2024

Restoring Nextcloud Tasks

/ local / , , , , ,

A few months ago due to my own laziness we ended up losing my main ZFS storage array­. One of the things lost was my Nextcloud VM, which used a zvol as its main storage space. The files themselves were easily recoverable as we had full copies on three separate machines but we personally use Nextcloud Tasks, and as it turns out there’s no easy way to backup your data from the server itself.

Cue much banging head against keyboard. By sheer chance and an offhand reddit comment leading to a github comment we were able to find a workaround via DAVx and Tasks.org, the software we already were using to sync our calendar and tasks (CalDAV) to our android device.

The issue is that locally the app has a record of the object existing on the server, but when it queries the server the object is no longer there. This indicates that the object was deleted, so Tasks deletes the local copy.

When you restore from a backup you’re restoring the same task that thinks the object exists on the server. When it queries the server again the object is still missing, so the local copy gets deleted again.

What you can do is put your phone in airplane mode, load your backup file, then use long press + multi-select to move all of your data to local lists. Then you can turn off airplane mode, let it sync once (not sure if this is necessary), then move all of your data from the local lists back to the caldav server

edit: tasks doesn’t support exporting to ics, but this is something I would like to support in the future
abaker commented on Feb 16

This gave us a path forward in restoring five years worth of tasks, as we wanted to keep eveything including old archived tasks instead of having to start over. The process is somewhat involved.

DAVx

Disable synchronization for all involved accounts. In my case there were two CalDAV accounts, one for the failed NC server and another for the newly provisioned NC server. Then put your phone in airplane mode just to guarantee there is no communication between your device and the server.

If this gets messed up there is a fair chance everything is lost and we don’t want that, now do we.

Tasks.Org

  1.  ☰ → Settings → Backups → Backup Now. Make sure it’s a folder the OS can access without additional permissions. The default folder is hidden to all apps by default and the only way to get to it is connecting the device to a computer cos Google hates you.
  2.  ☰ , scroll down to the “Local lists”. Create as many lists as you need to restore to NC.
  3. Open the original task list, tap bottom-right ⋮ → Enable “Show completed”. If you don’t do this you’ll only be backing current uncompleted tasks!
  4. Tap upper-right ⋮ → Select all
  5. Tap the list icon List glyph, tap the local list you want to move all of these tasks to.
  6. Repeat steps 3, 4, and 5, for as many lists as you have.

At this point all of your tasks live on your device. Strongly recommend creating another tasks.org backup and immediately copying it to another device just in case your device dies. If you have pets you know how quickly this can happen.

Nextcloud

Create lists to match the local lists on your device (if they haven’t been created already)

DAVx

Disable airplane mode and delete the account for the failed NC server. If you have not added the account for the new NC server, you can do so now (or enable sync for it at this point)

Tasks.Org

Before proceeding, make sure the lists from the new NC server show up in the list manager and your backup is copied off device. Now we basically do the reverse of earlier

  1. ☰ , scroll down to the “Local lists”.
  2. Open the a local task list, tap bottom-right ⋮ → Enable “Show completed” (if it isn’t already).
  3. Tap upper-right ⋮ → Select all
  4. Tap the list icon , tap the NC list you want to move all of these tasks to.
  5. Repeat steps 3, 4, 5 as required.
  6. ☰ → Settings → Backups → Backup Now.

This backup will contain the tasks as connected to the NC account with its lists and should start synchronizing up to Nextcloud. You can also sync manually in DAVx.

We hope this helps someone in the future other than myself, cos it certainly was a total pain in the ass. We originally tried messing with the raw JSON making up the CalDAV objects but due to the way the protocol works going this route failed. Both Nextcloud and tasks.org have exporting data to ICS on the roadmap but it’ll take a while to get implemented.

Better yet, make sure you have replacement hardware for whatever hardware fails, and attend to those failures promptly.

arroz-con-yolo:exeggcute:staff: red3blog: formeldeharv: i…

/ from outside, tumblr


arroz-con-yolo:

exeggcute:

staff:

red3blog:

formeldeharv:

i put “All I Want for Christmas is You” through a MIDI converter, and then back through an mp3 converter

the result is this garbage

I’m driving myself up the wall because I swear I can hear the vocal line but I don’t know how that could be if it was truly converted to MIDI. Unless you can replicate speech sounds entirely with modulated MIDI notes, in which case I’m actually impressed with this tire fire of an MP3.

image

the holiday season is almost upon us and I’d like to bring back this absolute fucking monstrosity of an audio file

I’m fucking WHEEZING

original post

They truly did this to themselves

/ from outside / ,

The practice has since metastasized to so many kinds of products in so many more stores—big-box discounters, beauty retailers, chain pharmacies—that it’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass. The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops. They, at least, have someone ready and waiting to take things out of lockup.

Source: Why CVS and Target Locking Up Products Is Backfiring – Bloomberg

We gave up on local retailers for 99% of everything we own. If we need to buy something in-person, it’s usually at the nearest co-op, or at Costco. We don’t step into any corporate retailers unless there is a dire need.

Flattened appearances

/ from outside / , , , ,

Gifford v. Sheil is not the first time an influencer has accused another of copying them — copyright itself is frequently weaponized in inter-creator conflicts through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice-and-takedown regime. Gifford’s suit, which takes the battle out of the realm of platform-level DMCA adjudication and into a federal district court, significantly raises the stakes. Perhaps the suit will serve as a serious warning shot to other influencers, but it mostly strikes me as a last-ditch effort by someone who has exhausted her other (few) options.

Source: The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry – The Verge

The article itself says regardless of who pushes a product on you, amazon still gets paid. This suit has the potential to change the entire ecosystem stateside for content creators… while corporations will stay mum so people forget about their role in the entire situation.

Live by the dunk? Die by the dunk

/ from outside / ,

I must not dunk.

Dunks are the time-killer

Dunks are the little stress that bring on social alienation

I will ignore bad takes

I will allow them to pass, or block them

And when they are off my feed I will read things that matter

And where the takes have gone there will be nothing

Only I will remain

Source: Annalee @flowerhorne.com – Bluesky

No, but really. Bluesky is not twitter. Trying to bring about the same social dynamics we had there will only bring everyone down.

Hopefully it’ll be good on tips from here on out.

/ status report / , , , , , ,

Here be what’s went on with us this past week. We got our asses kicked.

Work

  • bartendJerb is basically gone. Business levels have dropped below what’s sustainable for the place mid-term, but management won’t adjust labor, nor menu, nor open hours. They keep waiting for the weather to get cold. Guess what! It’s cold now! And it’s still slow!
  • mgbarJerb: Getting ever busier. We don’t think the corpos expected our location to come out swinging this hard, and yet here we are; getting no support from them while they try to tell us how to do our jobs. There is no institutional knowledge at the corporate level and they don’t provide mechanisms to keep it at the location level. Very little of the two weeks-long training I went through has actually been useful.

Personal

We got mamasha, our storage server, back online. She was offline for nearly three months cos we didn’t have to deal with an entire failed raidz2 pool. But it’s back online and so far, no issues. I have a bit more to say on this since a well-administered ZFS pool is not supposed to fail like this but here we are, restoring from a backup made two years ago, right before I mostly lost sentience.

Today the criminal president-elect announced 25% tariffs on all products coming from Mexico, Canada, and China. Better start a garden so you can have tomatoes, avocados, lettuce and jalapeños (they come from Mexico). If you’re building a house, you need to have your contractors finish ASAP (most lumber is imported from Canada). If you need electronics, you need to buy them now. Service industry will see the price of tequila, mezcal, beer (Modelo, Pacifico, XX Lager) go up.

Myself I’m starting the build-out process for a new storage server. mamasha’s hardware is from 2012 (Xeon E3-1220 V2, SuperMicro X9SCM-F) with the motherboard already getting replaced once. It’d be nice to have something with just as many PCI-E slots so we can put a nice GPU and see what’s what with self-hosted LLM tooling. We don’t condone the use of genAI for artistic purposes but that’s where tech is going so we need to learn how to deal with it even if it’s from an adversarial standpoint.

Bringing this server back online was my win of the week. We’ll take it.

Learning

We need to start learning new stuff. Picked up a copy of Meehan’s Bartender Manual and honestly we think it is helping us understand more about bartending as a profession.

Today we think we’ll go to the library and renew our library card. If it all goes to shit in the US it’d be useful to know another language. German, French or Czech would be nice.

Rebuilt our nextcloud VM since it died when out zpool crashed. It’s been okay to re-learn all of these things, the first time I configured the VM we didn’t keep much in the way of notes.

Speaking of notes… we’re now using obsidian instead of vim+wiki.vim. We don’t spend that much time on our workstation anymore and we need our notes available on the phone without having to fiddle on the command line on the phone. It’s a pain in the ass honestly.

Intersections

Now, on the intersection of work and personal… my phone scrobbles to last.fm whatever songs are being played in my environment. INXS is picking up steam as it is on the playlist at mgbarJerb.

They are also starting to push hard on the Christmas music and that’s going to be messy; had the displeasure of listening to an EDM remix of little drummer boy. Just… no.

This week we get an additional day off because of Thanksgiving. From here until the end of the year it’ll be madness at work.

block the twitter app, improve your life

/ local / , , , , , ,

There are many, many articles out there about the rise of BlueSky. There are so many more about the fall of twitter (yes I’m fucken deadnaming it). But even now, in the twilight of the latter, have had to rarely deal with shitty ads, spam bots, or crypto bros. There’s, I believe, a single reason for it.

We don’t use the official app. At all. We never have.

Currently we use the PWA version of the site via Firefox. This means I get

  • uBlock Origin to filter out ads.
  • Control Panel for Twitter to hide shit the apartheid muskrat came up with, defaulting my experience to the chronological timeline.
  • ClearURLs add-on bypassing tracking methods when linking in and out of the site.
  • The app (and thus, the company plus the apartheid muskrat) doesn’t get to siphon any of my phone data.

On desktop we used to use tweetdeck right up until the muskrat took it away. On mobile we used a variety of apps (Talon, Fenix 2, others) before those were also taken away. The official twitter app never held my attention. Using the PWA takes care of the technology side of things so I can concentrate my efforts elsewhere: Spending the time to curate my experience:

  • You follow me, but you only retweet and quote-tweet? I’m not following you back. Tweet things you came up by yourself.
  • Farming of any sort? You’ll probably catch a block.
  • Use of genAI tools to “create content”? Miss me with that.
  • You come into my mentions telling me I’m wrong about something? Yeah, you’re getting muted.

This effort took years and years. I grew up on the Old Internet; constantly doing this kind of thing was necessary to keep your sanity more or less intact. It’s why BlueSky is nicer:

One thing that makes 🦋 different is been created by people who have seen it all. Like if you think you’re going to shock them with gore,vore, scat, 4chan, 8chan, 256chan, inflation art, 2-girls-1 cup, lemon party, Tumblr lore, you name it – they saw and became immune to all that when they were 12.

David Aronchick ‪@ironyuppie.com‬

On BlueSky we have the nuclear block. I personally think it is the one innovation that will give it the upper hand over all the other would-be twitter competitors, or even social media at large.

the nuclear block is the single best product decision bluesky has made

yes, it’s sometimes annoying when you want to gawk but that’s part of why it’s good

Micah ‪@rincewind.run‬

Upper panel: Man laying down is smiling at his phone. Text says "Block account" Bottom Panel: Man is looking up. He is happy

Building on top of it are moderation lists and blocklists, which build on top of the block function. Like darth says, “just moving on really does work micah tbh“. If you want to gawk at someone posting stupid shit, you can use alternate methods if you really want to, but the vast majority of the time you just… move on, and that way you don’t get enraged or saddened.

Twitter had everything to stay the “town square of the Internet” for this decade, but the greed of it’s C-suite was bound to cause its downfall sooner or later. But even now, at the worst twitter has ever been, you don’t have to suffer the experience the muskrat wants for you.

It’s cheap if your workplace pays for it

/ from outside / , , ,

Eatertainment venues are more than destinations for date nights and office parties; far more than the rudimentary arcades and bowling alleys of eras past: Resting on three axes of pleasure (food, drink, and play), they offer a seamless, satisfying, and bonafide human “experience.” Sims and Smash Park operations director Kristin Kroeger, for example, emphasized to me that Smash Park’s true appeal lies not just in pickleball but in the brand’s combined activities, full bar, “scratch-made kitchen,” and premise of social interaction, all of which alchemize into a single “legendary experience.”

Source: What’s Fueling the Success of New-Wave Eatertainment? – Eater Twin Cities

In short, they want you to suffer FOMO if you’re not there when your friends are. Minneapolis is having a bit of a boom in these venues, with the unspoken addition that landlords absolutely love them:

  • Long lease times.
  • Humongous venue sizes. Smash Park in Roseville is 30K square feet. Puttshack in Southdale Center is 25K square feet. Puttery in Minneapolis is 70K square feet
  • A lot of them require parking, helping support mandatory parking minimums. Landlords would love to bring them back after they were abolished.

A lot of these venues are also 18+ or 21+. Children are not allowed. Considering the current political environment, in a couple years there will be no children to speak of so it’ll be a moot problem… until these venues can’t hire young employees:

The labor force is expected to increase by 8.9 million, or 5.5 percent, from 2020 to 2030. The labor force of people ages 16 to 24 is projected to shrink by 7.5 percent from 2020 to 2030. Among people age 75 years and older, the labor force is expected to grow by 96.5 percent over the next decade.

Number of people 75 and older in the labor force is expected to grow 96.5 percent by 2030

All in all. they qualify as Big Business. We know US economic policy hates small businesses— although holding small business as the best of capitalism is a mistake.

Eatertainment wants to replicate the experience of you hanging out with your friends at someone’s place, drinking and eating and playing games. But you get to pay for it.

Gotta block ’em all

/ local / , , , ,

Robb Knight, a software developer who found that Perplexity was circumventing robots.txt to scrape websites it wasn’t supposed to, told 404 Media there are many cases where it’s hard to tell what a user agent does or who operates it. “What’s happening to people, including me, is copy-pasting lists of agents without verifying every agent is a real one,” he said. Knight added that the Wall Street Journal and many News Corp-owned websites are currently blocking a bot called “Perplexity-ai,” which may or may not even exist (Perplexity’s crawler is called “PerplexityBot.”)

Source: Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)

The solution we used on this here blargh is simple: We blocked everyone on robots.txt:


User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Crawl-delay: 360

We also like to have a terminal window to look at what’s currently hitting the server and we block bots liberally. We’ve already blocked ahrefs.com and perplexitybot for being assholes without rate limits. Does this mean this here blargh will be that much harder to find? Yeah, but we don’t particularly care about it.

So much thinking to be done ugh

/ status report / , , , , , ,

So. The fucken orange idiot won the election:

  • Department of Education: To be closed, or as close to that as possible.
  • Abortion: Likely to be made illegal via FDA prohibition of abortion drugs and Comstock Act.
  • Kakistocrats taking over government functions. See who is getting picked to the orange idiot’s cabinet.
  • Immigration: Paths are going to get completely blocked off. And they’re talking about getting rid of Jus soli and switching to Jus sanguinis. Also, deporting millions of people. Doesn’t matter if you’re citizen, resident, or illegal. If you’re not white, you’re going.
  • Economy: Accelerationists are going to take over and they fully plan to crash the economy to achieve their societal aims.
  • Whatever it is they decide to fuck up next. Go read about Project 2025 to find out. You’re not going to like it.

For the past week we’ve been considering our options and we don’t have a lot of leeway— our savings were considerably sapped by large purchases for family and my own period of unemployment from August to October. We have just enough to get out with a large bag and that is dependent on us being able to afford to get out.

I don’t want to start over yet again, for the nth time in our lives. We have much to consider in the next month. Then comes the execution of whatever plans we come up with.

While we grapple with my personal facts, a whole lot of magaots are now realizing how badly they’re about to get fucked by the person they voted for. They’ll cry and they’ll moan and they’ll want for rescue but… what’s done is done. Fuck their feelings.

That was the big thing. Now for the usual things:

  • bartendJerb: Slowly picking up now that the weather has turned colder. It’s not nearly as cold as it should be. No idea how well the cocktails I came up with are selling, no one tells me numbers of any sort. I don’t think anyone knows numbers of any sort anyways.
  • mgbarJerb: It’s picking up steam and a lot of our staff still haven’t gotten it through their heads we are a high-volume craft cocktail and they need to fucken move. We don’t have the staffing levels they have at Bar La Grassa, much less that level of service.
  • Reading: Re-reading Meehan’s Bartender Manual to understand better what the fuck it is they want us to do at mgbarJerb.

I’ve mostly cut out twitter out of my social posting as most of those circles have moved over to bluesky, with twitter itself cratering even further down that it was before; still keep a browser window open to the site but it’s mostly for reading, not for posting. Been pruning a lot of my RSS feeds to cut out a lot of stuff we don’t follow anymore. Also! we rejiggered MariaDB on this server and hopefully OOM-killer will leave it alone from now on.

We also wanted to build a new server to replace our aging storage server hardware but… it depends on what we decide to do given the economy situation around this here parts.

The last bit we need to do is figure out a way to get us to sleep at a decent hour. We’ve been going to sleep with the first light of the sun and… we’ve missed out on overtime at work due to us not being awake to actually take the shifts. This post is one of those actions we’re taking since it’s keeping us awake past the usual sleep window.

We are fucked

/ from outside / , , , ,

We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.

Source: No one’s ready for this – The Verge

Years ago I remember reading a story about a technology that lets you remember everything as it truly happened, no as you remember it happening. The main character realized most of his adult life he had been the one to fuck up. Another one I remember is The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsys by Arthur C. Clarke.

Until we develop a technology like it, any visual media cannot be granted any authoritative display of fact. In a few months (hopefully years) the same will happen to video.

Computer illiteracy is just another symptom of mass disability

/ from outside / , , , , ,

The unhappy truth is the complexity of our technological environment has exceeded the cognitive grasp of most humans. We now have an unsustainable mismatch between “middle-class” work and the cognitive talents of a large percentage of Americans.

Source: Gordon’s Notes: Mass disability measured: in 2016 40% of OECD workers could not manage basic technology tasks

This is something we experienced at helpdeskJerb (a school). Most of the upper management had worked there for decades and had seen the technological environment go from zero tech to full-on academic infrastructure.

… And the vast majority of them could not handle it. About the most they can do is interact via email. Instant messaging? CRM? ERP? Completely out of their abilities. Which meant they need assistants to translate and handle things coming from the system/environment into something they could manage via email… bypassing the system entirely. It’s fine for them, but then someone has to enter the information into the system. During my time there we found this usually doesn’t happen, so there’s a lot of institutional memory that is lost when people leave the school.

That’s the management. Noticed the same thing happening with new students: A fair number of them were completely unable to navigate the school’s intranet and course management systems, requiring extra attention from counselors and assistants to get them signed up for what they wanted to study.

For all that modernity provides, it doesn’t help when you’re disabled. And now with the incoming US administration, they would rather you just die.

it’s okay to just be a manager. It’s fine and we mean it

/ from outside / , , ,

But leadership, oh baby, that’s what everyone wants to do. Managing is mundane and leadership is exciting. A manager handles trivialities, like hiring and firing. A leader has the privilege of serving as a shining moral beacon, soothing the trouble, reading the psychodynamic eddies (read: vibes) in the organization. At its best, it is a genuinely noble endeavor, not carried out by whoever happens to be at the top of an organizational chart, but whoever has the capacity to encourage other people to be their best selves at a given moment. The most inspiring person in my life yesterday was not anyone that gives talks about how amazing their own skills are, but the seven year old in the house next door who was drilling table tennis so determinedly that I guiltily got some piano practice in.

Source: Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug — Ludicity

We’ve worked for chefs and GMs who will say they’re not leaders. They’re just making sure the things that need doing are done and that they’re done properly and in a timely manner. And we’ve worked for leaders who will abuse and belittle everyone in the payroll because they’re inferior and unfit to even be considered for full-time work anymore; then they’re surprised when people leave or ragequit.

Looking at you, bistroBoss, you sack of shite.

Scroll to Top