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Shallow and Pedantic

A person/tech/code blog of a coder/techie/person. Like calculus in a kiddie pool, the author of this blog is known to be quite shallow and pedantic.

zsnapfree

Copy-on-write makes snapshots fast and accessible, but deleting them to reclaim disk space can be a bit confusing. Let’s have a quick primer on how those work, and look at a small utility to help reason about it. zsnapfree is a TUI for showing how much space can be reclaimed by freeing zfs snapshots. It is a TUI wrapper over the standard zfs tool. If you just want to see zsnapfree in action, skip to the screencast.

Adventures with slow boot

Rebooting a modern desktop computer really shouldn’t take very long, so when it was somewhat-regularly taking well over 10 minutes just to shut down, I got curious, and ended up looking at netdata, jitter, anacron, and even ansible.

ncdu-import

Figuring out what’s taking up space is a well-known issue, with a variety of great tools for it… if we’re talking about files on a local hard drive.

Timezone Changes

In October 2023, two weeks before daylight savings time (“summer time”) was set to end, Israel briefly considered delaying this. That would’ve been a terrible idea, even if it weren’t at war at the time.

Getting your code to your friends

For as long as I’ve been interested in software development, I’ve been interested in how software makes it onto a computer. “Works on my machine” was never quite enough… how would it work on someone else’s computer? Here’s a stroll down memory lane, starting from the 90s.