breaking code to a mobile-specific media query (it does some weird breaks to Firefox on the desktop for example).
  • Last year I switched completely to HTTPS (thanks Let’s Encrypt!) and have been slowly making fixes when I’ve encountered them (mostly broken images/media due to HTTP redirects and mixed content annoyingness).

Not Enough Hours In The Day

Posted on by lhl

If you have some spare time and looking for some fun/geeky, but not too intense reading:

Well, that’s more than enough for now. Time’s a wasting.

2015, The Year of Linux on My Laptop

Posted on by lhl

I’ve written a bit about this before[1], so I won’t rehash too much, but reading Andre’s piece on how his new Chromebook Pixel has replaced his Macbook Pro, made me a bit nostalgic and wanting to write some of my own thoughts about switching off of the Mac this year.

Like Andre, this a somewhat notable event for me. I’ve always used a mix of Macs and PCs growing up, but throughout most of the 90s, I built my own PCs for personal use (running DOS/Windows, and then poking around w/ Slackware releases pretty early on). In college, I spent more of my time on Sun workstations, and ended up managing a Mac computer lab (with some NT and SGI workstations in the back), which simultaneously generated a still-to-this-day disdain for the piece-of-crap System 9, but also a growing excitement for OS X. In 2001, I installed OS X 10.0 on a brand new G3 Snow iBook – it was almost unusably slow, but I didn’t look back, and while I continued to maintain a healthy menagerie of gaming PCs and Linux boxen, OS X was my daily driver, and just about every year I’d upgrade to the latest PowerBook, MacBook Pro, and finally, for the past few years, the 11″ MBAs. It was a bit of a sad and slow realization over the past few years that each version of OS X was getting worse for me than the last, and also, that the MBA wasn’t cutting it either, especially as I started traveling full time again. I waited for the 12″ MacBook to see if it were any better, but in the end, that was the final confirmation that Apple was no longer designing laptops for me.

I’d previous tested out a bunch of Chromebooks (including traveling with one on a month-long trip in China), but even with a Crouton setup, it just never worked for me. On the X side, I’d also tried just about every single tiling manager out there (Awesome was probably the best, QTile I had a soft spot for as a Python geek), but they never clicked. This time around, I’ve been using Openbox, and it’s been great – does everything I want, gets out of the way, and its behavior is completely customizable. I spent a month or so yak-shaving (fixing about one thing a day), and in the end, I have a setup that is bespoke in a way that feels fitting considering how much time I spend on my computers.  It’s not perfect – I had to write my own site-specific browser library (works but still needs some polishing), and my 1Password situation is passable, but honestly a huge pain. Also, I’m booting into Windows a lot more than I’d like – a pure necessity to run Adobe Creative Cloud, Unity3D, and the rest of my VR development, although I will admit that Windows 10 is… not that bad.

 

Since no laptops are powerful enough to currently drive PC VR experiences, I also started carrying around a very powerful PC in a Pelican case with me (my VR bucket). Since I can also use this for my photo editing, that changes the calculus a bit for my portable computing needs. I will probably end up with something a bit slimmer/lighter than my X250 next. Since I also carry a separate mechanical keyboard, this may even end up being a 2-in-1 or tablet. As long is it runs Linux well and has 8h+ battery life, I’ll be alright I think.

We’ll see what 2016 brings, but it’s a bit sad that for me, it probably won’t ever be a Mac again.

[1] For all the details:

Bands You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, This Is My Jam Memorial Edition

Posted on by lhl

This is My Jam went into archive mode this weekend. Those unfamiliar with it can read about it here, but the gist of it was that it was a little experiment in music discovery/curation that while beloved by a small community, never really found the right way to gain enought scale/daily engagement to be sustainable.

That being said, they’ve wound it down on a high note.  You can read all about the decision (the Guardian writeup is also good), and the praise they’ve received for shutting down responsibly. If you’re running a site with users, take heed; I’ve rarely, if ever, seen it done better.

One particularly neat feature of the archive (here’s mine) is the automatic generation of a Spotify playlist of your jams. Sadly, for my jams, only 28 out of 53 are available on Spotify right now. As a music enthusiast and early user (Matt, Hannah, and the EN folks are pals), early on I had decided to play around w/ TIMJ over the course of 2 months, from the beginning of October to the end of December 2011, I posted 18 tracks (only 6 of which are available on Spotify) of “bands you’ve probably never heard of.”

It’s been a really long while since I’ve posted music on my site, but I figure this is a fitting tribute. Pouring one out for TIMJ.

  • 1998 – Lanemeyer – Don’t Hate Me

    • 2011-10-09

    1998; 1,548 listeners; Kicking off “bands you’ve probably never heard of” series, read comment for more…

    flaneur: “This feels every inch of 1998.”

    lhl: “Ha, yeah, got distracted w / a phone call, posting a more detailed post now…”

    lhl: “So, first off, a little bit about this experiment. Basically, I was going through some of my music to find some of the older obscure tracks from my collection. I debated including this track, as it’s sort of objectively … not good. But I did remember these guys pretty fondly, for a number of reasons, and included these guys so I could tell the story.”

    lhl: “I actually spent most of my college years almost completely immersed in electronica of every variety, but towards the tail end, I started catching up/seeing what was was happening in the “rock” world, which at the turn of the millennium, was emo/post-emo indie rock. I think I had some (much better) Midtown tracks, and ended up finding these fellow NJ pop-punkers (and some even lesser known brethren like Humble Beginnings) either through mp3.com or AudioGalaxy.”

    lhl: “These guys ended up being mostly a stepping stone towards listening to much better punk (Lawrence Arms, Pitchfork, Drive Like Jehu, Fugazi and the Dischord catalog) and to some much more emo emo that I discovered around the same time period, but that’s a story for the next track. :)”

    lhl: “(BTW, you guys definitely need to do something about the character limits!)”

    lhl: “Also, “listeners” are last.fm listeners.
    Assuming all this data will get pulled automagically when thisismyjam gets Echo Nest super cow powers.

    Lane Meyer (New Jersey, US)
    http://www.last.fm/music/Lanemeyer
    25,335 plays (1,548 listeners) “

    lhl: “Next installment, tmw.”

    gtmcknight: “This song is awesome. Actually made me go back and listen to more college-ish music like Knapsack and My Hotel Year”

  • 1998 – Vitreous Humor – Sharin’ Stone

    • 2011-10-11

    1998; 1,730 last.fm listeners; OK, it’s all awesomesauce from here on out. Also, so, so emo.

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Vitreous%20Humor

    How emo you ask? I believe that I first caught this track on a compilation called the Emo Diaries. Also, this track was on an album Posthumous, that was released 2 years after they’d broken up.

    Actually a little surprised by how few listeners are listed on last.fm; they were pretty influential in the midwest scene of the era, and as good, if not better than many of the more successful acts that followed.”

    lhl: “They were on crank!, and I have a fair amount of their catalog. Boys Life, Mineral, Gloria Record, pre-Saddle Creek Cursive releases, etc etc. I still have a crank! records sticker on one of my camera cases.

    This was around the time where I was buying the majority of releases from the labels I was following, among them: Saddle Creek (Omaha), Post Parlo (Austin), Barsuk (Seattle), DeSoto (DC), and Jade Tree (DE)”

    flaneur: “And this is why we’ll need to work on the jam archive soon ;)”

    lhl: “Yeah, sort of sucks that it just disappears. Also, do previous tracks completely disappear from the timeline as well?”

    flaneur: “Yup. That’s intentional and I think what differentiates the service, but there are still things we can (and will) do around browsing/doing things with the backlog”

    lhl: “I can understand the approach/attitude (music expiration, highlighting the current jam), but in implementation I think make it too having the timeline completely blow away the previous jam/not having history in the timeline takes ephemerality too far.

    Why leave a comment if it just disappears and no one, not even the poster might see it? Why bother spending any time writing about a jam? If the idea isn’t just to highlight tracks of the moment, the context is important…”

    lhl: “just noticed jams don’t have permalinks either, huh? puts a damper on a lot of interesting things.”

    lhl: “btw i think there is a big hole right now for an app that lets your write/historicize/contextualize your relationship w/ a track, album, band, but maybe that’s not what thisismyjam is… but it should be!”

  • 2000 – Subset – Anchor

    • 2011-10-13

    2000; 1,034 last.fm listeners; track 3 of “bands no one’s heard of” playlist

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Subset

    I first heard of these guys because I worked with the drummer (who also drummed for Silver Scooter, a slightly more well known band) in Austin the summer of 2000.

    These guys (were?) great, not to be confused w/ another band of the same name from the Pacific Northwest (Biz Markie was involved).”

  • 2001 – emotional joystick – eight

    • 2011-10-15

    2001; 8,435 last.fm listeners; slightly less obscure, but just too good of a track not to post.

    lhl: “No great story here, but this is just a killer cut and is just criminally under-listened (say vs the squarepusher or other warp releases coming out around the same time). this was released before chip-tunes became a thing, and managed to bring in just the right bit of drill-and-bass excitement to a melodic, very mid-90s afx type of tune.”

  • 2002 – Halley – Adventures of George and the robbers (record player pt. 1)

    • 2011-10-20

    2002; 619 last.fm listeners; next stop on the bands you’ve never heard of tour. some more austin friends

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Halley

    Another band another coworker was in. I’m guessing that I must have seen them in 2000 or 2001 and picked up an early copy of this song, although my timelines may have been a bit off? Amazing how hazy this stuff gets. I remember this fitting in nicely between the Minus the Bear, Pinback, and Explosions in the Sky I was listening to. This track in particular I think is phenomenal.”

  • 2002 – The Farewell Bikeride – Duet

    • 2011-10-26

    2002; 29 last.fm listeners; that’s right, your home ec class probably was bigger than the listener count

    lhl: “Hmm, the preview didn’t do a good job w/ the photo, glad it cropped ok.

    http://www.last.fm/music/The+Farewell+Bikeride

    Provo, UT pop punk band. Not sure how I stumbled upon them. It looks like have a 128kbps copy of a 2-track release here: http://www.archive.org/details/masa022

    I *do* know that they were a real band, as apparently they played in the back of a Peninsula pizza shop a few years back. Apparently a not so mindblowing show (sorry Vince!)”

    uvince: “Wow, the memories!”

    jedsundwall: “Wow. I probably saw these guys play Kilby Court while I was at the University of Utah. Taking me back.”

    bwhitman: “i appreciate your choice of “home ec class” as barometer of low attendance”

  • 2003 – Some By Sea – There’s A Line In The Sand. Are You Afraid To Cross It?

    • 2011-11-09

    2003; 8,385 last.fm listeners; not totally obscure but this Tacoma band only (self) released 1 album and 1 EP.

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Some%20By%20Sea

    One of a number of indie pop bands that seems to fall under the Barsuk sound that was popular at the time. Most of their tracks were admittedly pretty Death Cab light, but this track, IMO is fantastic. Worth a listen if you missed them the first time around.

    (Actually, looking them up on Wikipedia, they did have a full length followup on SideCho before breaking up).”

  • 2004 – Alone – When My Headlights Meet Yours

    • 2011-11-14

    2004; 74 last.fm listeners; lovely post-rock/electronic just recently discovered via a reissue by the artist

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Alone/Several+Quiet+Moments
    (there are 3 other artists named alone, but they’re not the same I don’t believe)

    Not sure how I stumbled onto this. Maybe surfing what.cd tags? It’s a nice little release that no one has heard of, just one of the many albums released out of bedrooms over the past decade of massively democratized bloop making tools.

    http://alonemusic.bandcamp.com/album/several-quiet-moments-remaster
    http://www.alone-music.co.uk/”

  • 2005 – Velvetron – Deadbeat

    • 2011-11-19

    2005; 184 last.fm listeners; the folks in Chicago picked some great music for the campaign; more in comments

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Velvetron

    …referring to the 2008 Obama Campaign of course. From the Dan Zweben lick on the Super Bowl commercial, or The National (Fake Empire no less) on commercials and at the DNC.

    Of all the spots/tracks, this one by Velvetron was my favorite I think, and I’m somewhat surprised by how criminally underplayed this band is.

    Ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXAiyAf7HgA

    Velvetron’s site: http://velvetron.net/ (hey, didn’t even know they had a new album. Bought!)”

    joehughes: “Weird that the only way to give good music the word count it deserves is to comment on your own post!”

    lhl: “Well sadly, it also all disappears when you post a new song. Also, you probably won’t see this comment since I’m going to be posting a new track in a minute!”

  • 2007 – Portland – Girl In My Bed

    • 2011-11-23

    2007; 77 last.fm listeners; Go ahead. Try finding their album.

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Portland/Adrienne

    I’m not exactly sure how I stumbled onto these guys, but their entire album, Adrienne, has just a great guitar-driven post-rocky sound. As far as I know, this was their only release and it’s pretty much impossible to find it.

    If you have sufficient Google-fu, you can find that the original album was released on Punching Bee Music, a local Grand Rapids, Michigan label. It shared some members w/ the band The Mighty Narwhale.”

    iancr: “Wow. Woah. Jeez. Thanks!”

  • 2008 – Minimatic – Take on me (with a martini)

    • 2011-11-28

    2008; 2,734 last.fm listeners; French lounge remixer does a great cover…

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Minimatic

    This artist/track feels a bit less obscure to me than some of the others I’ve been posting. I feel like despite the low last.fm listener count, that there’s a more than fair chance that some people here have heard this before.

    A big reason I’m including this is because when I first heard this track, it was sort of a pain to chase down. I ended up eventually getting to the dj/producer’s site, where I wget’d a bunch of remix and mixtape tracks.”

  • 2008 – Satine – October Dane

    • 2011-12-01

    2008; ~800 last.fm listeners; first caught this on La Blogothèque. see comments for more

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Satine

    This is just a fantastic track. Maybe the best one of this whole “bands you’ve never heard of” series. I dropped them an email and ordered their EP (hand mailed via Air France) for €10 after I first heard this. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that October Dane wasn’t on it! The track was eventually released on their 2010 live album Satine Ünder Philharmonëën, available on Amazon MP3.”

  • 2008 – The Ghost Orchid – Horseshoes & Handgrenades

    • 2011-12-06

    2008; 5,306 last.fm listeners; fantastic unsigned San Diego post-rock tinged indietronica

    lhl: “Not sure how I originally stumbled on these guys (clicking through on random tags on what?) Their entire album is filled w/ the same awesomesauce, so if this strikes your fancy, they sell their album for $10 via paypal:

    http://theghostorchid.com/

    http://www.last.fm/music/The%20Ghost%20Orchid
    http://www.myspace.com/theghostorchid”

  • 2008 – the Old Believers – There It Is

    • 2011-12-14

    2008; 2,471 last.fm listeners; criminally unheard folk from Portland via Alaskan duo

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/The%20Old%20Believers

    This was one of my favorite albums from 2008 and this was one of my favorite opening tracks. You can actually listen/dl the whole album here: http://oldbelieversmusic.com/shhh/ , but if you like it, they probably deserve a couple bucks: http://www.amazon.com/Eight-Golden-Greats/dp/B0016CCVVC

    I think I’m about 13 or 14 tracks into my awesome bands people haven’t heard of set. Will pick up the pace to close out 2011 before I head out of town.”

  • 2009 – Ishivu – Palms

    • 2011-12-16

    2009; 928 last.fm listeners; made when he was 16? spotted on DÖDSELECTRO when it came out

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Ishivu

    DÖDSELECTRO ( http://deathelectro.com/ ) has long one of my favorite electronic music blogs and this is one of the many obscure gems that I found on it.”

  • 2010 – iambic – Satellites

    • 2011-12-19

    2010; 1,789 last.fm listeners; ambient/idm; RIYL Benn Jordan/Flashbulb, Halogen, Lusine, I Am Robot and Proud

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Iambic

    Actually, Album Leaf (but mellower) or Small Sails might also be good comparisons. A pleasant soundscapey post-rock w/ some jazzier instrumentation. Not sure how I stumbled on this. Tag search on what?”

  • 2010 – Lemâitre – Strobes Pt. 2

    • 2011-12-21

    2010; 12,512 last.fm listeners; RIYL Erlend Øye, Röyksopp, Phoenix

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Lemaitre

    Skirting the line of obscurity, but the tracks are just too fantastic. If you like this, be sure to check out The Friendly Sound (total earworm), Nishio, Blue Shift on their soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/serious-url”

  • 2011 – MH – 05 In The Blackness Of The Fire

    • 2011-12-23

    2011; 538 last.fm listeners; “an attempt at a modern Great American Folk Album.”

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/MH

    Released at the beginning of this year, chances are good you haven’t heard this album. If you are at all into psych or folk, you should rectify this. The entire album is available here: http://purehighonthesea.bandcamp.com/album/black-animal-2

    (It took a bit longer than I expected, but we’re finally closing in on the end of this bands you haven’t heard of jam list… I’ll probably do one more before I head out of town…)”

  • 2011 – Milo Greene – 1957

    • 2011-12-27

    2011; 2,989 last.fm listeners; and that’s a wrap 2011 and the “bands you’ve never heard of” playlist.

    lhl: “http://www.last.fm/music/Milo+Greene

    It looks like these guys have picked up some listeners since I started this list (they’re touring w/ The Civil Wars at the moment). Still, relatively under the radar relative to how. damn. good. they sound.

    They have a streaming only EP here: http://milogreene.bandcamp.com/

    and there’s a great live version of the track here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUazz0gML00”

Notes:

  • This post was, of course, written while listening to these tracks
  • Assembled w/ a combination of my old playlist Python code (I actually had these tracks assembled into a playlist back in Oct 2011 but never got around to posting it) and munging of the TIMJ csv data
  • to replace the comment semicolons w/ line breaks: %s/"; /"\r\r/g
  • also, I think ggVG +y is burnt in for doing select-all pulls in gvim now. I’m not sure that’s easier than ctrl-a ctrl-c but I’ll roll with it
  • One track I wanted to post was by an LA mathy-post-punk band called Snake vs Wizard. I actually had bought a home-made EP from them in the early 2000s, but unfortunately, never ripped it before it was lost to the mists of moving. If you have a copy, drop me a line.

Chargebacks and CC Fraud for Small Projects

Posted on by lhl

Remy has been posting a series, The toxic side of free. Or: how I lost the love for my side project, on JS Bin, and Part 4 covers how he started Pro Accounts and some of the unexpected costs – that is, carders would use the low price to test newly stolen cards and eventually he’d get chargebacks. The Hacker News discussion includes some advice on using minFraud (Sift and FraudLabs are other alternatives). Amazon DevPay also sounds like a good alternertive to building your own billing system.

Also, VATMOSS sounds terrible.

Adventures in Metered Internet Access

Posted on by lhl

I’m spending the month driving around New Zealand and I figure I’d write about one interesting tech travel challenges (and one of the major reasons that I’m in the process of switching to Linux from OS X). Those specifically interested in my yak shaving experiences on getting Linux set up on a Lenovo X250 of course can follow along, but this will be more focused.

I am currently on “Milford Sound Lodge Internet Access” which is a pretty decent satellite connection (about 20KB/s) considering that cell phone reception ended over 100km back (I have a Vodafone and Spark prepaid sims for this trip). The pricing is tiered, and the best per-MB pricing is 50MB for 10NZD (0.20NZD/MB) – I’m on day 2 and my third voucher right now. The captive portal is a short code provided by receipt-printed vouchers, and it’s actually pretty good/reliable as far as these things go. The portal itself is a simple Python cgi-bin, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find it backed by a solid embedded FreeBSD setup (curiousity got the better of me, It’s running an ancient Debian Linux (2.6 kernel), the web server is lighthttp).

I haven’t bothered using my Macbook Air – it chewed through 20MB of even more expensive internationl airplane wifi in a matter of minutes. There’s no way for me to effectively control all the various daemons or lock down the network (Little Snitch tracks and shows me everything, but inexplicably gives me know way to go into a lockdown mode).

I’m running Ubuntu 15.04 on my X250 at the moment. iptraf and iftop work well for tracking connections, and nethogs lets you see connections on a per-process basis. OOTB, things were decent – I wrote a script to stop unattended-upgrades and dropbox to avoid any surprises, however a few surprises: avahi-daemon doesn’t seem to stop chattering even when turned off. It’s purely local, but it was running up charges so I ended up uninstalling it for now. The other thing that was (not surprising) was that both Chromium/Chrome and Firefox chew through networking with their auto-updates. I could probably disable the updates (there may be other extensions as well though) and various syncing things, but instead I’m using uzbl at the moment (surf and vimprobable are other options) for lightweight browsing. I’m also using elinks (links/lynx as backups), which is much more efficient, of course. On my yak-shaving list: finding a terminal-based webkit browser, setting up a travel Firefox profile w/ uBlock, Noscript, images and all updates disabled for travel mode.

Besides the browser hijinks, my current setup is incredibly well behaved – a few bytes for occasional ntp updates that I haven’t been able to track down (it’s not in my init.d…), but I can live with that.

Interesting notes on mobile usage:

It turns out that iOS 8 is almost as badly behaved as OS X on Wifi. I turned off “Background App Refresh” and scoured all the other settings available to me, but iOS still ate up 5MB+ of data immediately after signing in. I haven’t let it get online again. I must be missing something. I’d assume that there are many places in the world with metered wifi connections?

Android 5.1 is slightly better behaved. You can Restrict Background Data (Settings > Data Usage > Menu), but of course, by default this only restricts cellular, not wifi connections. There’s a separate Network Restrictions option that lets you specify Metered Wifi Networks, however that works. Once this is set (after I burned through a couple MB of data) then it works as expected.