rolisz's site

HackTM Oradea

Me and Catalin presenting on stage

Catalin and me presenting on stage

Last weekend was HackTM Oradea, a hackathon that started in Timisoara. Last year they went to Sibiu and this year they came to Oradea. In Timisoara it's quite big (over 700 par­tic­i­pants last year). Here in Oradea it's smaller, around 100 people, most of them being from out of town.

I haven't been at hackathons in quite a while, so I decided to try this one, mostly for meeting other people and also to code something new and learn something fun. When I got there, Catalin, who has attended my pre­sen­ta­tions I did at my university, recognized me and we started talking. …continue.

Old Man's Cave

Me

The next target for our hikes was Peștera Bătrânului (Old Man’s Cave)1, which is close to where my parents-in-law live. We knew the cave was closed to tourists, but the views on the way there were supposed to be pretty.

We left on foot on a Saturday morning at 11:00 from Vadu Crișului, on the blue line trail. We passed by the Peștera Caprei (Goat’s Cave), the three Devenț Caves and Poarta Sărutului (Gate of Kissing) The path quickly turned quite steep. Because it had rained until 10:55, the soil was muddy and slippery and I often had to turn on the 4x4 traction (aka use …continue.

Backing up 3: Syncthing

Main screen of Syncthing

The main screen of the Syncthing GUI

A while ago, I mentioned how I back up my valuable data to my NAS. In the mean time, I added one more thing to it: a UPS1 so even if the power goes out, it still says up and more im­por­tant­ly, it can shut down safely. This is important because if the power cuts out while hard drives are spinning, the head can damage the disk and you lose the data. The UPC can tell the NAS when it's on low power, so the NAS enters standby safely.

But I said that there is another component to backups, which is …continue.

Boardgames Party: Splendor

Splendor game cover

One of the games that we recently played a lot is Splendor (Amazon link), a game with some really neat tokens, rep­re­sent­ing precious stones, and where the rich get richer (almost like in real life xD).

­­­

The objective of the game is to get 15 prestige points. You get prestige points from some cards and from visits from nobles. You buy cards with precious stones. But cards also represent mines, traders or jewelers, which give you more precious stones. So the more cards you have, the easier it is to buy other cards.

There are some con­straints on how many precious stones you can have and …continue.

NAS Outage #1

Incident scope
NAS user not able to access Web Interface for NAS
Incident duration
At least 30 hours, up to 72 hours
Incident resolution
Change router port

Last weekend I was not at home. Some time on Saturday afternoon, I wanted to access some of the self hosted services I host on my NAS. I entered the URL and waited. I knew that sometimes the first request takes some time (maybe the NAS powers down the hard disks), so after waiting some time, I just hit refresh. Still nothing. I tried another service. Nothing. I tried all of them. Nothing. I tried going to the IP address of the NAS …continue.

Books of 2018

Inspired by many of the posts I saw on the bl­o­gos­phere about how people did in their reading challenge in 2018, I decided to do a short recap as well.

I started 12 books in 2018 and I finished 10 of them. This is unusual for me, because I'm quite picky about what books I start reading and I like to finish what I start. But I couldn't stand the author's style in one the books, even though the topic sounded really in­ter­est­ing (The Sov­er­eign­ty of God by A.W. Pinker), and I found the other one to be too slow (The Progress of Doctrine in the New …continue.

Man (and car) versus nature 2

View from the hike

Almost a year later, I went again on a winter hike, with the same group of friends, to the "Biserica Moțului" Peak, close to Padiș. This time I was one of the drivers, so I went with our little Skoda, with 3 other guys.

Because this hike was shorter, we decided it's enough if we leave one hour later than last time. It was a very good decision, which would have been better if we had left one more hour later.

The evening before we left, it started snowing. We decided that we will still go, no matter what. The road until Boga, 15 kilometers away …continue.

2018 in Review

In 2018 I finally managed to buck the trend of writing fewer and fewer posts: I wrote 22 posts, just like in the previous year! That's a bit less than what I would have liked (at least two a month), but personal life keeps getting busier and busier.

The number of sessions continued dropping, by almost 30%, down to 10000. Pageviews dropped a bit below 20000, but session length grew by 6%.

The day with the most pageviews was the 1st of February, with 369 views, when I posted about leaving Google. The second most popular day was October 17, after I posted about our trip to …continue.

Boardgames Party: Sushi Go

Sushi Go box

This year I caught the bug of boardgames. I bought a lot of them, I tried a lot of them and I played some a loooot of times. My lovely wife also enjoys this hobby very much, so we often have friends over to play various boardgames. Almost all of our friends enjoy playing boardgames, I even managed to convince my parents to play once, but my dad confessed that he just... doesn't see the point in playing any kinds of games.

I want to start reviewing some of the boardgames in my collection. Today I will start with Sushi Go (Amazon link), a very simple and quick …continue.

Synology Moments

First pictures

I have almost 60000 pictures (about 195 GB), going back to about 2007 and I like to keep things organized. Of course, I also don't want to manually tag 60000 pictures. Until last year, the only option to avoid that was Google Photos, which would au­to­mat­i­cal­ly recognize objects, locations and faces in pictures and give you the option to search by them. But Google Photos has the downside that you have to upload all your pictures to a 3rd party and that you have to pay a monthly fee for that storage.

Well, at the end of last year, Synology (the company that makes my NAS) launched …continue.