blog.8-p.info

I occasionally browse Linux and PC laptops. One thing surprises me is that HiDPI screens are still only for flagship models.

For example, System76’s laptops are mostly Full HD. Adder WS is 4K OLED (3840x2160) but the price is $2,199. Dell XPS 13 has UHD+ (3840 x 2400) option and the price after adding the option is ~$1,400. ThinkPad X1 Yoga is WQHD (2560 x 1440) and the price is ~$1,200.

In this regard, I still like Apple laptops. The cheapest MacBook Air is $999 but has “Retina” display (2560 x 1600), which is slightly taller than WQHD (2560 x 1440).

As a spoiled Apple user, I hope manufacturers see HiDPI as normal. My OnePlus 5T, 2017 “flagship killer” budget phone has Full HD+ (1080 x 2160). Nokia 6.2, 2019 budget phone is Full HD+ (1080 x 2280). And these phones have obviously smaller screens than laptops. Large laptop screens must have more pixels to be “crisp” for eyes. Please!

I’ve been working from home for months now. Naturally I’m spending more time with my family – my wife and kids.

I can hear all the fights they have and all the grinning moments they share. Well, to be fair, I sometimes have both as well. I can have not only dinner but also lunch with them. I even make meals sometimes.

And that feels great.

Of course, I may not be super-productive by sharing the space. I could ignore all of them when I was in the office.

And that feels odd now. Do I really want to ignore them by being far away from them? Do I have to be that productive? We all say family is the first priority. Yet, we stay away from them for 8 hours times 5 days every week. Then we only spend time with them for the rest of the week, two days.

I had a haircut in Saturday. While getting a clipper was option, I went to a nearby barber.

The experience was of course different. I had a temperature check in the beginning. I couldn’t wait inside and reading magazines. I was wearing a mask while having a haircut.

I also shaved off my goatee. I stopped shaving off that in the beginning of this pandemic, but it was itchy to keep after wearing a mask was becoming mandatory in many places.

My first pull request for containerd’s devmapper snapshotter has been merged into master. There was also a nice open-source moment. One of the reviewers, Maksym is my ex-coworker.

Since I have fresh memory of the snapshotter, I’d like to write a bit about that.

What are snapshotters?

Docker has graph drivers. Apparently the official doc calls them as storage drivers, but internally they are still graph drivers.

snapshotters are containerd’s graph/storage drivers equivalent. Michael Crosby’s Where are containerd’s graph drivers? is the best document to understand the motivation.

The short answer is that containerd does not have graph drivers, but it does have snapshotters. We didn’t make this change because we wanted to invent something new or had a severe case of NiH (not invented here). We set out to fix a few long standing issues that are caused by the design of graph drivers. To better understand some of these issues, we first have to look at the history of graph drivers and how they were originally developed.

What is devmapper snapshotter?

It is Docker’s device mapper storage driver equivalent.

How does that work?

Docker’s How container reads and writes work with devicemapper is probably the best document regarding the internals.

Hmm, are thy same?

Design-wise, close.

Implementation-wise, no. While storage/graph drivers and snapshotters are similar, the APIs are different. In addition to that, the graph driver is using libdevmapper through CGO, whereas the snapshotter is using dmsetup CLI.

This is my 20th post of #100DaysToOffload challenge. Hmm, seems I’m writing the last 10 posts much faster than the first 10 posts. This is good.

Apparently #100DaysToOffload caught some eyes in the Japanese tech internet community. morygonzalez has started his challenge. taizoo is joining in his own way.

Taking a break from Twitter

I have IFTTT that tweets my new blog posts automatically, but I’m going to disable the integration for at least the next 10 posts. Seeing Likes on my tweets made me motiviated about writing. That’s for sure. But I also want to stay away from Twitter.

Twitter is simply too fast for me. Also people tend to be mad about stuff there, which I don’t want to be with. Don’t have to be mad about stuff would be considered as a privilege though.