It’s been 3 weeks since Noisebridge’s Iron Blogger kicked off. While I’m happy to have kept myself to a schedule of writing at least once a week, I’m still trying to beat the anti-pattern of scrambling to write something last thing on a Sunday evening.

Thankfully, I have a few things I’m working on that I’d like to write about in more detail. I’m hoping to flesh out a few post stubs to keep on hand during the coming weeks such that I’ll never be short of ideas about which to write.

Drobo recovery: in progress⌗

A quick update on the Drobo recovery adventure of 2015. I’ve been slowly moving data off the Drobo onto an external HDD that I’m using as a temporary store, and as of yesterday have a 90% assembled FreeNAS box ready to replace it.

I went slightly over budget on the FreeNAS replacement, ending up with a very compact, quiet i3 4130T build which I think shall last a considerable amount of time. I got a good deal on a Fractal Node 304 case which required a change in the partlist to be compatible with the smaller Mini-ITX formfactor. The resulting machine without the 5 HDDs is incredibly quiet and small. It’s a marvel to see everything fit in there even without the drives.

I’m hoping by the end of this week to have the data completely copied off the Drobo and the drives installed in the NAS rig, but progress here isn’t guaranteed with hours coming in sporadic chunks. Either way I’m excited to have the finished project running at home.

Data Security for Journalists workshop⌗

I’ve begun putting together a small amount of material to accompany the Data Security for Journalists workshop that I’ll be helping to run in April. I’ll be hosting a much smaller dry-run at Noisebridge this coming Saturday with 6 journalist friend-of-friends to better judge the topics and ideas I have about what to do with the time allotted.

I’m glad of the opportunity to write some technical documentation, a skill which I think is very valuable and one which I’d like to develop further. Writing an introduction to public key cryptography and then giving it to non-technical friends for feedback has been a really fun learning experience. One really must be very comfortable with such topics to be able to effectively communicate them with a non-technical audience.

Building things.⌗

I got a small amount of time this week to work on K-9, the art car that QCCB built for Burning Man 2014. K-9 had an outing at a Doctor Who themed art show in SF which required some amount of preparation beforehand. It was a lot of fun to do some hands-on work and escape computers for a few hours. It reminded me how much fun it was to be a part of creating K-9 in the first place, and that I should try to build more physical things alongside my computer-y endeavours.