Weekender #4

• My home backup system used to rely on a 12 year old Drobo 2 that connected via FireWire 800 to my MacMini home server. At the end of 2019, I replaced it with two 12TB external harddrives. One for actual storage, the other was a clone for redundancy. At the time, I was surprised that 12TB of storage could be had for $179. I remember when 60 MEGABYTES of storage cost $600. Last week, I purchased a 14TB external drive, to start the work of organizing over 20 years of digital photos, for nearly the same price. I wanted to be able to have all of the photos on a single drive while I organized, de-duped and deleted photos that aren’t needed. I continue to be amazed at how cheap storage has become. I can only hope that it’s reliable as well.

• As far as Drobo is concerned, I’m not sure what’s going on with that company. I was hoping to purchase a new Drobo 5D3, but they were out of stock for months, so I finally gave up and researched other alternatives. I’m glad I did. I just checked, and they’re still out of stock on almost all of their product line up as of today. Maybe Drobo is dead.

• This week, I received an email from Maciej Ceglowski, the creator of the bookmarking service Pinboard, asking old-time users to switch to a yearly subscription to support the service. For those that don’t know, Pinboard was created as an alternative to Del.icio.us because Ceglowski was unhappy with the design changes at the time. Delicious was sold to Yahoo in 2005. Yahoo sold it in 2011, and after it traded hands a few times between various other companies, in an odd twist, [Pinboard bought Del.icio.us in 2017. When it debuted, Pinboard had a one-time signup fee that was unusual in that the fee was based on how many members signed up. The price would increment a fraction of a cent in cost for each new member. The sooner you signed up, the lower the prices was and would never get lower. I forget how much I paid for it back then, but it was really, really cheap. In return for switching to to subscription he pledged to support more active development and new features. I still use Pinboard to this day, so of course it was an easy choice to subscribe.

• If you miss going out to a restaurant or bar during the pandemic, I thought this website was cleverly done. Maybe the next best thing?

• Finished two manga this week: Naoki Urasawa’s Asadora! Volume 1, and Inio Asano’s Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction Volume 9. Urasawa and Asano are both such masters of comic storytelling. They each have differing styles, but both leave me feeling like I’ve watched a movie.

• Speaking of movies… based on a true story, And so we put goldfish in the pool. ／そうして私たちはプールに金魚を、 is a debut short film from Makoto Nagahisa. The story follows four fifteen-year old girls as they deal with the doldrums and frustrations of living in a small town, friendship, love, and betrayal. The film perfectly captures that period of adolecensce between being a kid, and who we’d like to be. I really enjoyed the story-telling, editing, sound design and visuals. The emotions portrayed by the actors felt very raw, yet true.

  • Nagahisa recently released his second film, We Are Little Zombies, and I’ll look forward to watching this soon.

• This week, I’ve been listening to the album I Told You So by Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio. If you like instrumental funk, you’ll love this. Plus… lots of ORGAN! Listen: Apple Music | Spotify

Full disclosure: If you click on those links and purchase, a small commission will go to my wife.