the snail shell


I set up a NAS and now I'm ill

…matic. ok I’ll stop, sorry

guh! I thought it’d be nice to have my one source of truth for all my data I care about. I can reference it from anywhere, and it’ll back up to The Cloud. Plus, music server.

It was more of a pain than I expected!

buying the right stuff

I searched for a NAS and bought one. Well, I thought I did. You’ll have to forgive me for thinking this first result was a NAS, given the search terms and all the rest of the results:

amazon search results showing a HD enclosure under a search for “terramaster 2 bay NAS”

I guess I should have noticed it was very cheap. Alas: it was a hard drive enclosure. Well. Returned it and bought a QNAP TS-216G-US.

Luckily I did the HD just fine: a 1TB Western Digital NAS SSD123.

Got a UPS with AVR while I’m at it, since our @&*$%#! grid means we lose power more often these days.

dive into bizarro software world

I didn’t really think about it, but buying a QNAP NAS is really buying a QNAP El Cheapo Computer running QNAP OS, which means you get more-or-less whatever software they have made available for QNAP OS.

Setting it up is more of a thing than I’d guessed! you connect through guessing its address on your LAN, then you can set up “MyQNAPCloud”? You have to choose all sorts of setup things like do you want a “thin volume”, “thick volume”, or “static volume” on your hard drive? Gah

Then you’re in its knockoff-Windows GUI, f’ing everything has a splash screen Wizard, and you go through their App Center stepping over 19 different Backup/Sync apps, 11 “Entertainment” apps such as “Kazoo Server”, a lil category called “Surveillance”, …

Luckily “HBS Hybrid Backup Sync”, the preinstalled backup app, let me set up the following syncs easily:

  1. from Google Drive to NAS (real-time)
  2. from Dropbox to NAS (real-time)
  3. from NAS to Glacier (nightly)

access my files

On my local network at home, I can go to 192.168.1.76 and find the NAS. I don’t know why it’s .76. I don’t even remember how I found it the first time when I plugged everything in and then went “now what?”

I can get there via myqnapcloud.com. Then that gives me a “smart URL” that’s https://qlink.to/(my nas name). Most importantly, I can access it like a HD, I think, on my local network or once I set up a VPN. More on that later.

(I’m sure there’s some way I can ssh? I hope? geez I didn’t even get this far yet)

jellyfin again

Jellyfin lets you stream your music from anywhere. Plex does too, but they’re getting worse over time and charging Yet Another Subscription, while Jellyfin remains free. Alas, free also sometimes means pain in the ass.

(I originally wanted to buy from Terramaster, the #3 NAS company, because they don’t lock you in to their HDs like Synology, and they advertise Jellyfin built-in. but I figured QNAP, the #2 NAS company, would be just as good, and how hard can installing software be? alas)

Anyway someone made an app you can install for QNAP Janky OS, and it seems to work, hooray

The last bit I can’t figure out is how to get it to serve jellyfin over https or install tailscale. The jellyfin-qnap maker wrote a series of incantations that did not work, though it’s probably my fault, because I did the usual “forget about certificates for 6-12 months, let all knowledge leave my brain, then try to learn about them again.”

ach, vpn

I can skip all this https nonsense if I use a VPN!

  1. Why SSD? I guess I could have bought a 3.5" HDD: cheaper and bigger. But I have small data requirements (200Gb-ish), I still have it in my mind that “SSD is better”, and no spinning disks means slightly quieter I guess. ↩︎

  2. why only 1TB? much like house storage, the amount of junk you have scales with your available space ↩︎

  3. why not 2 drives set up as RAID? I guess I like the idea of 2 backups: one local exact copy for when the HD dies, and one on AWS in case our house burns down. but this feels maybe a bit paranoid: the odds that Amazon dies the same time my HD does seem very low. IF I do test my backup and recovery. Which I will. Of course. ↩︎



The Part That Has Cancer

When you suffer, do you linger on it, or shrug and move on?

Linger:

Shrug:

You should lingerYou should shrug
You lingerFeelings processedInvented trauma
You shrugTrauma lasts foreverNo problem 🤙

how do you know

argh how do you know

obviously this is a feeling question, not a thinking question. it’s only correlated with the objective thing that happened; two people can both be in an earthquake but only one has lasting trauma. depression goes down in wartime. clearly not only “what happened” but also “how does it feel” and “what does it mean to you” all matter. is the answer just “you have to learn this over time”? oof

why is this important

typing happily at my computer on a pleasant day, I can’t really tell you. but when I’m suffering, I absolutely can. it means the world to have someone (perhaps myself) helping me through it. sometimes that’s consoling me, commiserating, talking, even (maybe primarily) just being there.

there are a million slings and arrows every day. you’ve got to learn to shrug. maybe the “everyone’s in therapy, everyone’s on SSRIs, everyone’s still depressed” modern world is partially a result of inability to shrug.

but also: 1/3 of us are going to get cancer. you love your spouse? it’s more than half, 5/9 that one of you will. you have two kids you love: 80% chance one of you will.

maybe it’s not that bad; maybe that includes the “easily cut it off and you’re done” minor skin cancers, I don’t know. but maybe it’s worse: lump in every other disease that’s “as bad as cancer.” good chance you undergo significant suffering in your life. if nothing else, when you die: maybe a lucky few of us get the “hit by a meteor” death where one second you’re there and the next you’re gone, but most of us will have a hard time of it. and when you’re there, you hope your loved ones, and especially you, have learned to linger.



Code for People is Organization

“Code for the machine” vs “code for people”

Some code is for the machine. That is, maybe you write code to compute a big numerical optimization, or to predict whether AAPL will go up or down, or to multiply a zillion matrices and tell you whether this photo contains a bird.

Some code is for people. You want to let people share their photos online. You have a chat client that has complicated rules about whether to notify you. You want to give people access to your internal apps, but only people in department X get to see app Y, and so on.

(This is, of course, a dubious binary, but at least I’m not saying “one is good and one is bad.")

The primary skill in “code for people” is organization

Your application exists to do “business logic”; it has 400 layers of Frameworks around it to enable it to (run on the web/run on your phone/store data/control a robot arm/etc), but the reason for your app’s existence is that business logic. Most of the difficulty in “software engineering” is to make the right business logic available at the right time.

(This is why software is so goofy; if you build houses or something, at least you’re interfacing with wood and concrete and nails. If you build software, it’s as close to “just complexity” as you can get. Besides maybe law or accounting.)

Anyway, it’s kind of weird that people study Computer Science and then go on to write “code for people.” You need a dash of algorithms and data structures, big-O notation, databases, graph theory, networks, sure. But there should be a series of classes in the Computer Science curriculum with problems like: