Random Short Take #109

Posted on 2026-10-16 by dan

Random short take #109. Looking for news that’s old? You’ve come to the right place. Let’s get random.

This opinion piece would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so alarmingly accurate. We weren’t allowed to trust Wikipedia articles but whatever AI tells us is just fine? Let’s pump the brakes and reflect, please.
And speaking of art and artifice, this post from John Birmingham on digital media versus holding the art in your hand was great.
Need to store that digital media somewhere? Backblaze knows a bit about that. Read the Q2 2026 Drive Stats report here.
Speaking of storage, this article over at El Reg on the Domesday Project was pretty cool.
And while we’re talking long-term storage, in press release news, check out what Cerabyte has been up to.
In people news, Preston de Guise is looking for a job. Hire him if you need someone smart who can really help your organisation.
I’m not looking to return to the world of home lab builds, but if you’re looking for a primer, this article covers off some of the basics really well.
And this is just … ugh.

Random Short Take #108

Posted on 2026-09-03 by dan

Random short take #108. Looking for old news? You’ve come to the right place. Let’s get random.

This is a fantastic article by Leon Adato over at Techstrong about how somehow there’s never enough time to get the real work done.
If you’ve been reading this weblog for a while, or have been to my house, you’ll know I’m a fan of physical media. Articles like this are a reminder of why that’s the case. Remember, the studios don’t wanted you to “own” anything. Especially if they can sell it to you over and over again. Now I just wish I was handy enough with electronics to be able to repair my LaserDisc player when it plays up.
Speaking of media you can steal, this article about the Nicolas Cage Fortitude movie disk being stolen from a Netflix office is mind-blowing on a few levels. From my reading it seems like there’s enough blame pie for both sides. Lock up your stuff. Encrypt it before you give it to someone. How is this a thing in 2026? With companies operating at this scale?
Speaking of things that make me feel old, Windows NT 4.0 went on sale 30 years ago. My first NT was 3.51, but my favourite will always be 4.0.
And while we’re talking about NT 4.0, here’s a great article from Corey Quinn at The Register on some of the cool stuff AWS is doing with networking.
Not had enough of old things that are new? LTO is still shipping. And in pretty large numbers. More on that here.
It wouldn’t be a modern listicle without some kind of AI take. Here are Chan’s thoughts on AI and sales engineering. Good stuff.
Finally, here’s a great article from Tom Hollingsworth on engagement and social media.

Random Short Take #107

Posted on 2026-05-18 by dan

Random short take #107. Looking for old news? I’ve got just the thing. Let’s get random.

This article from Matt Allford struck a chord. I have an awful lot of USB cables in my house, and I have no idea what the specs of most of them are.
Speaking of things I only have a superficial understanding of, this article from Christian on Intel Arc SR-IOV hardware transcoding with Plex on Proxmox VE was great.
Still using an Apple Time Capsule? You’re out of luck and in luck at the same time, as is explained over at The Register.
Speaking of backup and recovery, this article about Backblaze has me questioning everything I’m doing to keep stuff safe at home. I’ve checked that my iCloud data is protected (and recoverable), but only because the machine I have Backblaze installed on has downloaded copies of that data. For the stuff I keep on Dropbox and Google Drive, it doesn’t seem as straight forward. Not that I’d ever recommend you only keep data with one provider. Maybe I need to write something more about this, if only to confirm that I’m doing correctly myself.
In resilience news (is that really a category?), this was an interesting article on AWS and what’s happening in the Middle East. The response from AWS has been fascinating, as have some of the hot takes from so-called “disaster recovery experts”. I’m looking forward to talking with customers in Western Queensland about the risk matrix they’ve drawn up that has them in a tizzy about losing three availability zones. There’s preparedness and then there’s how you recover, I guess.
Missing using FireWire with the most recent version of macOS? This article from Jeff Geerling might be of use if you still have a MiniDV camera you need to connect to something. It just won’t be with macOS.
Speaking of things not working after updates, you could always follow John Birmingham’s advice and just never update. But I’m not sure that’s really sustainable.
I think Netflix does some really cool stuff from a technical perspective, but for the most part the catalogue seems to be trash. So these kinds of posts from people rediscovering physical media are always nice to read.

Random Short Take #106

Posted on 2026-02-15 by dan

Random short take #106. Looking for old news? I’ve got just the thing. Let’s get random.

Jeff Geerling writes about recapping his 5 year old studio monitors. I’m posting this mainly because I’m inept when it comes to these kind of things.
I promise this isn’t just a list of Jeff Geerling articles, but here’s another one he wrote about exploring a modern SMPTE 2110 broadcast truck with his dad. I’m fascinated by all of the different media and entertainment technology that’s out there, particularly storage. I’m the first to admit I have limited exposure to it, so these kind of articles are great.
Adam writes about why they (BinaryLane) choose local storage over Network-Attached Storage – and why HA belongs at the application layer. It’s an interesting take, and one I don’t entirely disagree with. Having had exposure to various storage availability solutions over the decades, it can sometimes feel like the blast radius is too great when something goes wrong. And things do go wrong, even with the good stuff.
Curtis posted some thoughts to accompany his podcast episode on why the 3-2-1 Rule is dead and why we need 3-2-1-1-0. It’s a lot of numbers to remember, and if you’re not already doing 3-2-1 at a minimum, you need to look into it.
Interested in running the VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) on Apple macOS? William Lam has you covered.
Over at El Reg, we are living in the worst timeline, as Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info.
Also at The Register, Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote. I don’t know if it’s delight or bewilderment the children are feeling, but it’s nonetheless a cool project.
Finally, if you’re looking to shutdown your Spotify Family plan, but your children don’t want to lose their playlists, etc. the solution is to get them to move off the plan to the free tier first. Which seems obvious in hindsight, but these companies spend a lot of time explaining how to get on family plans, but don’t really talk much about what happens when your children grow up.

Random Short Take #105

Posted on 2025-11-19 by dan

Random short take #105. Want news? Sorry I’ve had a bit on. Let’s get random.

Christian Mohn published a great article off the back of his recent presentation at VMUG UserCon UK 2025 – vSphere: It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Root.
Duncan Epping dives into the topic of vSAN Stretched Clusters vs Fault Domains in a “campus” setting.
Feeling a bit down? This won’t help – The Enterprise Experience.
Backblaze has published its drive stats for Q3 2025.
Howard Oakley put together a great explainer on .DS_Store files.
In press release news, Arcitecta recently announced that the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) has selected Arcitecta’s Mediaflux platform to serve as its central Digital Asset Management System (DAMS). This is a company doing some pretty cool stuff, and in my backyard too.
Speaking of storage companies doing cool stuff, Hammerspace has announced the latest version of its Data Platform Software.
Finally, I had the opportunity to speak with Boyan Krosnov and Alex Ivanov recently about StorPool Storage and its HCI Software Stack integrated with Oracle Virtualization. I’ve been a big fan of StorPool for some time, and it’s worth checking out if you haven’t previously.

Random Short Take #104

Posted on 2025-08-08 by dan

Random short take #104. Want news? This is where news goes to die. Let’s get random.

Starting with a little how-to article from Kad – the different ways to install VMware Tools.
And still on Broadcom, here’s a handy article from Chris on download tokens and VMware updates.
Here’s one view on how to backup your iCloud data. This stuff keeps me awake at night.
Speaking of consumer data in the cloud, here’s a neat article from Dropbox on its seventh-generation server hardware.
Switching gears slightly, here’s a great article from Chin-Fah on intelligent data movement and data placement and how it will dictate the future of AI data infrastructure.
Still on AI, it’s becoming a pain for data centre capacity planning according to El Reg.
Speaking of storing things, Brian Moses 3D-printed a NAS case. Like, a pretty big one.
In press release news, the Active Archive Alliance has welcomed BDT Media Automation to the organisation. In other PR news, Hammerspace has announced some impressive benchmarking results.

Random Short Take #100

Posted on 2024-12-12 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #100. I’m back from my holiday, but it’s only a few weeks until Christmas, so this is likely the last Random Short Take for the year. Let’s get random.

Michael Cade recently wanted to extend the root partition of some RHEL VMs provisioned with Terraform. If you want to know how to do it, he wrote up the process here.
Speaking of storage, Brian Moses has published the 2025 edition of his DIY NAS build. You can check it out here.
Have you ever wondered what happens when you change the Key Provider, KMIP, Native Key Provider, NKP, for vSAN Encryption? John Nicholson has you covered in this article.
I haven’t been paying enough attention to Solidigm, but fortunately Gina has been. Here’s her take on the 122TB announcement.
In PR news, StorMagic has announced SvHCI 2.0.
Meanwhile, Hammerspace and Supermicro are collaborating – you can read more about that here.
Switching to data protection press releases, S2|DATA has released a free NetBackup reader.
Since this is the 100th Random Short Take, I’ll finish with a random article from 10 years ago about the second album from (my favourite band) the Beastie Boys. And if you get a chance to read Dan LeRoy’s excellent book on the subject I can heartily recommend that you do so.

Bonus round. vExpert applications are now open for next year. Read more about that here. In the meantime, stay safe, don’t get shot, and see you in the new year.

Random Short Take #98

Posted on 2024-10-15 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #98. Some of these links have been in my queue for a little while, so apologies if it’s not as fresh as it could be. Let’s get random.

Let’s start off with a brilliant article from JB “Going tharn“. We build all these systems to get stuff done, and when it goes wrong it can go ever so wrong. To quote the article, “[t]hat is the terrible power of modern systems, I think. They make us alone, atomise us, and disconnect us from each other. They turn us tharn. They replace those human connections with a User-Platform relationship that feels remarkably similar to the old master-servant relationship in its power imbalance.” I haven’t read something that resonated with me as much as that in quite some time.
My friend Damo is heading off on esCarpade later this week, raising money for Camp Quality. If you have some of the folding stuff lying around I urge you to support him.
Which disk format? Howard Oakley asks (and answers) the question so I don’t have to ask it anymore.
Here are some of the announcements from NetApp Insight 2024.
I enjoyed Tom’s article “Semper Gumby“. It’s important to try and be as flexible as possible, even when you get old and crotchety like I am.
Preston has started “Preston’s Assorted musings (Episode 1?)” and I believe it’s already a series. Worth checking out if only for the fact that he puts some thought into it rather than just spraying links to random articles everywhere like I do.
Paolo put together a handy article on how to configure the Object First VSA as a Veeam Repository if you’re into that kind of thing.
Over at El Reg there’s an article on how your Smart TV sucks. And it’s tracking you. No surprises there, but look into blocking yours with a pi-hole if you can (or however you like to restrict access to things that shouldn’t be talking to the big, wide world).

Random Short Take #97

Posted on 2024-09-10 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #97. Let’s get random.

I’m a little behind on the news, but Preston wrote about what’s new with PowerProtect Data Manager 19.17.
Speaking of data protection, if you’re a Mac user I bet you think you know a bit about Time Machine. This article from Howard Oakley might make you think otherwise.
Do you need a Stratum 1 NTP server at home? I didn’t think I did, but this article from Justin Paul has me reconsidering it.
Security is hard. And security for operational technology (OT) can be a real pain too. This article over at Gigaom covers some of the challenges.
Speaking of security, Chin-Fah put together a great piece on data governance for cybersecurity and AI.
Speaking of AI, the Active Archive Alliance has released a special report on Active Archives and AI.
Henry Rollins recently made an appearance on The Vinyl Guide podcast talking about his Stay Fanatic!!! series of books and his obsession with music history. Worth checking out if (like me) you’re a fan of Henry or record collecting (or both).
Speaking of archiving, here’s a great piece on archiving CD-ROMs on Linux.

Random Short Take #96

Posted on 2024-08-07 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #96. I’m pouring one out for Geordie Guy this week. Let’s get random.

It’s been a tough week, but in what can only be considered excellent news, someone has gotten Windows NT 4 working on a few Apple PowerPC variants. Would you want to do that? Of course not. If you’re looking to run NT 4, you’re much better off finding some nice beefy DEC Alphas. But it’s always nice to have the option. You can read more over at The Register.
And in more good news, JB found out recently that 7-Eleven stores in Australia are going to become more like 7-Eleven stores in Japan. Hooray!
But it’s not all good news. Nicholson has published an interesting article on some of the problems with 10Gbps. “Networking speed is a luxury for people who have tigers on gold leashes, and we needed to save money somewhere” may be my new favourite quote.
You want more bad news? Fine. Tom Andry dives into why HDMI has sucked and continues to suck. I’ve had mixed experiences with HDMI over the years, but I can confirm that it’s not always been smooth sailing, despite the advertising to that effect.
It’s not all bad though. Found yourself struggling with sudo on Debian? Vivek has you covered with this comprehensive guide.
Talked yourself into building your own NAS but don’t know what case to use? Check out this post from Brian Moses.
In PR news, Leaseweb recently launched an object storage solution in Canada. Read more about what’s on offer here.
In other PR news, Pure Storage is investing in Cerabyte. This company is doing some cool stuff.

Finally, and I’m a little late to the party, I just wanted to call out Jetpack for being a bunch of pumpkins and wanting me to upgrade my stats plan because I run a “commercial” site. If you think I want to pay $12.99 a month to see different numbers from those that Google and my hosting provider give me you’re wildly mistaken. And sod knows how I qualify as commercial (unless it’s for posting GoFundMe links for people who are dead or dying) but you can seriously get fucked. Sorry for swearing Mum.

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