Author: Adam

I’m a little over a month out from going down to compete at the BIJJF Worlds in Vegas this year. It’s the first time I’m competing at anything outside of the in house tournaments that run at the school.

Yea. I know. I’m jumping straight into the deep end.

This week however I did have a chance to go down and spectate at the IBJJF competition in Portland this weekend. Overall while it’s a long drive there and back in the same day it answered a lot of questions about how these things are run. Where the bullpen is, what the signage looks like, things like that. And while the worlds is going to be a completely different scale compared to the competition in Portland it’s also going to have a lot of stuff in common with the smaller competitions.

Unfortunately there were not a lot of people in my weight class and belt range signed up, and given that I wasn’t sure I was able to make it down in time to compete so I didn’t wind up fighting this time around. It would have been interesting to get a match in but at least I was able to watch and get a feel for things before I head down.

So with a new camera I’m spending a lot of time looking for places where I can go take some photos. I was going to make a run up to a viewpoint on the way to Mount Cypress but given that a FIFA game was running traffic was enough of a mess that I decided to head the other direction and wound up in a place called White Rock.

It’s home to a large pier, a nice beach, and a lot of places to get Ice Cream. It’s also got some decent scenery and a decent place to take shots of the sunset.

There were lots of other things going around the area, some birds that stood still long enough to get a decent photo.

The occasional train slipping through.

And a very large white rock.

Overall not a bad place to sit and just enjoy the area, provided that it’s not pissing rain down at the time.

Back when Broadcom bought VMWare a pile of changes were implemented on their end that resulted in some sweeping increases in price and the dropping of several free options from their stack of offerings.

Once this info started flowing and we realized that the cost to keep their products around were going to jump 300% we jumped off that platform and moved to something else. From what I’m hearing we were not the only ones to jump and now there are reports that VMWare is now trying to win people back.

VMware "win-back initiative" is an insult to our intelligence
byu/Trelfar insysadmin

Given what’s been going on with VMWare and Broadcom I don’t really know what to think here. Even if we were big enough for VMWare to care about what we do (we aren’t) I don’t think that we would be moving off of their stack into something else if we had completed the process of migration to a new stack. Even if I was interested we moved everything over well over two years ago and regardless of what they would do for pricing we wouldn’t be able to recoup the costs of moving away from them in the first place.

Honestly this whole situation may go down as a case study in how to burn a company to the ground.

For a long time I didn’t bother having any type of media server at home, I just had the machine that had copies of my media hooked up to the TV directly or had a computer sitting on that TV accessing the media through a SMB share or something along those lines. However since that didn’t really provide a user friendly interface I eventually wound up looking into options.

For a long time I ran Plex internally, it was well supported and worked on my Apple TV devices, as well as the Chromecast devices that I used for a long time. The one thing that started to be a issue was Plex pushing subscriptions more and more aggressively over time. Now to be fair, I wasn’t paying anything for the service so it’s not something that I can really complain about however when I started looking at getting hardware encoding enabled and found out that it and the mobile apps were paywalled behind a plex pass or some other type of payment I wound up setting up a Jellyfin instance to see if that worked better.

Install for either was pretty simple because both were installed in Docker containers on the server where my media lives, so for the most part it was just pick the correct image, set where the media lives, and go. Now, if you where installing on something other than a Docker host things might be a bit more involved and in that case Plex would probably have the advantage depending on what you are running on. The UI for both is good enough, but Plex is a bit more polished. That said, i’m using this as a media player so I won’t be spending a lot of time in that UI (hopefully).

The biggest thing that Plex seems to do well is support for various platforms. From what I’ve seen it’s got clients for most everything out there where Jellyfin is a bit more… selective in what it supports. In my case the streaming devices that I’m working with at home are supported so there’s no huge difference for me. It does however mean that if I’m replacing a TV or streaming box that I need to make sure that a client for Jellyfin is available for the device. Right now that’s somewhat limited, but at least Android and Google TV are supported so there’s decent selections of devices around. Plex however supported a lot more devices at the time, so if you aren’t willing to look at replacing your Device that might be the deciding factor.

In the end Jellyfin did everything that I need, and it supports the devices that I have around the house so I’ve moved everything over and shut down the Plex instance that I was running.

Your milage may vary, however when I can use a free, open source, option over something that potentially costs me a fair plile of money I generally lean towards the free option. That said I did pay for a Unraid license instead of going with TrueNAS on my primary storage server for a reason.

So, we have some of those MacBook NEO’s sitting around the office since they are a pretty good deal (even after the price increases) for the demo devices that we need. The intent wasn’t to use them as daily drivers just as a node that would be online for our products to talk to.

However over the last couple of weeks really playing around with the device it’s becoming more and more apparent that the devices are able to hit well above the price point that they are selling for.

In our office a lot of our staff spend most of their day working in web based apps (CRM & Email) and working through a soft phone that we use for our phone system. None of those are things that are particularly taxing for a computer and we have had some folks running on hardware that’s older a decade old without any specific performance issues. However on those decade old machines Windows 10 is the flavour of Windows that plays nice on that hardware and now that it’s officially out of support we are having to roll that hardware out of production and get replacements in place.

Our general go-to devices have, for a long time, been Lenovo Thinkpads. Generally speaking we were able to pick them up for around the 1200$ range at a reasonable specification, however with the recent increase in price for all IT gear those are harder and harder to get and we are starting to look at 1800$ or higher for devices that would match what we were picking up previously.

And the thing is playing with the Neo’s we found that they were working fine for anything we threw at them, and since they are still around the 1000$ CAD mark even after the price increases we are looking at using them as a alternative to the Windows based machines we have been picking up.

I know, buying a 8gb machine for day to day use seems strange as hell but in our testing we can’t see the machine getting to more than ~7gb of used RAM during our normal operations. Even if for some reason the devices wind up being underpowered in a couple of years they were are cheap enough that we can swap them out for something new in a couple of years and not feel horrible about it.

Well now that I’ve got a new Camera I’ve been doing a lot of walking around parks that are resonably close to where I live and one of those is the Malcom Knapp Research Forest. It’s not like some of the other parks that are geared at recreation, it’s a working forest where folks are running experiments and testing things related to forestry.

It’s a bit strange walking through there and suddenly coming into a spot that’s been completely clear cut so that they can test methods for quickly re-populating the local trees, or areas that have apparently been purposefully left overgrown.

While it is a working forest there’s still a fairly good number of trails there to walk around, as well as service roads that run through the park connecting up to various places.

Those roads make for some interesting spots where you come across warning signs for traffic in the middle of the woods but at some point you could come into contact with logging trucks or other vehciles running around in the forest.

There are several trails to pick from, so there’s still a good chunk of the forest that I haven’t had a chance to walk through, but what I have walked through has been generally well marked. Some of the trails are on the overgrown side but not to a point where you can’t find them or get to where you are looking to go. There are however enough crossings and switchbacks that you should keep a map on hand if not a GPS to keep track of where you are in the forest.

The nice thing is that the folks who run the forest are pretty restrictive about what they allow in the park, so you don’t have bikes (electric, pedal, or otherwise) that you have to worry about so it’s a very quiet place to walk around. And while there are lakes there it’s not like Golden Ears where you get as many people there for a swim in the lake.

Malcom Knapp Research Forest – June 19, 2026

One of my favourite Anime series is Ghost in the Shell. Personally I always liked the original manga and while many of the other adaptations are good they always had something that didn’t always completely scratch that itch for me.

A new one that just came out and the art style so far is pretty much on spot compared to the manga, and the story so far feels almost scene for scene like a copy of the Manga.

I’m kind of looking forward to it but I don’t like waiting for new episodes of things so I might wait until it’s all out for a longer watch throuhg.

So last month Anthropic pushed out some new models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5 and shortly after the US Government flagged them as being a issue and had them pulled from production.

I’ve heard a lot of “reasons” for this from various people but something obviously spooked people in the know enough that they decided that these models needed to be pulled for a while. The problem with this is that it’s shone a spotlight on the models and their capabilities and probably has people paying a lot of attention to what these are capable of.

Even if all that the folks at Anthropic did was to reinstate the guardrails that keep these tools honest it’s still going to be too late to put this back in the bag. At some point one of the more open models is going to get to a point where it’s going to be able to pull the same type of stunts, and when that happens it could get messy again.

Today I was messing around with a MacBook Neo from work, playing around with moving user profiles around with an eye to trying to use the device as a daily driver.

One of the things that I need to do for that to work is to get the users home folder saved into a separate disk, volume, or partition, depending on how you want to look at it. It’s been a hot minute since I daily drove a macOS system at work and the process that I used to used to do this back in the day needed to be revalidated since it’s been a long time.

In short I was just going to copy the user home folder over to the new volume using the ditto command, change my user settings to point to the new folder, and I’m done.

However I ran into issues copying over the profile to the new location, specifically permissions errors even when running the command as root.

It took a bit but eventually I remembered that even when running commands as root you don’t have access to your entire disk through the terminal. That’s something that you have to grant the terminal application and normally that happens when the app in question (terminal or otherwise) tries to access something that it shouldn’t. In this case the ditto command didn’t trigger the notification and I didn’t connect that this wasn’t something granted previously.

I understand why this is done, but it’s still irritating to run into this when I actually know what I’m doing. It’s almost like the folks at Apple think that I need handholding when using my computer. And while I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not some type of macOS god who knows everything I’m not completely ignorant of the operating system and how it works. Generally if I’m dropping into the terminal for something I’m aware of the risks and if the machine gets blown up, well that’s what backups are for.

I understand why these guardrails are in place. There are a lot of folks who don’t care or can’t understand what they are doing if they drop into a terminal or start playing with some parts of the operating system. For those who know these things are a pain in the ass, but at least on the current versions of macOS I can get past them fairly quickly and get things done. I am however concerned how long that will remain the case. I can see a day where you won’t have control over the system that you are using and I really don’t like that idea.

If I buy a piece of hardware it expect that it’s mine to do whatever the hell I want to do with it.

Bah. Enough grumbling. The profile is where it needs to be now, time to get on with the other testing that I need to do.

I have a pile of camera bags.

All of them have been bought for different equipment at different times, but most wind up being bought from a company called Powepro. They make generally decent stuff and I’ve gotten pretty good use out of many of the bags I’ve picked up, but when I got my Z50 I wound up needing something easy to walk around with and take photos with.

The Lowepro Nova 5 AW that I used for years with my old kit is just too big for the Mirrorless kit that i’m using right now, and it’s bulky and cumbersome when walking around. I did pick up a Adventura BP 300 III and while that’s not horrible it’s still too big if I’m just walking around taking snapshots. And you can’t access anything in there without taking it off so not so great for stashing things you need frequent access to.

And while Lowepro is generally my go-to for this type of thing all their bags all look like photography gear and I kind of wanted something a that doesn’t scream tourist with a pile of expensive camera gear.

The one bag that I kept hearing mentioned was the sling bags from Peak Design. Most of the others seemed to be being compared to that bag as the “gold standard”. I have both a Cuff and Leash from Peak Desgin for my camera but I didn’t pay full price for those. The anchors are neat, and the ability to swap things around to whatever strap configuration I want is very cool I don’t think I would have bit if I had to pay full price for them.

Looking at their bags in general I could see myself spending 180$ on a sling bag, but at that price it’s at a place where I would be willing to try alternate bags if they were cheaper. However most of the sling bags that I found interesting where still around the 140$ range and falls into a price range where I have to think on it for a bit.

Last week after being dragged down to the mall by one of my kids I was walking through the camera shop and saw they had the Peak Design 6L Sling on sale for a decent price (it’s on sale on Peak Design’s page as well for what it’s worth) and after poking at it for a bit I decided to grab one and give it a try since it was down into the same price as the other bags I was looking at because the Peak design ones were pricier than I wanted to spend.

There’s piles of reviews on this bag online in other places so I’m not getting into details here but so far the thing works well. It fits more than I would need walking around, and is well built. All in I’m ok with having spent what I did on this bag since it’s a good walking around bag. However you can’t toss a laptop in there and there’s still a pile of other charging and other accessories that I need to be packing around so it’s not a one bag to rule them all type of thing but it’s close.

I suppose that at some point I’ll have to have a think on their backpacks and see if they would be worth the 300$+ asking price for them. But for now the Lowpro bag will probably be good enough for when I’m travelling, and I’ll just pack the sling bag for me to take walking around.