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:

Grapefruit Mead*

* technically it's called a melamel when you add fruit to a mead

Following up on previous mead brewing attempts, I decided to attempt a mead flavored with grapefruit.  Basically I followed Charlie Papazian's recipe from The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing, p. 344 "Antipodal Mead".  What I used:

Time lapse of cutting limbs off a mostly dead tree using a bucket lift

Here's how I put together a time lapse video of cutting limbs off a mostly dead tree.

Raspberry pi RAID array 3: health check & building a level 0 array to use for additional backup

I wanted to build a level-0 array out of two 1 TB drives (total size should be 2 TB) to act as a backup for my existing level-1 array (size: 2 TB), but I first discovered a problem with the level-1 array - it was only listing one of the constituent drives as actually being present, and it's state was "degraded".  Here's how I fixed that problem and built the level-0 array, and started my backup.