♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
This website is now scheduled to undergo periodic maintenance for about 1 hour at 05:00 UTC (about 9PM in California) every 23rd of the month, starting in two days' time.
Apologies for any inconvenience caused by this, but the ability to take a disk image of the website is something I've long wanted to be able to do ...and now we're running in a Linux KVM guest, I can finally do it! [...]
This website will be offline for several hours, intermittently, over the next day or so. My apologies...
I believe the website is now back online for the most part. There may be one or two random outages in the next few hours, but we're nearly sorted! Thank you for your patience... [...]
It's been almost two years since we moved into our Lincolnshire home. It was intended to be a 'move in and don't spend anything' kind of place, but before four months were out, we'd added solar panels to the main roof. Another three months and we'd fitted a new, insulated roof to the sunroom/conservatory. At the start of the second year, we replaced the floors in the kitchen, sunroom, laundry and boot room. After that came floor replacement in the second study and repainting of every room in the house. So, it ended up not being the 'move-in-ready' kind of place we'd hoped for!
My listening room was next, but it's been a long haul! There was a fireplace which had to be removed and total re-plastering of the wall where it had once been, together with embedding power and speaker cables in the brickwork. I wanted a panel of vertical wooden slats for no particular reason I can remember or think of: I'm told they are currently fashionable, but I wouldn't know and I asked for them two years ago! That panel went in just before Christmas, after which ...crickets! The English workman likes his New Year break and after that their diary was full, so they couldn't squeeze us in to replace the floors until this past week. The week thus began with me moving all my books out for the umpteenth time, all my glass, all my comfy seats... and my computers. Which means I've been offline since Tuesday, kicking my heels: it turns out that a laptop doesn't really replace a desktop PC you're comfortable with 🙂 [...]
We bought our current house in April/May 2023. It's been a slow slog since then: solar panels, new roof on the conservatory, new flooring throughout. One room remains to be tackled downstairs (upstairs gets dealt with next March!): the music listening room, otherwise known as the Holy of Holies, my Utopia, and Sanctuary!!
This week the plasterer was due, and then cancelled, and is now due next week (typical Lincolnshire, really). Which meant the listening equipment was removed from the room, then moved back, though not necessarily to the same places from whence they had come 🙂 Hopefully, next week (sometime) will be the charm... [...]
I get multiple alerts every day about people trying to sign in to this website using names such as 'zaintaylor' or 'bpgenius'. I assume almost all such log-in attempts are bogus, bot-driven attempts to attack this site, but it occurs to me that there may be a handful of people trying legitimately to log in to this website using (for example) their wordpress.com user credentials. If so: please don't bother, since no-one can log into this website, except me. Attempting to do so will net you an instant 2-month long ban for your IP address.
If you are attempting to leave a comment, you don't need to log in to do so: just supply a name and an email address at the time of leaving a comment and, assuming you pass moderation, your comment will appear in due course. Once you've had one comment appear, subsequent ones should not need to go through the moderation process. [...]
So the site was down today for several hours: my apologies for the unanticipated outage.
The fact is, however, that I have learned at least how to move the website from one ZFS storage pool to another, on the same host. Thus, this site is now running from an SSD instead of a bunch of spinning hard disks: hopefully, it is, in consequence, a bit more responsive than it was. More to the point, I now know how to move this website from one server to another, provided the new server is at least running FreeBSD. In the language of my last post, I am certainly still tied to the FreeBSD bottle, but at least I can navigate that particular ship in directions I find acceptable. I've even been able to migrate this website to run from a 2009 laptop that's running FreeBSD: I am therefore no longer particularly bound to a specific choice of OS appliance. [...]
I find myself in a bit of a pickle of my own devising!
Back at the start of the year, I acquired a nice, new server and stuck TrueNAS on it (an 'appliance variant' of FreeBSD, run through a web interface). I then migrated this website off a Linux server I've used since 2014 or thereabouts and installed it into a FreeBSD 'jail' running on that machine (FreeBSD jails being that operating system's equivalent of KVM on Linux or Hyper-V on Windows: the OS's 'native', built-in and free virtualisation technology. As can be told from the fact that you're reading these words now, it's pretty obvious that everything converted across nicely and has been running well ever since. So, what's the issue? [...]
I just wanted to say a huge thank you to Gordon, Trevor, Jim and Hans for their very generous gifts to me over on my 'buy me a music score/coffee' page.
You wouldn't believe the pleasure it gives me to know that something I've done here, which is just a big hobby, has proved useful enough to someone that they'd actually give me something for it! [...]
My turn-of-the-year project to move this website off a vintage 2012 server running Ubuntu onto a slightly-less-vintage 2019 server running TrueNAS Core (an 'appliance' built on top of FreeBSD) is now complete. What's more, there's a backup of it running on a TrueNAS Scale server (another 'appliance' built on top of Debian), on a server I was gifted when the company I was working for in Australia in 2012 sold itself off to a rival and all the staff were made redundant. It's my oldest-ever server, I think: vintage 2010 or thereabouts, but I've specc'd it up with 2 12-thread Xeon CPUs (so, 24 threads in all) running at 2.8GHz, and with 192GB of RAM. So definitely old, but not exactly shabby -and more than capable of running the 30 or so virtual machines I need to test my software against most varieties of Linux and Windows, in addition to acting as my music, video and website backup server.
Apart from a couple of outages today as the final moves of the (very noisy!) servers into their designated loft space took place, I don't think anyone would have noticed much by way of change or disaster! In fact, 95% of the move was finished on January 1st, well before my own announced deadline. The other 5% has been getting the backup server configured properly, which took longer than I expected because I chose to upgrade the CPUs and the RAM... and then managed to buy two sticks of faulty RAM and had to wait for replacements to be shipped from Germany. [...]
As previously wished, I hope you all have a Happy New Year, with as much classical music listening pleasure as I'm expecting it to bring me! 🙂
Just a heads-up, however: things will shortly be happening to this website [...]
As 2023 draws to its close, I thought I'd trawl through my Giocoso music player's database and work out what I've spent the past twelve months doing, as far as listening to classical music goes.
The headline news is that I've played 3,007 unique recordings this year which, cumulatively, lasted for about 69 days (68.93 if you want to be accurate about it!). [...]
The Other Half has long berated me for not selling my software, or otherwise attempting to monetise this site. I have long resisted doing so -but as buying new music or new computers to test and develop things on is getting expensive, I've finally relented, in a modest way: I've just opened an account at 'buy me a coffee', a trustworthy site that takes donations from grateful members of the public and sees them on their way to creators. I've labelled my account as 'buy me a music score', as that's what I'll probably end up doing with any amounts of cash I get from it, though a newer desktop PC is on the wishlist, too!
There's zero obligation and I'm not going to promote it heavily, but if you value anything I've produced here and can spare a fiver or so, I'd be grateful (and it might just keep the Other Half quiet, too!). Check it out at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/absolutelybaching [...]