Wed Mar 23 18:56:48 UTC 2022

After wrestling with groff for so long I was looking forward to using jns' new
text justify [0].  But the compile ran into some  CMAKE_ROOT error, causing me
significant amusement with the declaration that

>CMake has most likely not been installed correctly.

Not  that I'm  any great  coding  genius, but  I'm surprised  how many  little
technical things seem bent or broken on  SDF, which is supposedly run by geeks
for geeks.  I'm sure it's somehow  just as likely to  be the result of  my own
ignorance. At least I don't feel any great motivation to reactivate SDF Usenet
access since they changed things up again  - I was only following the Apple ][
group, and I've  never owned a single piece of  Apple hardware. Regardless, it
was good to see at least one  newsgroup still being actively useful and social
and spam-free, and I hope that's still the case.

So  is  storage (hard  drive,  or  equivalent)  the  weakest link  in  current
computing? Sure feels like it to  me. Reliability of long-term data seems like
the reason  many would-be  self-hosters end  up outsourcing  to one  degree or
another. Not that a  paid corporation is any less likely to  be struck down by
the hand of  fate, should God or  Nature's God choose them to  make an example
of. But thinking hard about the realistic odds and tradeoffs of any situation,
like "I live in  the desert and off grid and need redundant  solar panels so I
can always troll on my Raspberry Pi", means thinking about all kinds of stuff.
Exactly what data are you storing and  why is it so important? Is it important
only to you, or potentially to others (security risks)? The better answers you
have to  all of  those questions, the  more informed a  position you're  in to
decide whether to do something yourself or find someone else.

All  that aside,  it would  be nice  to see  some small  and portable  storage
solution  actually rated  for decades  or a  human lifespan,  like the  M-Disc
standard for optical media. If the price of that longevity was slower speed to
some extent, that's a fair and acceptable tradeoff. Whatever happened to those
holographic cubes  we were promised?  Same trash heap  of ideas as  the flying
car? *Au revoir*, Mister Smith.

I like the speed of solid state, but their data recovery still looks downright
dismal. Most times  if a hard drive  goes wonky I have a  reasonable chance of
recovering most of  it. And when it  comes to the truly  important data, right
now I could fit mine on a single CD. I don't need a vast ephemeral cloud, even
if I'm the rainmaker in charge. Just a durable vault to which I can entrust my
most crucial bits.

Of course it's so much simpler to  build a mobile trellis on casters. Which is
why I'm Amish at heart.

[0] https://tildegit.org/jns/justify