The musings of an aspiring carver of space

Filesystems and grey-matter systems

What. A. Day.

My head is spinning. I've learned so much, and yet I have so many questions, as I close out my work day. I can't remember a more recursive day in recent memory: where you park your reading on a topic to delve into another subtopic, return, continue reading on that topic, then delve into another subtopic, and a deeper subtopic from there, etc. There were some functions I didn't even call — to stretch a metaphor to breaking; I just made notes in the list of questions that always sits on my desktop and ploughed on.

FUSE was one of those. I don't know how this passed me by; what an elegant idea. I was trying to get an SSH private key from my desktop to my Mac, so I could continue working on my AWS indexer cluster from there, but ext4 is a mystery to Catalina. ext4fuse to the rescue, along with some, well, magic, from my point of view to make sure my user was in the proper group for mounting filesystems. I need to get more comfortable with macOS; it feels so alien, compared with Ubuntu and Mint.

The good news is, it all worked, and I've made notes about the research I still need to do, in slower time, before I'll be able to properly explain the process to anyone. (My ultimate goal, these days, as I want to be a mentor in our company, somewhere well down the road.)


Also, quickly, I hit Yes on a support page — you know, that, typically annoying, “Did you find this useful?” bit at the bottom — for the first time in ages today: it was a short, clear, spectacularly useful page, hosted by Amazon, on how to grow EBS volumes and partitions, and then resize the associated filesystems. Within ten minutes, my indexer cluster stopped complaining about the walls closing it. Result!


Finally, HN pointed me to a wonderful, beautiful piece by Eugene Yan on zettelkasten and Roam. I can't remember... Gosh, is it a bad sign that a post of this length is causing deja vu, about forgetting things?! I was so excited by this piece. Just, beside myself, really. I'm so unhappy with my knowledge management system right now; nothing's joined up. It's like an archaeological dig, going back through old notebooks, text files on old backups. Making connections is serendipity, at its most frustrating.

Until now.

Or, it would be, if Roam wasn't closed to new users. (D'oh!) The bright side is that the application form for their wait list was a lot of fun. I'm not joking. I really enjoyed it. It didn't make up for not having access to the software, but it certainly took away some of the sting.

End of Day 24


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I'm writing this as part of the 100 Days To Offload project; join us at: https://100daystooffload.com/