Notes for October 12-17

Had a fairly slow start to the week, then a progressively intense ramp-up that I tempered by way of a couple of strategically timed outings and a little time on my own projects.

I also spent quite a bit of time playing with the FM-1, although I’m having trouble finding the right kind of inspiration. And all sorts of stuff keeps breaking…

Time Machine broke again, mysteriously, on Golden Gate, and for some reason only my MacBook Pro was affected. Completely fed up with this, I just went and did what I had previously threatened: brought up a Samba Time Machine container (using mbentley/timemachine) in an unprivileged Debian LXC on tnas, backed by a bind mount from ZFS.

That entailed a bit of UID/GID finagling, and I must say I’m happy I don’t have to do it by hand myself again–took all of two minutes for piclaw to set everything up after I pointed it to my earlier post, and the LXC setup looks like this:

# lxc.conf
arch: amd64
cores: 2
features: nesting=1
hostname: timemachine
memory: 512
mp0: /local-zfs/folders/shares,mp=/mnt/shares
net0: name=eth0,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1,ip=dhcp,type=veth
onboot: 1
ostype: debian
rootfs: local:102/vm-102-disk-0.raw,size=8G
swap: 512
unprivileged: 1

…whereas the container itself is managed via this snippet:

# docker-compose.yaml
services:
  timemachine:
    image: mbentley/timemachine:latest
    container_name: timemachine
    restart: always
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      # share is smb://hostname/TimeMachine
      - TM_USERNAME=timemachine
      - TM_GROUPNAME=timemachine
      - PASSWORD=<redacted>
      - TM_UID=1000
      - TM_GID=1000
      - SET_PERMISSIONS=false
      - VOLUME_SIZE_LIMIT=0
    volumes:
      # this is a pass-through mountpoint to the ZFS volume in Proxmox
      - /mnt/shares/timemachine:/opt/timemachine
    tmpfs:
      - /run/samba

I’m quite happy with how both kintsugi and my Obsidian server/agent harness are turning out (I’m drafting this and all my upcoming articles in it). kintsugi needed a bit more work than I expected, though, because:

• iOS self-signed certificates and general Safari weirdness required a bunch of fixes across the board
• despite applying container isolation to agents, it bafflingly lacked any sort of non-network resource limits and I had one workspace stall the entire machine it was running in
• I needed better remote management and telemetry

Most of those are now done, and I have it running on my Orange Pi 6 Plus (yes, I’ve pretty much sorted out ARM support) to add USB device passthrough and other features I need to do embedded/ESP32 development over the next few weeks.

Finally watched the end of Ted Lasso, which completely did not disappoint. Our current TV time is mostly handpicked YouTube and Apple TV fare (there’s just no real competition in overall quality) and I feel like there’s not enough time to watch all of the good stuff (like Dark Matter, which we’re behind on).

I also spent a while fixing various Calibre issues (my custom weekly news downloads were not working after an upgrade) and fiddling with my Xteink X4 a bit.