I recently moved our family’s personal storage from a ~14 year old QNAP TS-219P NAS to a new Synology DS224+ NAS, with roughly 2x the storage. The data migration went pretty smoothly, after a couple of false starts. I tried a “restore from USB drive” approach first. After all, both NAS types can back up to ext4 filesystems, so it should read OK, right? Unfortunately these copies take a looong time to complete, and the web UI provides no measure of progress to give confidence that it’s working.

Linux includes a bench calculator called bc, which can achieve remarkable arbitrary-precision results in very few lines of code. For ease of running, code can be embedded in a here document: fib.sh #!/usr/bin/env bash BC_LINE_LENGTH=0 bc -q <<end 0;1; for (i=1;i<1000;i++) {g=last;last+=f;f=g;last} end The BC_LINE_LENGTH environment variable is used to prevent long lines from being split with a \ continuation character. The -q flag suppresses the welcome prompt. The 0;1; bit just prints the first two results.

We have this wonderful sewing machine from the mid eighties, a New Home Memory Craft 6000 - instruction book is available here. The brand is also known as “Janome”. This machine can stitch letters and symbols using microprocessor control, sewing “emojis” before that word was widely known. When it was recently powered on after a few years sat idle, it was completely inert (apart from the work light). A local sewing-machine repair place took a look, said it was blowing fuses repeatedly, indicating a fault on one or other of the PCBs.