I recently built a file server. For the operating system, I decided to use Alpine Linux. As with most of my Linux systems, I wanted to utilize full disk encryption. The following guide is mostly based off the documentation on the Alpine Wiki, and goes through the installation of Alpine on a modern UEFI system, with LUKS full disk encryption.
On Sunday, October 11th, I had the pleasure of being a guest on William Maggos’s show, the Culture War Radio podcast. We talked about my background, adventures around the planet, political culture and technology.
Windows 10 Bluescreen on Boot for iaStoreAC.sys Driver
I recently added some high speed storage to my Windows 10 machine, which I use for gaming and video editing. At first, I was going to replace the existing 500GB NVME drive with a 1TB drive, and use the old drive in my storage server. However, I accidentally ordered another 500GB drive. Instead of returning it, I decided to use an older drive that was left over from my laptop upgrade as the operating system disk in the storage server, and install the 500GB as a secondary drive in my Windows machine. What should have been a simple upgrade, led to a blue screen on boot. The message displayed was a SYSTEM THREAD EXCEPTION with the cause being iaStorAC.sys, part of the Intel Rapid Store drivers.
Years ago, a friend told me he was going to visit his sister in Queensland, Australia. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and we made plans to meet up. We ended up hiking through some spectacular parks and amazing waterfalls. On one of our hikes, my friend asked me, “Why do you hate America?” It’s one of those lines often parodied from early 2000s Fox News broadcasts, during the height of outrage over the Iraq war.
At the time, I did hate a lot of American foreign policy, and found there was little difference between US political parties. I had my reasons for leaving, yet I eventually came back to America. Having traveled through and lived in different places around the world, I saw the trade-offs in the different values held by nationals of various countries. I still take issue with many policies in the United States, but I believe there are many aspects to American law and ideology, that respect individual rights and freedoms in fundamentally unique ways. America may run afoul of letting people slide through the cracks, but it is also a nation suited to help people succeed at their dreams.
My mother told me that when I was very young, I would always look out the window in the evenings for the police car that would often sit on our street each night during the late shift. On a night when a car didn’t appear, and my father couldn’t get me to sleep, he would put me in a stroller and walk around until we saw one. I grew up on shows like Dragnet and games like Police Quest, and when I told my neighbors that I wanted to be a cop when I grew up, they’d tell me, “You’re too smart for that.”
Back when I first started posting videos, I used Vimeo. Even though YouTube was the dominant video site, I wanted to support the underdog. I even bought a Vimeo Pro account. At the time, Vimeo had higher quality video than YouTube, but nowhere near the level of discoverability. Eventually I started posting on YouTube; both new content and some reposts of my older videos. It’s 2020 and YouTube, as well as the rest of big tech, is continuing to remove content they don’t agree with from their platforms. None of my videos have ever gotten a large number of views, and none are monetized, so I might as well copy them to a PeerTube instance I control. If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.