Astronomy and meeting nice random people in Sydney, Australia

While visiting in-laws in Sydney, Australia, I woke up very early on December 25, 2018, and took a walk to try to look at stars that are only visible in the Southern hemisphere.  I ended up meeting some very nice people in a park from Venezuela and Chile!  It was magical to be out in the city at such an odd hour and have the feeling of discovery by looking both around and up.

Failed attempt to rebuild raspberry pi filesystem (ext4)

My raspberry pi failed to boot, and I tracked it down to being a damaged main linux partition.  I tried to repair the partition, but it didn't work.  This posts lists some of the things I tried for posterity.

Trip to NYC to visit Tuukka and watch Anjunadeep Open Air

My friend Tuukka was going to be nearby - in NYC* - so he invited me down to hang out while he filmed Yotto (deep house DJ) perform at Anjunadeep Open Air at the Brooklyn Mirage.  It was an amazing experience ...

* he's from Helsinki, so that is relatively nearby)

Setting up samba share on raspberry pi

I wanted to have a samba share of the RAID on my raspberry pi, I was able to do it quite quickly using the instructions here:
https://wiki.debian.org/SambaServerSimple

The main thing I had to do that was not in the above instructions: install the package samba-common-bin in order to have smbpasswd; not sure why it wasn't installed by default, perhaps that is a difference between the debian version those instructions and the version of raspbian I'm running.

I ran into an apt-get upgrade error during the process that was probably unrelated but for completeness: it had to do with exim4, fix meant moving all exim4-* from /var/lib/dpkg into a temp location, then running:

sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

I was able to connect my mac laptop to it immediately from the finder --> Go --> Connect to Server (command-K), then using this for the server address:

smb://piB/mraid

piB is the address of the raspberry Pi (I've edited /etc/hosts on my laptop to use that) and mraid is the name of the share I configured on the samba server on the raspberry pi in /etc/samba/smb.conf ([ourfiles] in the link above).

Dry stout from dried malt extract and a mash

I originally intended to make a dry stout from dried malt extract, but when I realized I didn't have enough extract, I decided to try doing a mash of what grain I had available to make up the balance of sugars. The results: