Perl regex engine is my totem animal.

This is why failures on residential scale and for residential users are non-rare events, and must be planned for as "regular" emergency. Have a charged up high capacity power bank, emergency lights, emergency food and water, emergency comms, etc.

On grid failures: if you look pretty much anywhere at https://t.co/NOT2ylNeT8, then you will notice there is hardly any high-capacity redundancy anywhere. Except if you are, say, an multi-hundred-MW aluminium foundry that must stay powered. Reserve eats into efficiency.

Apropos of nothing, refreshing my memory on

100 Megapixel Moon (Trial Run): Verified that my new (second-hand) EdgeHD 8 can be mosaic-ed without much hassle. Once seeing improves, and collimation tools arrive, this would be extra awesome. https://t.co/tIthFGeEdt

Have the best experience on X.

How can you make sure that your USB SSD backup is intact after messing with hardware settings? Well, if you do ZFS backups, then you just plug the drive into the fastest port and scrub all that 4 TB of data in 1.5 hours.

Note, of course, that configuring devices through low-level interfaces can step on funky bugs on their own, which can ultimately not only corrupt the data, but irrevocably foobar the device. Backup your stuff before doing funky business.

USB bridges continue to be a funky mess. Salvaged my 2TB Samsung T7 Shield write performance by enabling TRIM via SCSI provisioning_mode=unmap, as described on Arch Linux wiki: https://t.co/MFcEodXIOr. Used to write at 2 MB/sec, now writes at full speed.

Today and only today there is a prediction of not one, but *two* half-Moons during the day! Do not miss out on this! Also, grab a cup to condense all that 100% humidity while you are outside.

Also, my new desktop background, courtesy of Hubble Space Telescope Heritage data archives.

Andromeda Galaxy last night. Going outside in -7°C for a few hours to acquire data really tests how much do you like a hobby.

Of course you can take out all C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python lines of code out of the codebase in 5...10 years. It is even easier than it looks. You just need to shut down every service that is related to business in any way. Done! Time to collect that breakthrough bonus.

Periodic reminder that https://t.co/7TpMfmp51N is awesome and deserves our donations. It also routinely hosts BitTorrent files for their data, which is useful if you want to donate some bandwidth as well. Take this link as the example:

YouTube brought me an unbelievable sight of a guy cleaning up the GPU, saying "Be careful not to knock any components off the board", and then using the industrial air compressor with the nose up close. I think you can power-wash the GPUs at some point... at least once.

RTX A4000 is loud. Rabbit-holed into "bad cooling; here are DIY coolers ideas", only to open the card and stare at 2+ years of dust clogging the radiator. 5 seconds of blowing, -25°C across all load levels, drastic fan speed reduction. Take care of your HW before modding it, SMH.

Update: Rebooted; nothing bad has happened. Gotta love server infra even running on 15+ year old hardware.

That feeling when you had the regular update script running at one of your public facing servers, but you also forgot to reboot it for 3.5 years. I am sure nothing bad is going to happen if I do it now, 2 days before NY break starts.

You will rarely see this amount of dedicated work. People image small parts of this sky area for many hours: Wizard Nebula, Lion Nebula, Elephant's Trunk Nebula, Squid Nebula, and there is stuff in between. This one is 17+ days total integration time!

...and all this is only "rough" alignment. You have to repeat this in the field on the real stars (much point-ier source) and when tube is oriented near target (since primary mirror cell also moves slightly). Apparently, no big deal for seasoned SCT owners.

SCTs are funky to collimate even in these "lab" conditions. The artificial star has to be exactly on axis, the minor adjustments have major effects, and any adjustment moves the secondary mirror (duh), which moves the star out of axis. That's why people love refractors: no fuss.

The moment our hero realizes that "artificial stars" used for collimating telescopes in amateur astronomy are just 50μm fiber fed by a light source, and that he has a lot of fiber cables like that just waiting to be used.