My brothers and I play Minecraft on the Nerd.nu Survival server, a rather large one with dozens of players online at any given time. Unlike players who spend all their time hunting for massive quantities of diamonds and grinding for experience to get high-level enchants, we prefer to build impressive fortresses and attempt to defend them when the occasional PVPer shows up.

During world revision twelve, we built a castle known as Winterspyre. Or, at least, we built part of it. The admins reset the map before we could finish…

Winterspyre, in terms of the progress we attained before the reset, is a large and detailed tower. We finished it, both exterior and interior, but it was intended to be only part one of a larger structure.

The plan was to build four walls (with interior hallways, of course) ending in four smaller towers, the walls being like wheel spokes coming from the center hub tower, known as The Spire. Then rounded walls would be built to connect the outer towers, forming a complex that would look something like the targeting symbol on a rifle scope if viewed from above.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time. But here’s what we managed to accomplish before the server reset, the product of many hours of mining, crafting and building.

I have one web server (a VM from VPS.net) that hosts all of my various web sites. Nothing too intensive, mostly WordPress blogs and some custom PHP applications. Maybe a Python script or two.

Earlier, my brother alerted me to the fact that my MySQL daemon was AWOL, when he tried to visit one of the sites and got an error message. So I fired up a terminal and went to take a look. After trying to restart the mysqld process with no success, I eventually thought to check the disk space. Somehow, the 20GB volume was full. It didn’t make much sense, seeing as I wasn’t storing any large media files or anything…

Upon closer inspection, I found that there was one 12GB directory that was full of large Minecraft world backups. :)

I operate a private Minecraft server for my brothers and I, and I have a cron job that automatically backs it up on a daily basis. The backups get dumped to my web server for safekeeping, and are supposed to be deleted after a few days. There should never be more than a few days worth of world backups, but the backup script wasn’t deleting anything. So there ended up being months worth of large (well over 100MB apiece) archives. Oops.

For future reference, here’s a handy command worth remembering:

sudo du -hs /*

You can replace / with any path you want to get the size of its subdirectories.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had an actively updated personal blog. I neglected this one for a few years, despite my occasional urge to write about something that was simply too many degrees of separation away from the topics of my other blogs. I blame a mix of forgetfulness, laziness and not having the “right” format and design.

I think I finally stuck the landing with this one.

Besides the lightweight design, one of the more interesting features I put into the new theme is support for Post Formats. I’m using the Link format to create link posts in the style of Daring Fireball, coupled with Alex King’s neat plugin to make a simple UI for them.

Now for the really exciting part. I finally managed to secure Harzewski.com after its previous owner (a distant relative I don’t know personally) let it expire. I picked it up with a little help from SnapNames and moved the blog to a shiny new subdomain at matt.harzewski.com. Good thing I ran that whois search on a whim, a mere week before the drop period…

Well, there you have it. A new URL, a fresh design, and hopefully a new beginning for this blog.

I’ve been enjoying Pat Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles series lately. It’s one of the best epic fantasy series I’ve read in awhile (right up there with a couple of my other favorites: The Way of Kings and The Wheel of Time) and it’s well worth reading if you like elaborate stories involving wizards.

It’s only a matter of time until Netflix does the same. The studios can only push so far before the service becomes too unattractive and subscribers start leaving again. I give it to the next contract renewal. (You can’t get much more ridiculouss than a 56 day delay and forbidding users from adding the movies to their queues until after the delay.)

Neat, isn’t it? Tortilla chips, apparently, burn quite well if you put a match to them. If you take 2 to 3 of them and (taking the proper safety precautions) set them on fire, they will burn brilliantly for several minutes, giving you ample time to toast a marshmallow or two.

Corn chips (the Medallion brand available at Sams Club is what we used) contain a bit of oil, which you can see bubbling on the surface of the chip as the chip is consumed by the flames. Oil, as you surely know, is a great fuel source. When you set the chips alight, you’re creating a small grease fire, which will burn until the fuel source is used up, or until the fire is manually extinguished.

Safety note: If you attempt this, do not pour water on the fire in attempt to extinguish the flames. Grease fires can not be doused with water, and any attempts to do so will result in a very dangerous fireball. If the fire gets out of hand and needs to be put out, either pour baking soda on the flames, or use a fire extinguisher. Also, the fire pictured above was inside an aluminum tray resting in a stainless steel kitchen sink. It is recommended that you have a similar setup, as the flames can grow to a fairly large height.

Attempt this at your own risk. I assume no responsibility for your stupidity if you decide to play with grease fires. Unless you are a responsible adult (i.e. not Reddit/Digg users), or are operating under the supervision of a responsible adult, do not try this.

Here’s an idea, how about all of these ISPs use one bandwidth cap formula:

x * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30, where x would be the speed of the internet connection.

There’s no point in selling someone 30mb/sec cable internet access if they can still only download as much data as I can on my 1mb/sec DSL in a month.

I’m tired of all this talk of bandwidth caps and such. ISPs, give your customers what they’re paying for. Internet access is expensive enough as it is without making things worse.

Or at least provide the option for a customer to pay for more usage instead of cutting them off entirely…

I finally got my 16GB iPod Touch yesterday, and it’s great. I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it though. (This post was almost called “iRant about Best Buy.”)

First, I checked the local Best Buy, a mere two days after the new device was released, to see if they had it. They didn’t. A little disappointing, but no big deal, after all it had only been a couple days since the keynote.

So I started monitoring the Best Buy website, so I’d know as soon as it came in. About a week after the keynote, the site updated to show that it was available, yay! So after driving in to town, and asking asking for the device, I was told that they were sold out (if they’d ever even had it at all…). In only a few hours they were sold out. And that was the 8GB model anyway. Somewhere along the line I decided it would be better to get the 16GB.

A few days after, the Best Buy website updated again to show the 8GB model was in stock, but not the 16GB. Apparently they’re not stocking the larger model at all…

Luckily, an Apple store had opened in my state, they’ve been open for a week today, and they of course had all of the iPod models in stock. So I ended up in the car two hours both ways, on a trip to the über-cool Apple store. I got the iPod and that was that.

Oh well, I’d much rather Apple made some extra cash than Best Buy.