more Vancouver

Only 3 week delay, haha.

Still in the 'north' place of my last post. The first week felt very busy, like I couldn't believe it was only a week. The last two weeks have been faster. Not sure why, I did a bunch of walks but nothing that seems all that novel in my diary. Maybe just local shopping, checking Chinese markets, trying a Vietnamese restaurant, I dunno. Walking enough to find the big Japanese market... huh, didn't realize that was so far back.

Job hunt continues.

BC has gone back to Normal. Masking no longer required even on public transit, though "recommended". At least one big pharmacy, London Drugs, has also collapsed, with a "masks strongly recommended" sign. I am wondering if returning to the US would make sense for covid safety reasons.

Airbnb one week out was looking rather horrible, but I found a cheap 2-week place in Richmond BC, a suburb to the south of Vancouver, which holds the airport and a lot of Chinese people. Then looking for 30 day places after that has good options again, though I wonder if I want to keep staying here. OTOH I don't want to juggle disruption and job hunt that much, and have some medical concerns that might call for staying still -- or for going somewhere where I have more friends to help out if I need it.

Yeah, not a lot of exciting 'Vancouver' things recently, been more internal stuff. Reading the new Liaden book, reading Niven Warlock stories, 'being there' for a friend trying to escape Russia (they made it), reading a book on *early* Roman history, immune system stuff I've already posted about, couple new-to-me filk groups (thefaithfulsidekicks.com, viabellaband.com). And some computer stuff, that can be its own post.

laptop woes

The front of my laptop was expanding. I assumed the battery was in the back, so that this was frame warping or something, but then did research and found I was wrong. The expansion seemed to progress by the day, so I found a computer store open today (Sunday), and they confirmed yep, battery swollen in every cell, and strongly urged against continuing to use it. I was happier to comply when I realized you could use a laptop without a battery at all. As for getting a new battery... it hurts to not be in the US. Amazon could have gotten me a 3rd party battery tomorrow... if I were in Toronto. Vancouver? Wait a week. The store later said they found an unused OEM battery, 2-3 days, CA$290 for batt/service/shipping, vs. the CA$70 of Amazon but waiting a week and paying someone to install the thing since I lack the tools. I decided to splurge on the real battery and speed.

I also recalled that my replacement non-HP charger cord had been finicky, sometimes switching to not charging due to a lame wire or something. Not a big deal with a battery in, but bad when any fluctuation means shutdown! So I invested in a new charger, too. I have a lot of job stuff to do, I would like to not lose work or video in the middle of things. The charger was actually the only thing I paid for in the store; they texted about finding a battery later. But while they were at it they also cleaned out my power ports and I guess other internals, of dust, for free. Even my keyboard and clickpad feel very different now. The clickpad just *works* with barely any pressure, so weird... I'm thinking I should take laptops in for cleanings more regularly, the way I took my bike for annual tune-ups.

As for the battery, it seems expensive, but a similar new laptop would cost a couple thousand (especially up in Canada), and new battery + dust removal = new lease of life, I think.

(Linux geekery ahead)

Speaking of not losing work, I decided to invest effort in protection there. I can't do much about the Windows host OS, hopefully it can take care of itself, and I don't do much in it that could lose data, but I know from experience that my Linux virtual machine suddenly shutting down can lead to crankiness. So I explored ext4 filesystem mount options, exceeding the experience of even an ex-sysadmin friend. Also did some crude measurements of the effect on I/O, running "yes > y" for a second before ^C and seeing the size of file y.

Base state data=ordered,relatime: 800 MB/s
data=journal: 300 MB/s. adding nodelalloc (no delayed allocation of disk blocks) and commit=1 (commit the journal every second, vs. default 5 sec) didn't make a clear difference on top of that.
sync: 18 MB/s. Whoops!

Does it matter? Well, it would if I were copying a lot around my filesystem, but I'm not. There's downloading... but speedtest said I get 123 Mb/s down, which is like 15 MB. Likewise an rsync of a big file reports 15 MB/s. So it doesn't seem I can get data faster than I can write it, even now. There's SSD life, maybe, but this is just for a few days until I get a battery again and don't have to worry about oopses with the power cable.

Edit: of course, all the filesystem stuff may be moot if Windows 10 crashed and corrupted the virtualbox files... thus part of why I got a new charger.

Edit 2: I adapted https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/troubleshoot/windows-server/backup-and-storage/turn-disk-write-caching-on-off to turn off write caching. This had a further hit to performance: now I only get 1 MB/s! OTOH, it can be toggled off and on at run time without rebooting (take that, Linux), so if I urgently need to download something big, I could. In the meantime, I feel the host OS is more robust now.