Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2023-11)

I want to make it easy to be able to occasionally (manually) archive the bulk of the public data files off-site, eg in Zenodo for safe-keeping.

The first step is adding a make rule to periodically rebuild a public-data-files.txt plain-text, one-filename-per-line, tricky-files-excluded, sorted list. Tricky files include those with unsafe names such as starting with -, or containing whitespace, or even anything that looks like a broken temporary file. Sorting the list may help with compression as a solid archive in various ways. As of now this list contains 10384 files.

This list is both useful metadata in its own right, but then is used to build an xz-compressed tar archive of the data itself. This currently runs to somewhat under 400MB.

This new snapshot is now listed as an extra 'distribution' on the main data page, as well as adding the DOI [hart-davis2023EOUdata].

I have updated all DOIs in the Zenodo 'snapshot' bibliography [hart-davis2023bibliography] and offline page archive [hart-davis2023EOUoffline] entries to use the 'invariant' DOI that redirects to the latest version. I have also changed the bibliography entry URL in each case to point to the live version of each file here at EOU.

I bought a 128GB microSDVC card via Amazon for pekoe (RPi) that looks after the Thermino heat battery.

I am running f3 - Fight Flash Fraud fwrite on my Mac for it (via brew install f3).

The fwrite tool reports Free space: 119.33 GB and seems to be writing 1GB files, and achieving ~75+MB/s performance on each early file.

% f3write /Volumes/Untitled/
F3 write 8.0
Copyright (C) 2010 Digirati Internet LTDA.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.

Free space: 119.33 GB
Creating file 1.h2w ... OK!
...
Creating file 119.h2w ... OK!
Creating file 120.h2w ... OK!
Free space: 640.00 KB
Average writing speed: 73.77 MB/s

Now verifying with fread:

% f3read /Volumes/Untitled/
F3 read 8.0
Copyright (C) 2010 Digirati Internet LTDA.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.

                  SECTORS      ok/corrupted/changed/overwritten
Validating file 1.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
...
Validating file 119.h2w ... 2097152/        0/      0/      0
Validating file 120.h2w ...  697167/        0/      0/      0

  Data OK: 119.33 GB (250258255 sectors)
Data LOST: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
	       Corrupted: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
	Slightly changed: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
	     Overwritten: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)
Average reading speed: 84.74 MB/s

So this card looks to be per spec on capacity, and good to go for fixing pekoe.

CrowView

After some bracing root canal surgery in the afternoon (yes really), I unboxed and played a little with my new CrowView 14" Portable Ultralight Dual Monitor. (It was on Kickstarter and I paid HKD1038, so ~£106.)

I am a little concerned about the forces applied to my MBA by the CrowView attached to the side, but it also stands alone, eg portrait for PDF papers!

In any case, connecting the CrowView and MBA with the USB-C to USB-C cable supplied makes the CrowView just work. Its position relative to the MBA display and rotation are easy to adjust in the MBA settings. Note that the CrowView can get its power (~5W) from the MBA or via a second USB-C connector.

The MBA (M1) will not apparently drive the CrowView and my Dell monitor simultaneously, not that there is space on my desk anyway!

The image shows testing the CrowView on the train: it works.