To the tune of "We Three Kings"

Trump thinks he's king of USA.
Bribes not gifts, it's all pay to play.
Hate and violence,
Speech he'll silence,
Fall in line and obey.

[REFRAIN]
O Don of blunder, Don of blight,
Don with loyal cult alt-right,
"Mandate" fading,
Mind degrading,
Evil, cruel, God's wrath will smite.

Born a babe, his skin way too thin.
Cries and whines when he doesn't win.
Never grew up,
Tweets he threw up,
Spewing out bile and sin.

[REFRAIN]

Bankruptcy to offer has he.
All accountability flee.
Fraud and lawsuits,
Paid prostitutes,
Run from the tape pee pee.

[REFRAIN]

Orange his skin and heavy his weight.
Globally a joke head of state.
Not respected,
Got elected,
So Putin he'll fellate.

[REFRAIN]

Cutting aid both here and abroad.
Being poor will soon be outlawed.
Jesus crying,
Homeless dying,
Keep up the doomed facade.

[REFRAIN]

(stay mad bro)

For a while now I've only had my Core i3 laptop with 6GB of RAM from 2010. That changed slightly because Linode provided me with a MacBook Pro when I started working there, which I do use for non-work activities. But I don't game on the MacBook, and my old laptop can only just handle modded Minecraft or League of Legends on all minimum settings. After building my NAS it was time to finally get a desktop. I planned to go a bit overboard, but not insanely so. The system I ended up with is more than I need, but I'm quite happy with it.

One of the biggest choices, given recent offerings, is going with an Intel or AMD CPU. Given reviews, price point, not being a hard-core gamer, and frustration with vulnerabilities (Meltdown & Spectre, Foreshadow) while working at Linode, I went with AMD. I was initally also going to go with an AMD graphics card, but my brother offered to sell me one of his older nVidia cards at no markup and I happily took him up on the offer. He also gave me the case for free as a Christmas present, which was awesome. The rest is pretty standard, chosen mostly based on cost or brand recognition, except I wanted (a frankly unnecessary) 32GB of RAM to make it basically impossible to run out. Most of the components were purchased at MicroCenter, the rest on Amazon (I'm using Amazon links for almost all of them for consistency though).

Some comments on the items:

• CPU — if you're not familiar, Intel is still the king of single core performance, making them the leaders in gaming, but AMD's latest CPUs are nothing to sneeze at; I ended up with 8 cores / 16 threads @ 4.3GHz (with boost)
• CPU cooler — one of the reasons AMD is a better value than Intel is that they include a pretty nice CPU cooler with their CPUs; this one looks nice and kept my CPU at a reasonable temp even during brief stress testing; plus it's RGB, so of course it's pink
• Motherboard — MicroCenter had sales when buying specific motherboards with specific CPUs which determined my choice
• Graphics card — AMD cards have better open source drivers in linux, but nVidia does make proprietary drivers available, and I was happy to buy this mid-tier but still respectable card from my brother
• Case — I was extremely happy with this case; cable management was awesome (it even has built-in velcro), it's sturdy, and the front panel and glass side look awesome
• RAID drive — I bought 2 of the same HDDs I used in my NAS for this desktop in case I wanted them, but honestly I'm probably just going to put everything on either my desktop's SSD, or on my NAS; I probably will use these for something in the future, at which point they will be in a RAID 1 configuration
• USB soundcard — unfortunately the audio codec in my motherboard has some really annoying issues in linux so I bought a cheap USB soundcard to use with my headset's microphone
• UPS — stands for "Uninterruptible Power Supply" and it's just a nice to have so my desktop can run on battery backup for a few minutes and shutdown cleanly in the event of a power outage (the UPS tells it to do a clean shutdown over a USB cable)
• Chair — I wanted to replace a cheap mesh-backed chair I got from Staples a few years back; my main criteria here was to get polyester because I hate fake leather; overall quite happy with the chair

I first installed Windows 10, then Ubuntu 18.04 on the SSD. I then named it shinkiro in honor of Lelouch's custom Knightmare Frame from my favorite anime, Code Geass. Photos:

Further reading:

• Is MicroCenter that great?
• Is AMD a Good Option in 2018?
• GPU Hierarchy 2018

I'm planning on building a desktop soon, but one of things I wanted to do first was build a storage server. I'm calling this a NAS, but it might be more correct to say networked DAS. At any rate, I want a central place to store my files, which are currently scattered across my laptop, homeserver, raspberry pi, external hard drive, and various USB drives. In building the NAS, I want to know the files I put there will be safe from mechanical failures and silent corruption. In addition to hard drives failing, digital storage has a scary failure mode. Here's the 3 main safeguards you should consider using to protect the data you care about most:

Many people have heard about RAID, but fewer are aware of Bit Rot. It's not very common, since hard drives have some built-in error correction, but it's still possible, and can be devastating for even a single bit flip depending on the exact circumstances. After reviewing various options, I settled on ZFS with RAIDZ2, which has all 3 features baked-in, and a very easy deployment process that lends itself to set-it-and-forget-it. It also has easy to use quotas which is good since I intend to share some storage with my friends.

For the hardware, I settled on a 6x4TB hard drive array in RAIDZ2. In exchange for reduced usable storage space (in my case 24TB became 14TB), RAIDZ2 means up to 2 hard drives can fail without any data loss. If a hard drive fails, you can just plug in a new one and ZFS automatically populates the new drive and restores redundancy. I picked the drive size and number based on my desired storage size (minimum 10TB) and the cost/TB of the drives. Based on various recommendations online, I went with WD Red drives. The rest of the hardware was chosen based almost solely on cost.

Some comments on the items:

• Case — I was extremely happy with this case; cable management was awesome, it's sturdy, and it's cheap to boot
• Power Supply — since this box will be on 24/7, I wanted a gold-rated supply, and I was quite pleased with the cables this one came with
• Fans — the 6 drives are packed together pretty tight in the front of the case, so I got 2 extra fans (Corsair advertised them as HSP "High Static Pressure" for cramped areas, but I'm unsure how necessary that is)
• PCIe SATA card — the motherboard has 6 SATA ports, so I needed an extra in order to connect the SSD; my intial intention was to scavenge parts from my homeserver (area11) hence the 1x channel width

After getting it up and running, I ran the long SMART test and destructive badblocks (the latter inside screen sessions) on each drive to appease my paranoia (all tests came back clean as they should for brand new drives):

sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdX
sudo badblocks -wsvo diskX-bb.txt /dev/sdX
sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdX

It was then affectionately dubbed trichiliocosm in honor of one of Zoro's attacks from an episode of One Piece (kudos @glenn for the suggestion). Photos:

Further reading:

• DIY NAS vs. enclosure
• DIY NAS 2017
• Why use NAS HDDs
• OpenZFS vs. Btrfs
• Hidden cost of expanding ZFS pools
• Expanding ZFS pools
• ZFS supposedly requires ECC RAM
• ZFS does not need ECC RAM (rebuttal of above)

Here is the best example of gerrymandering you will ever see. If you're not familiar with the term, it's one of the ridiculous techniques politicians use to gain an advantage in the two-party system. The green region is a single congressional district in Illinois, commonly called "The Earmuffs." Using the scale on the map, the thinnest sections are about 200 feet across. Why divide a region into rectangles when you can have earmuffs instead?

Image from this Wikipedia article. More info in this Washington Post article.

This is the best video I've ever seen of lightning. It's really awesome; you can see the leaders and return stroke perfectly. After some quick math using the timestamp shown in the video, it's been slowed down by a factor of 238.