After hearing about folks having months of their Google Drive data disappear the other day, I figured that some might find how I mitigate risks like these with my personal data backup pipeline interesting. I’ve run this pipeline in this or a similar form for more than two years now, with only a few manual Read More…
Deleting All Files Without SHA1 Hashes From a Backblaze B2-Backed Rclone Crypt Remote
As part of my backup pipeline, I use rclone to sync all my files from Seafile to an offsite location using the handy crypt backend once per week. Recently, I switched to using Backblaze B2 as my offsite storage provider, but learned only after uploading all my files, that large files (anything over 200M as Read More…
A First Look At Wealthsimple Trade
Earlier this month, I received an invite to the highly-anticipated Wealthsimple Trade app. Since it’s announcement back in August, Trade has amassed nearly 100,000 wait-list signups, and I was excited to try it out for myself. Here’s a first look and some initial thoughts – click on any image to see a full-size version. Trade Read More…
HackTheNorth 2017: An Overview Of Our CockroachDB Cluster Monitoring Tool
A few weekends ago, I had the opportunity to work with CockroachDB at Hack the North in Waterloo. For those of you who aren’t familiar with CockroachDB, it’s a scalable and resilient SQL database that’s very easy to setup and manage. Together with my team, I worked on a tool called CockroachNest to automatically monitor Read More…
Be Careful Who You Hire! (Or, How A Rogue Developer Remotely Deleted His Work To Give Himself More Work)
The other day, I was given the task of finding out what was wrong with a client’s website that kept mysteriously deleting itself only days after backups were restored. After a quick grep of the WordPress install for keywords like unlink and rmdir, which would be responsible for what was happening, I found this in Read More…
A Peek Into Toronto’s Abandoned Bay Lower Subway Station
If you enjoyed looking through the cracks last time for a peek at the hidden entrance at TTC’s Queen Station in Toronto, here’s another place on the TTC to check out. When Bay Station was originally built back in 1966, there were two levels in a configuration much like Bloor-Yonge station, with the lower second Read More…
A Hidden Entrance at Toronto’s Queen Station
Next time you find yourself at the TTC’s Queen Subway Station in Toronto and have a few minutes to spare, take a look inside the vents behind the Metropass vending machines. An old entrance used to exist here that was closed after the Maritime Life Building went up in 2003 and a new entrance was Read More…
The Hello Machine, 1974
This is an incredibly well-made short, wordless film-poem that touches upon the manufacture of a Western Electric 1ESS phone switch. It’s amazing how much work went into one of these – truly a feat of engineering, and definitely worth a watch. If you’re interested, there’s also quite a library of other interesting historical telephone lore Read More…
NES 1001 in 1 Pirate Multicart Teardown and Game List
When purchased new from Pacific Mall in the 1990s, this bootleg Nintendo NES multicart included a handy paper game list. As I’ve seen other people with this same cartridge online, but with no complete game list, I’ve scanned and uploaded a copy here. As for the games on the cartridge, it’s pretty much the same 20 games Read More…
An Arcade Ticket Eater Teardown
I recently ended up with a countertop Deltronic DL-9000 ticket eater from an arcade auction a little while ago. Since it’s a more unique piece of arcade equipment, I felt a teardown post was in order; to show just exactly what’s inside, how it works, and what happens to your tickets once you’ve fed them Read More…