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OWC miniStack STX and the Mac Mini

When I ordered the M2 Mac Mini I opted for the smaller 512GB internal SSD knowing that, since the Mini would be always-on, I could hang as much storage off it as I wanted.

A hodgepodge of external drives scattered over my desk is not the prettiest setup, though. I wanted something cleaner. Something nicer-looking. I went with an OWC miniStack STX.



The miniStack can be ordered pre-configured with a variety of storage options, but I figured I'd save a few bucks and set it up myself. I ordered a 2TB Gen 4 M.2 NVMe stick and a Seagate IronWolf 8TB HD. It took about 10 minutes to install both drives into the miniStack and I was ready to go.

The whole point of the thing is that it is the exact dimensions of a Mac Mini. It sits underneath the Mini and so takes up zero additional desk space. This is way better than normal external drives.

An important bonus with the miniStack is that it adds three Thunderbolt 4 ports (actually four ports, but one is used by the Mini->miniStack cable).



There's a small catch. The PCI bus only uses one channel so top transfer speeds are limited to around 750MB/s. I don't know anything about NVMe drives or PCIe buses so I'm just taking their word for it, but my disk speed test showed around 790MB/s. That's plenty for my purposes.

I still need the CalDigit hub for the SD slot, Optical audio, and extra USB-A ports. Here's what the stack looks like:





Setting all this up gave me an opportunity to tidy up the rest of my desk. I think it looks great.



So far I've not heard any noticeable fan noise, so that's good. I do hear the HDD grinding away but that's probably due to both Spotlight and BackBlaze doing their things.

The 2TB SSD will be used for working files and recent photos. The big HDD will contain the rest of my media and photo archives, along with anything else I want near-to-hand but don't need fast-transfer access to. That leaves a 1TB SSD (not shown) hanging off the back for Time Machine and the vertical 8TB HDD for nightly backups using Carbon Copy Cloner.

It's a nice upgrade.

23 Mar, 2024

What if I stopped worrying about [THING]?

My life would be simpler if I could convince myself to stop worrying about things like¹:

• How should I rename photos during import?
• What if the app goes away?
• How will I find this later?
• Are my notes are in the right app or format?
• What if I switch to Linux?
• Are file names consistent everywhere?
• Kebab case or Camel case?
• Has anyone at the company done anything problematic recently?
• What will people think of me if I start/stop using this app?
• Will this be readable in 100 years?

Almost none of these are truly important, even though they all seem very important at the time.

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1. This is a very incomplete list ↩

14 Mar, 2024

I canceled my Fujifilm X100VI order

I tried, albeit half-heartedly, for 18 months to grab a Fujifilm X100V at a "normal" price. The X100 series are awesome cameras. I still have an original X100, and had an X100T for a while. The original X100 is just so very slow that I don't often grab it. When the new X100VI was announced, knowing they'd probably be in short supply soon, I pre-ordered one at both Adorama and B&H.

After missing out on the first batch of cameras, it was clear that I was in for a long wait. This gave me time to think about cameras.

I don't need a new digital camera right now. I'm barely using the ones I have, which are two very nice cameras. See for yourself...



The little GRIII is great for carrying everywhere and I love the files I get from it.

The SL2 is for when I'm being "serious" about photographing something.

Where would the X100VI fit? I suppose it would probably replace the GRIII, but the more I though about it, the clearer it became that I didn't need it, so I canceled my orders.

I would love the built-in flash, optical viewfinder, and 35mm FoV, but until I start actually making photos again, I don't need a new digital camera.

11 Mar, 2024

A (small) improvement to photo display on Glass.photo

I don’t like the way Glass shows images in a desktop browser when the browser window is wider than around 1,000 pixels. I prefer the layout in narrower windows, but I never have mine that narrow. This means whenever I’m browsing Glass, I have to shrink the window.



The Arc browser has “Boosts” that let me easily adjust the CSS of any website, so I created one for Arc. This is it:

.lg\:flex-row{flex-direction: column !important;}

Here’s the result:



This will do for now. I’ve written the Glass folks asking if there is a reason for the side-by-side default layout because I’d like to never see that layout.

09 Mar, 2024

From MacBook Pro to Mac Mini

This morning it took over 30 minutes to copy a 70MB file from my MBP to the Synology over WiFi. The wait resurfaced my thoughts about having an always-on computer on my desk with some fast, attached storage.



I just ordered an M2 Mac Mini (Pro) with 16GB RAM and a 512GB internal drive.



Since 2021, I’ve had an over-spec’ed MacBook Pro (M1 Max) with a 2TB internal drive and 32GB of RAM. I don’t do much that requires all of that oomph, but I figured it was nice to have anyway. With the Mini, I went with the Pro version mostly for the additional ports. A smaller, 512GB internal drive should be fine, since I’ll have a number of fast SSDs always attached. I’m not worried about not having enough room for my stuff. The thing I’m most worried about is “only” 16GB RAM. I’ve had 32GB for so long that I don’t remember what it was like working with less. I’m almost certain that 16GB will be plenty for my purposes, but it still makes me a little twitchy. Plus, $1,299 still feels like relatively cheap compared to the $3k+ I spent on the MBP.

The hardest part of all this will be that, since I’m keeping the MBP for mobile use, I’ll now have two Macs again. Consolidating to one machine a few years ago was such a breath of fresh air. I no longer had to worry about keeping configs updates or which folders needed syncing, etc. Now it’s all back.

Keeping things synced means worrying about which apps I use, or don’t, and if they sync by default or need to be set up to do so. My org files are all in ~/Documents/org now so iCloud should take care of that¹. However, my emacs configuration is in ~/.config/emacs. I’ll once again have to manage my .config files, which has always kind of sucked. I really don’t want to symlink everything and I really don’t want to go back to finding some “clever” method of managing them. The answer, I think, is to use fewer things that need configuring. Good luck with that, Jack.

The next step will be to figure out my storage options. I’m thinking I’d like some sort of Thunderbolt RAID thing with some SSDs inside. And also my existing backup drives. Oh, and Time Machine, for good measure. If you’ve found something you like, I’d love to hear about it.

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1. I’ve experience few issues with iCloud, so this doesn’t worry me 🤞 ↩

08 Mar, 2024

Perfect Days (2023)



Hirayama seems utterly content with his simple life as a cleaner of toilets in Tokyo. Outside of his very structured everyday routine he enjoys his passion for music and for books. And he loves trees and takes photos of them. A series of unexpected encounters gradually reveal more of his past.

Perfect Days was just beautiful, and exactly what I needed. I loved every simple, slow-moving moment of it.

07 Mar, 2024

Whatever happened to my junk drawer?

In a post from 2013, Digital Recordkeeping, I summed up my tools like this:

Tinderbox is my notebook. Evernote is my junk drawer. DEVONthink is my filing cabinet.

I was onto something back then. It has occurred to me is that I no longer have a dedicated tool to use as a Junk Drawer. Why is that?

I guess what happened is that DEVONthink became both my file cabinet and junk drawer. I'm now thinking this was a mistake. DEVONthink is for carefully filing things I know I want to keep. It's for organized, longer-term storage. Things like tax documents, journal scans, etc. It shouldn't be used as my save-as-pdf-for-(maybe)-reading-later system. That way leads to chaos, which is what I have now.

What does a junk drawer app need? I'd say fast, easy capture along with good search are the most important. It should be lightweight and allow for different ways of getting stuff into it, based on context.

Some might say that a simple set of folders in the filesystem should work. They're right, it could, but that's still too much friction. I want to grab web pages and images and snippets of text from everywhere and just pour them into something. I'm probably not going to organize anything, so a way to see what's new and a search would be great.

At some point I standardized on DEVONthink rather than the simpler EagleFiler for my archives. EagleFiler is great, though, and I'm thinking it would make a terrific junk drawer. I can capture things using its built-in F1 universal capture shortcut. There's also a dedicated inbox folder that gets sucked into it automatically. And EagleFiler is really just a wrapper around a set of folders, so it's easy to back out.

I miss having a dedicated junk drawer. I think EagleFiler is worth a try.

03 Mar, 2024

Nuke & Pave - the half-hearted edition

"Nuke & Pave" typically means wiping a computer's hard drive and installing everything from scratch. That's not what I'm doing (although it is tempting). What I'm doing is more like a precision strike. (I'll stop using military analogies, now. They're gross.)

Things get out of hand, and when they do I need a reset. Right now my blogs, email, file-storage, and note-taking are all very much out of hand. I'm writing this post as a way to sort it out in my head.

Blogging. I've been posting to four websites for a couple of weeks. It starts innocently enough, but then I get to a space where I want to write something but don't because I can't decide where it should go. I'm dropping everything but the wiki and this blog at baty.net.

Email. OMG Mutt is so great. So is Notmuch and Mu4e and even Apple Mail. I've been switching between them for a while now and it's done nothing but mess with my muscle memory and cause weird sync issues. I don't get that much email, so I'll be dropping back to Apple Mail in the near term. I'll still be running mbsync daily just to have a nice local Mailbox copy of all my mail.

Note taking. Good grief, it's been a rough couple of weeks on the note-taking front. Face it, I'm an Emacs guy. I've been an Emacs guy for more than a decade. And yet, I found myself spending many hours installing and configuring NeoVim and LazyVim for some reason. It's not completely crazy, as I still use Vim as my $EDITOR, but that's only for popping in and out of simple text or config files. I need to stay in Emacs. I'll keep the Vim stuff around because I've done all that work, but there's no way I'm going to live there. And Obsidian can fuck right off.

I got mad recently because I wanted to jot something down and didn't know where to put it. I launched Obsidian because Daily Notes work great there. Stop it! To help avoid that urge, I've added some quality of life improvements to my Org-mode/Denote setup. Let's hope that works.

I don't know where this leaves Tinderbox. Still noodling on that one.

Otherwise, my notes go in Denote files using Emacs or in TiddlyWiki.

File Storage. This one I haven't dealt with yet. I have files scattered everywhere and it's crazy-making. There's the Synology with my archives, but there's also the Mac Mini with what was going to be my Archives until I chickened out. Now there's some files in both places and some in one or the other. Not cool. I'm currently leaning toward punting on the Mini and putting it all back on the Synology.

There are a few more areas that need a reset. I'll get to them later.

03 Mar, 2024

Creating a WARC web archive using wget

I’ve been tinkering with keeping offline copies of websites (mostly mine), and have always used either wget or httrack. I wasn’t aware of the WARC format until recently, so I thought I’d try creating a few WARC archives.

wget, as it happens, has WARC support built in via the –warc-file option. I added that to my usual set of switches and put it all in a shell script, like so.

#!/bin/sh
# warc-archive.sh https://example.com warc-file-name

wget \
    --mirror \
    --warc-file=$2 \
    --warc-cdx \
    --page-requisites \
    --html-extension \
    --execute robots=off \
    --directory-prefix=. \
    --wait=1 \
    --random-wait \
    $1

This creates a compressed, self-contained WARC file along with a mirrored set of files comprising the entire site.

Actually reading the WARC files is the tricky part. As far as I can tell the easiest way is using Replay Web.page. Drag the website.warc.gz file into the browser and from there you can search for documents, images, etc. and browse the site completely offline.

It’s a little convoluted and I’m still confused about what goes where, but it seems pretty handy having a single-file, self-contained, offline archive of an entire website.

02 Mar, 2024

Additional backups

Derek Sivers posted about how he handles backups and it got me thinking about how I handle backups.

I feel like I'm mostly covered. I use Backblaze on my MacBook Pro for continuous, off-site backups of both the internal SSD and the attached "Media" drive containing my photos, videos, etc. I clone "Media" to a separate external drive once a week. iCloud syncs my ~/Documents and ~/Desktop folders, so that should be covered. The headless Mac Mini is also using Backblaze. The Synology is synced nightly to Backblaze B2 storage.

I don't worry too much about losing stuff. And yet, it sometimes feels a little abstracted. A little too magic. This is where Sivers' piece resonated. I dig rsync and use it for pushing local website changes out to servers all the time, so I decided to also use it mimic parts of Sivers' simple routine.

For remote storage, I spun up a 5TB Hetzner Storage Box. Cost is around $10/month. They really are just dumb servers you can access via (S)FTP or SSH. Then I wrote a couple of tiny shell scripts that wrap rsync.

As an added measure, the script can also rsync to an attached thumb drive, so I'm doing that, too. The scripts back up slightly different things to the storage box vs the thumb drive, depending on "importance".

Now I can type "bkremote" or "bkstick" and I have a complete snapshot of (most of) my stuff, one local and one offsite. The nice part is that I can easily get at all of it. No need to log in to a service or unpack weird backup files. It's an exact mirror. The down side is that it's an exact mirror. No history or versioning. If I delete something locally, then sync, it's gone everywhere. I'm ok with this since it's just an adjunct to my current system. But I'm happy to hear about anything that I might be missing.

28 Feb, 2024