We went to a coffee roaster recently that had one of those Fellow Espresso Series 1 coffee machines on display. I’d only seen this on James Hoffman’s review, so I was surprised at how big it was. It was wider than my 13-inch MacBook Air, and much deeper. James mentions the size, but it’s a different experience entirely seeing it in person.
It reminded me of when I got my first Sun Ray box at uni in the 2000s, and how I thought it was even smaller in person than I expected. Or thinking the Queen Mary was even bigger than I expected when Clara and I went to Long Beach. I guess size is one of those attributes I need to see to believe, or even relate to.
This has been the year for weddings. Clara and I (finally) tied the knot earlier this year after being together for more than a decade, and we have three more for friends and family later this year.
Yesterday we were honoured to be at the Gunner’s Barracks in Sydney again for another, this time between Linh and my brother-in-law Victor. A bit of rain threatened to wash away the initial ceremony, but everyone laughed and the bride and groom took it in their stride. It’s also a good luck omen, so I can only assume they planned this in advance.
Linh and Victor are among the kindest, most considerate people I’ve ever met, with a soft spoken but cheeky streak that shone throughout the proceedings. I couldn’t be happier or more proud.
In the space of a year, my little family tree has been extended to include Cantonese and Vietnamese. This is an honour, though I’ll admit the pressure is now on to learn more than 唔該 and cảm ơn (cough). I’ll add them to the pile with Japanese (cough). I really should get this cough checked out.
I’m a fan of the HP(E) ProLiant MicroServer line, and still have a Gen 8 kicking around for NetBSD testing. I call it my Companion Cube. But its limitations and quirky boot behaviour do have me looking for another tiny machine with four bays I can eventually upgrade into. I was also thinking of building a server for Clara to be able to tinker with.
If only someone made a case with a similar internal design and footprint to the MicroServer that… oh, wait a minute. What’s this handsome thing? I mean, aside from the reader who’s looking at this post?
This is the InWin IW-MS04, which I’ve also seen sold as the InWin Mini 4 Bay. It’s another cute server box which largely reproduces the same layout as the HP, right down to the four drive sleds, Mini-ITX motherboard tray, a half-height PCIe slot, slim optical drive bay, and 120 mm fan grill.
It also includes a dust cover in the door, something the HP lacked:
You wouldn’t want anything but a more basic CPU given the space constraints for a cooler, but a power-efficient CPU for running a file server and related services would be perfect.
I’ve been backing up my home directories on my NetBSD machines to my FreeBSD backup server using rsync(1). But I’ve been experimenting with using ZFS for /home on NetBSD, so I thought it made sense to use zfs send for backups to the FreeBSD machine instead.
But there’s a caveat here. NetBSD’s ZFS only includes support for a subset of the features that OpenZFS on FreeBSD provides. Therefore, if this pool is intended to be used with NetBSD, the FreeBSD zpool should be created with only the features NetBSD supports.
According to NetBSD’s zpool-features(7) manpage, the following zpool features are supported:
async_destroy
bookmarks
enabled_txg
embedded_data
empty_bpobj
extensible_dataset
filesystem_limits
hole_birth
large_blocks
lz4_compress
multi_vdev_crash_dump
sha512
skein
spacemap_histogram
I assumed this coincided with the feature list imported from illumos in 2020, and a look at the list in the following file on FreeBSD confirms this:
/usr/share/zfs/compatibility.d/2020
So to build a NetBSD-friendly pool on FreeBSD, we use:
-d, which disables all zpool features
-o compatibility=2020, which only enables these features
Oh wow. Việt Nam has my favourite coffee culture in the world now, but Australia is an easy second. He says, as he drinks cold brew from Nicaragua. You know what I mean.
Update: An earlier version of this post referred to Nicaragua being in South America, which I know wasn’t true. I literally was looking at a map on their wall as I wrote it. What next, am I going to say Chile is next to Canada? Or that Costa Rica is an island near Vermont!? Estúpido
With thanks to Jean A. and Adrian for reminding me.
I’ve had iPhones since the 3G. These are issues I expect I’ll always have.
Scheduled updates. I’ll set it to run updates overnight, when it’s plugged in, fully charged, has jiggabytes of free space, and is connected to Wi-Fi. It almost never works. I have always had to do updates manually.
Android comparisons. Anyone voicing frustration with iOS will be told they should just use Android. Now that I have experience with both, I can safely say Android saw how far iOS has slid, and said “hold my beer”. Can we get someone from Palm back, please?
I will say, Android’s Settings app is much better. It’s logically organised, and easy to find things! Which reminds me…
The Settings search bar is often useless. I search for a setting, and it comes up with either nothing, or something completely unrelated.
Voice Control can’t be disabled, irrespective of what I turn off in Settings. I have never needed or wanted Voice Control. Every week or so, I’ll bump something and end up in Voice Control. If it were capturing my voice, it’d be nearly twenty years of me saying WAH LAO EH.
Failed image transfers. If you import all your photos using Image Capture, it will always choke with a cryptic error on at least one file, and stop importing.
Ironically, if you mount your iPhone on KDE as a camera device, there are zero issues transferring files.
Less precise keyboard entry. Each phone gets slightly worse. You’d think it’d get better, or I’d have developed the required muscle memory to use them better.
The gyroscope is almost useless. Surely the camera in a phone would be better at detecting orientation now.
No simple tethering with Macs. It’s always a dance of turning off Personal Hotspot, turning off the Mac’s Wi-Fi, then turning each on, then connecting, then turning one or more of them off again, then turning each on again.
Again, ironically, my ThinkPad with Fedora and FreeBSD connects to the hotspot instantly.
Springboard icon sorting is still painful. Swiping an icon on the home screen up to a folder on the previous row will swap them instead. This is one of those “how did this get by QA?” problems that makes my head hurt.
I appreciate not everyone has these issues. Must be nice!
I’ve been in the market for a good KVM for years. My tiny home office desk has two computers:
A MacBook Air for work, that I use exclusively in clamshell mode while on the desk
A Ryzen desktop with FreeBSD and Fedora
My dream was to have a single keyboard, mouse, and display, and be able to switch between the two machines without constantly swapping cables.
You’d think this would be easy. After all, people like me can remember having Belkin KVMs that did this for our Intel Macs, and even VGA KVMs for data centres and old desktops. But alas, as with so much modern tech, there are solutions that mostly work, but have deficiencies in design or function that render them useless, or frustrating enough that I want to defenestrate the entire mess of boxes and cables. I’d soon learn why, but it confounded me why there were (a) no good 4K KVMs that (2) would let me use a MacBook Air in clamshell mode. Surely this wasn’t a weird use case!?
I saw more than a few people specifically recommend the AV Access iDock M10 KVM. It seemed pricey, but I was able to get a lightly-used unit from a well-known auction site for almost half the price. I was willing to try anything at this point, frankly.
The product page literally describes the unit as a KVM for switching “between 1 MacBook and 1 desktop with one button”, which is the precise use case I was after. It supports dual 4K@60Hz, which was more than sufficient for my single 4K panel. It can also deliver 100 W for charging, so it could replace my Dell monitor’s combined power and display cable.
Wiring up the KVM
The dock arrived today, so I set about getting it all wired up. Forgive my box-drawing diagram:
I connected the MacBook Air using the supplied double-ended USB-C cable to the Laptop 1 connector on the back of the KVM
I connected my Ryzen desktop’s DisplayPort cable and USB-C cable to Desktop 2 on the back of the KVM
I connected the wireless mouse receiver, and the cable for my keyboard, to the USB-A ports on the front of the KVM
This is how it looked once all the cables were connected, along with Ethernet and power. It still has space to connect one more monitor if I wanted, and to swap the DisplayPort for HDMI on the desktop.
Testing: success!
I slipped the unit under my monitor table stand, woke the Mac from sleep, and crossed my fingers.
It worked! MacOS asked me to confirm if I wanted to connect to this new device, after which they keyboard and mouse were also detected. I closed the Mac, put it into clamshell mode, and it also just kept working. I pressed the button on the top of the unit to switch from Laptop 1 to Desktop 2. Within a couple of seconds, I was in KDE on Fedora. Pressing the button again, and I was back on the MacBook Air. Neither machine had gone to sleep or suspended when the keyboard, mouse, and display had been disconnected, thanks to the device implementing EDID. This was what was missing from other units I’d tried.
I slipped the KVM under the monitor table, and now I also have a convenient set of USB ports, an SD card reader, and even a headphone jack.
I consider this a success. I’m blown away at how well this works.
Wrinkles
I don’t have many, and none are show stoppers:
The Dell 4K monitor I use exhibits slight colour fringing on large blocks of red. This KVM, for whatever reason, makes this slightly worse. I’m not sure if this is a cable, monitor, or sync issue; I’ll need to dig into. It’s barely perceptible, but it’s there.
The KVM box does get warm. I bought some taller rubber feet to give it a bit more breathing room, which has helped.
The USB-A ports on the front mean the cable for the keyboard sticks out into the desk. I’ve ordered a 180 degree USB-A adaptor to route the cable around and under the KVM, which I can do thanks to the aforementioned feet. This should make it much tidier.
Would I recommend?
If you have the specific setup of a Mac laptop and a PC desktop, between which you’re constantly swapping like an emacs user in the 1990s, yes. The quality of life difference it represents is huge.
You know what the biggest functional difference is between running FreeBSD and Linux on the desktop? Out of memory errors.
On FreeBSD, I rarely get them. On Linux, I regularly do. Despite running KDE on both, and despite largely using the same applications. KDE on Linux will pop up to advise me the system is low on memory, then it’ll pop up again to advise that it’s killed a random program (without my input) to free it up.
ARC on FreeBSD and macOS doesn’t get enough praise. No, not ZFS ARC, though that’s also great.
Clara and I found this Pentium III motherboard and a collection of parts off the side of the road in Chatswood back in 2024. I put it into an Antec case from my father in law, and it’s gradually become my primary utility PC. I use it to test hard drives and expansion cards before I put them into my other machines, and I use its 5.25 and 3.5 disk drives for imaging and creating boot disks.
Weirdly, about a month ago the attached PS/2 started sending errant signals. Or so I thought. I’d be in a utility checking the status of a drive, like a gentleman, when suddenly I’d be scrolled a page further down, or a random menu item would be selected. If an invalid key was “pressed”, the PC speaker would chirp indignantly. One morning I woke up to hear the PC speaker beeping on and off nearly continuously, as though a ghost cat had sat on the keyboard, or Ed Sheeran was giving a concert.
Worried that it might somehow be an electrical issue on the port, I connected a USB keyboard instead. Alas, the errant key presses and resulting beeps resumed, as though the ghost cat had been summoned again, or a listener with a masochistic streak had asked Ed Sheeran for an encore.
I tore the whole machine down, removed the board, double-checked the mounting nuts, re-installed the board, and only connected the essentials. A week later in this state, and the issue hasn’t resurfaced, even with the original PS/2 keyboard attached again. I’ve been slowly reattaching components, validating they work, then repeating.
So far, so good. Sheeran and the ghost cat have been banished, and I’m able to interact with the computer as normal. Huzzah!
I’m still at a loss as to what caused the problems though. Maybe the PS/2 port was marginal and I managed to finagle it into working again, though that wouldn’t explain why a USB keyboard exhibited the same issue. Maybe the board wasn’t mounted properly, which caused a short. Or maybe something I had plugged in before was spamming the bus, something people do on public transport when they don’t use headphones.
