A beautiful dry day, and we haven't had many of those this year. Since I got up earlier than I expected I thought I'd do Buckminster and back, about 80 miles.

I went the "old" way through Rempstone since it's a bit shorter and I wanted to make sure I arrived at Buckminster's village shop before it closed at 1300. I got there at 1235, good timing. Had a bit of a feast on the bench outside - a cheese & onion slice, a packet of crisps and a Magnum ice-cream lolly.

On the way back just to make it more interesting I took a right turn at the crossroads at Waltham - to give myself an orienteering task. But I very soon found myself back on the usual path. Basically a three mile detour, partly consisting of a single-track lane.

Came back along Narrow Lane and through Wymeswold (where I took the pic) and Hoton on the way back, for a change. I have quite a few variations of the eastbound route now.  Noticed a number of tiny fish in the stream (the River Mantle apparently) at Wymeswold. Minnows?



Listened to the first couple of hours of the next Reacher novel, Worth Dying For. Very good so far, classic Reacher. Flowing along nicely and so far not tripping over its own plot, as they sometimes tend to do. Reuses plot elements from Killing Floor and Echo Burning. Then I listened to football, including a highly entertaining FA Cup competition between Man United and Coventry at Wembley. As I was putting the bike away in the garage Coventry scored what I thought was a consolation goal to make it 3-1 to United, but later I discovered they'd pulled it back to 3-3!

Conditions seemed warmer than the advertised 11C in the afternoon. Mostly sunny, as well. I took off my overtrousers with about 13 miles to go. I was definitely too hot with about 4 to go but didn't bother to stop and part-unclothe.

Back on 80.69. Very enjoyable run out.

https://www.strava.com/activities/11233367980

Failure. But at least I only spent three minutes on it.

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I'm trying to get some more use out of my old Drobo RAID array - it has a size limitation of 2TB on the filesystems it presents, so I'm using a tool called mergerfs to combine two of them. But I wasn't sure if this would be useful for my own use case. Rather than digging into the documentation, I asked https://pi.ai/ ..


Do you know anything about mergerfs?

Absolutely, James! MergerFS is a really useful tool in the world of file systems. It's a union file system that allows you to combine multiple hard drives into a single, unified drive for easier management and storage. This can be particularly helpful if you have a bunch of smaller drives lying around or if you just want to simplify your storage setup. Have you been considering using MergerFS for your own storage needs?

I am using it, but am new to it.

Nice! MergerFS can be a bit daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's a really powerful tool. As you dive deeper into using MergerFS, you'll find that there are some neat tricks and advanced features you can leverage to make the most of your storage setup. Have you come across any specific challenges or questions as you've started using MergerFS?

Yes, and I wonder if you'll be able to help. Let me describe my present scenario. I have two 2TB filesystems, /media/jg/Drobo01 and /media/jg/Drobo02. I have combined them using mergerfs into a single filesystem, /media/jg/drobojoin.

Alright, James, that sounds like a solid setup so far! The fact that you've successfully combined your two Drobo filesystems using MergerFS into a single, larger filesystem is a great step forward. I'd be happy to help you with any questions or challenges you might be facing. What's been causing you trouble in your current MergerFS setup?

No trouble so far but I wonder if I'll hit a snag soon. At the moment I am copying a 3TB directory named "tosh" into the combined filesystem.

That's quite a lot of data! Copying 3TB of files can be a time-consuming process, but MergerFS should handle it just fine. As you're copying into your combined Drobojoin filesystem, MergerFS will automatically distribute the files across both of your underlying Drobo01 and Drobo02 filesystems. You shouldn't hit any snags unless one of the underlying filesystems runs out of space or encounters an error. Are you worried about any specific issues that might arise during the copy process?

At the moment I see that the Drobo01 branch contains the tosh directory. The Drobo02 branch does not. What happens when Drobo01 runs out of space?

That's a great question, James. When Drobo01 runs out of space during your copy operation, MergerFS should automatically start using the available space on Drobo02 to store the remaining files. This is one of the key benefits of MergerFS—it can seamlessly distribute files across multiple filesystems, making it appear as one large filesystem. So, you shouldn't need to worry about manually moving files around or running out of space on a single filesystem. MergerFS should handle it all for you!

So at some point, a directory /media/jg/Drobo02/tosh will get created?

Exactly! As soon as Drobo01 fills up and MergerFS begins using Drobo02 for the copy operation, you should see a new directory /media/jg/Drobo02/tosh get created automatically. MergerFS will continue writing files to this directory until Drobo02 is also filled up or the copy operation is complete. This seamless transition between filesystems is one of the reasons MergerFS is such a powerful tool for managing large amounts of data across multiple drives.

That's so helpful. I'll let you know if you were right later on.

Glad to be of help, James! I'm pretty confident that's how MergerFS will behave, but it never hurts to double-check and confirm. I look forward to hearing back from you once the copy operation is complete and we can confirm that MergerFS handled everything as expected.

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Another very quick one, 20 seconds.

Yes, and Mussolini made the trains run on time.

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Quickest one ever, probably four seconds.

Absolute clowns, but a lot of thick people have been taken in. I don't think Bridgen is one of them. He's just trying to salvage a career out of their ignorance at the expense of people's health and lives.

I'm literally represented by the most dishonourable, irresponsible MP in the entire House of Commons, and I voted for him. But I'm looking forward to cleaning him out of there.

Quote from: David L on April 18, 2024, 07:01:39 PMWhen I look at that picture, I can smell Brut 33

Interesting. I get Old Spice.

Quote from: The Picnic Wasp on April 18, 2024, 07:26:13 PMI hope you enjoy a glass or two of something expensive tonight, James.

Thanks! I wasn't expecting to do that today. But I do have a half-decent bottle of red.

I first took out a mortgage in 1991, on my old house in Derby. It cost me £38,000. I took out a 95% mortgage with a 5 year bank loan for the 5%. But it was a 27 year mortgage so if I'd never got married, I'd have been mortgage free in the first half of 2018.

But this is a much nicer house, I must admit.

Quote from: David L on April 18, 2024, 06:05:36 PMThis was on a few years back. Not sure whether it was pilot episodes but I thought it had sunk without a trace. Surprised to see it back. Amusing, in the most part, for our demographic.

We've recorded it to watch later. I hope it has the wokerati frothing at the mouth!

I was thinking about that last night. In some ways it does have the BBC Woke trademark - the colleague he shares an office with is gay, his best friend is black. But although Tony is obviously an unreconstructed '70s male with no sense of political correctness or propriety, he's not completely a unsympathetic character and some of the jokes work both ways. I think it's pretty inoffensive in both directions.

People like Mammoth really did exist, my driving instructor was one. So were one or two of the people I knew at RR.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2024/04/17/emma-raducanu-company-profit-commercial-endorsements/

The body of the article is paywalled, but the headline pretty much says it all. That winning serve at Flushing Meadows turned out to be very lucrative.

Watched the first episode of Mammoth last night. A PE teacher is frozen in an avalanche in 1979, and revived perfectly preserved in 2024. A bit like Life on Mars in reverse. Loved it. Especially liked the dialogue with the lesbian PE teacher he shares an office with. BBC2.

Our mortgage deal is due to expire in May, so I phoned Santander to arrange a new one. But the best deal they could offer me was going to cost me an extra £200 a month, because it's a very short term (due to end in December). The only other option was to pay the whole thing off now.

So they sent me a redemption statement, I did the sums taking into account interest I'd lose and I've just paid off our mortgage. I made a payment of nearly £49,000 using a smartphone app (we were due to pay them £43,600 in December).

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Two minutes, but I thought I'd got it on the second go.

The forecast was for showers in the late afternoon but since it's been such a thin cycling month due to the weather, I thought I'd just take the Tricross and accept the conditions. Actually the weather was rather nice when I set off, sunny and mild.

A couple of miles later I noticed that I had a lot more lateral movement in my right shoe than I ought to. I tried to remove the shoe from the pedal, but couldn't! The cleat was securely attached to the pedal, but clearly it wasn't properly attached to the shoe. It wasn't actually giving me any trouble though so I pressed on, hoping I wouldn't need to release my right foot until I had a chance to stop and have a better look, which I did near Twycross.

The front cleat bolt was missing altogether and the two rear bolts were loose. I probably had an Allen key in the saddle bag though. Did I? I still don't know, the zipper was corroded onto the zip and wouldn't budge.

So: I decided my best bet was to remove the cleat (it was easy enough to unscrew the bolts with my fingers) so I wouldn't lose it - and attempt to operate the right pedal like a conventional bike pedal. A mistake, probably. I'd been doing fine with the cleat loosely attached apart from the fear of not being able to unfasten my right foot. But without the cleat, my foot kept slipping off the pedal. It was just about workable though so I kept going but cut across via Little Twycross and Bilstone to keep it short.

Half an hour later, the rain came down. I'd expected showers, but this was 15 minutes of persistent cold rain. Naturally this made the right cycling shoe even more slippery on the pedal.

Only 23.53 miles, but I wouldn't have gone out at all if I'd know it was going to rain like that. I've done 222 this month which I suppose is acceptable. And 1592 this year. This time last year I'd done 1800. Actually I've just noticed that I did a 120 mile ride a year ago today. It was the day I got two punctures near Bourne, a lovely warm day. How can that be a year ago already?

https://www.strava.com/activities/11204052764