Tag: Tech

The Power of Telemetry

The online backup company Backblaze – of which I am a reasonably satisfied long-term customer – makes statistics about the hard drives they use public. A chap called Ryan Smith took this telemetry and, with a little data wrangling and some educated guesses, worked out large parts of their business model – including important elements of their asset replacement cycle.

Telemetry is creepy. Turn it off.

400 Bad Request

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
The number of request header fields exceeds this server's limit.

Does anyone else get this? I seem to have broken the BBC website. I don’t seem to get it anywhere else and it doesn’t happen all the time but, when it does, I don’t seem to be able to get that chrome session to ever load that page.

It’s worth noting that I’ve never seen this with FireFox, so it might be either a browser issue or an issue with the two plugins I use (HTTPS Everywhere and uBlock Origin).

Time Machine

Apple’s Time Machine is a neat little utility to automate onsite backups. However its machinations are, like so many of Apple’s products, completely opaque to the end user using the standard user interface and so troubleshooting can be rather difficult. Fortunately for us, this is one of those circumstances where Terminal commands can come to the rescue.

Our first magic spell is…

log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info

This will show logged message from the past and can be useful if you’re trying to troubleshoot an issue that’s already in progress. Run this command and macOS will display the last few weeks of Time Machine logs before exiting

The second magic spell is…

log stream --style syslog --predicate 'senderImagePath contains[cd] "TimeMachine"' --info

This command will run – and will remain running until you explicitly exit it – and will display any log messages that Time Machine writes out to the system log.

Raspberry Pi with PCIe

The Raspberry Pi 4 is out! And I’m not going to buy one because A) revision zero is buggered, B) the load this site produces on it’s current 3B+ host is functionally zero (so there’s very little point in upgrading it) and C) I’m currently far too busy to do any pottering around with one outside of that.

However other people have and they’ve started playing around with the new PCIe bus – even going as far as desoldering the USB controller and adding a PCIe riser.

Which is very neat indeed.

For All Time

194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:54:49 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 47 "-" "bl.uk_lddc_bot/3.3.0-LBS-2016-02 (+http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:02 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1851 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:11 +0100] "GET /assets/main.css HTTP/1.1" 200 9924 "https://www.chrisrcook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"
194.66.232.91 - - [01/Jul/2019:07:55:11 +0100] "GET /resources/images/home.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 382760 "https://www.chrisrcook.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/538.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) PhantomJS/2.1.1 Safari/538.1 bl.uk_lddc_renderbot/2.0.0 (+ http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit/websites/websites/faqswebmaster/index.html)"

This is kinda cool – this site seems to have made it as far as the UK Web Archive’s crawlers! Apparently I will now taint the web long after I’m gone.

There are also a couple of snapshots on Archive.org but they only exist because I was playing with their Wayback Machine website – alas, I have not yet to made it far enough up the list for them to visit of their own accord.