What the Heck Happened to the Archive?

 For more than two decades, I've been an ardent fan of the Internet Archive, aka archive.org. It's been an amazing repository for recordings of live music, public domain literature, vintage video, and other such ephemera. I've always said you have to be careful going in, because you might not find your way back out for quite a long while. I've even used a few selections from the Archive as materials for the classes I teach, but a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my department chair at work, asking if I could fix a broken link from an item on the Archive. When I went to the site, I found the whole thing was down with no real explanation on the error page, beyond an assurance the condition was temporary. 

 My first thought was that the copyright police had finally caught up with them, since in recent years, an increasing amount of copyrighted material has found its way onto the site, but that was not the case.

On further investigation, it turns out the site had fallen victim to a cyber attack. Things are gradually coming back up now, but as they say, it isn't what it used to be, at least not yet. Administrators say the content is all safe and they're working to strengthen the interface to resist future attacks. I was able to find the missing video my department chair inquired about, but I couldn't get to it from the proverbial front door of the site's homepage. I had to enter the title into a search engine to access it directly. 

Today, 26 October 2024, I was listening to a Phil Lesh and Friends concert on SiriusXM, in observance of the former Grateful Dead bassist's passing yesterday at age 84, and decided to see if it was available on Archive. I was able to go in from the home page and find multiple copies from different tapers, but I couldn't download any of them directly from the Archive site, as has been my habit. Fortunately, I was able to select a torrent for the one I wanted and downloaded it that way.

So, if you're wondering as I was, what the heck happened to the Archive? That's the information I have been able to gather thus far. It looks like we'll just have to be patient for a little while longer as administrators continue working to recover the site and make it more secure, but where there's a will, there's a way to get to what you need.

UPDATE--As of today, 10 November, one can now stream audio and video from the Archive, but direct downloads are still unavailable. Many text resources are still completely unavailable via Archive, but may be accessed through other Web sites such as Project Gutenberg. The only option to download audio and video files is via a torrent, but this hit-and-miss at best. It only works if another user is actively seeding an item. As an experiment, I downloaded torrents for a couple of old radio shows yesterday, but have yet to capture a single byte of data. They just don't get the traffic of, say, a Grateful Dead concert recording. Recovering the entire Archive will doubtless be a lengthy and arduous task. One can hope it will be completed soon, but patience is necessarily the watchword. 

UPDATE--2 January 2025: Earlier today, I downloaded a 1975 Little Feat show from Archive without resorting to using a torrent. While I can't say categorically that the site is now fully operational again, this is a major step forward and a good reason to be optimistic. Happy New Year indeed.

A Better Way to K

 Like a lot of people, I succumbed to the convenience of Keurig coffeemakers about six or seven years ago, but I have always felt a bit guilty about the plastic waste from those little single-use K-cups. That and their expense were enough to keep me from initially jumping on the Keurig bandwagon for several years after they first came out.

I have several of the reusable K-cups that can be filled with regular ground coffee, but they've always been less than satisfactory. The coffee has always come out tasting fairly weak. My solution to date has been to add a small amount--less than a quarter teaspoon--of instant coffee to the grounds to boost the flavor without giving it that bitter instant coffee edge. Fortunately, I've now found a better way. 

For quite some time, I have suspected the coffee grounds were too coarse, so I finally decided to test my theory by getting an electric coffee grinder to grind my coffee a little finer. The grinder arrived late yesterday, so I decided to test my theory and re-grind some coarse-ground coffee to a finer state, then loading up a reusable K-cup for my morning coffee. All I can say is this is what the coffee should have tasted like all along. And with the lower cost per cup for ground coffee versus K-cups, my $10 coffee grinder should pay for itself in no time.

I'm glad to have solved this conundrum and I can now have the convenience of my Keurig with less of an environmental impact. Still, there's one other problem. I only have one single-serve reusable K-cup that works with my Keurig 2.0 brewer. The problem is the Keurig 2.0 models use a digital rights management technology to lock out unlicensed K-cups. Thankfully, the DRM scheme garnered enough consumer backlash that Keurig phased it out with the Keurig 2.0 models on which it had been introduced. There are YouTube videos out there describing which wires to cut to disable the system, but that's a little more "Mission: Impossible" than I really want to get into with my coffeemaker.

Unfortunately, that DRM system locks out most reusable K-cups as well, unless they have a lavender stripe around the lid, which only one of mine does. The others are solid black and the system doesn't recognize them. Those will soon be retired, now that I have just ordered a six-pack of Keurig 2.0 compatible reusable K-cups so that I can use loose coffee grounds instead of single-use K-cups on a more regular basis. 

From a practicality standpoint, I'll still be using single-use K-cups at work, because I don't have the time or facilities to be grinding (or in this case, re-grinding) coffee there. It may take a little while to fully transition to the reusables at home, but I will will be manageable and in time, and soon I will be going loose, instead of single-use.

Linux Mint, A Year later

 It's been almost exactly a year since I bought a second hand Dell Latitude 7490 laptop computer, loaded with Linux Mint as its operating system. I had experimented with several flavors of Linux in the past, including Mint, but none of them had actually stuck, until this one. A year later, this one is still my daily driver. 

I bought this laptop on impulse out of three-way frustration. I was using an aging Apple MacBook Pro as my daily driver, but it had aged out of receiving any updates, so the writing was on the wall for that one. I also had a slightly newer HP notebook computer that was reaching the end of its line as well, since it lacked the system resources to upgrade to Windows 11. Finally, I had an HP Chromebook that was simply too limited for my needs. I tried to expand its functionality by installing and running Linux applications under the Linux Developer Environment (aka Crostini) in Chrome OS, but I never could make it do what I needed it to do. 

When the Dell arrived, I was immediately impressed with its performance and user friendliness. The computer practically configured itself, automatically adding both of my printers, and finding my wireless network so that I only had to type in my WEP password to get online. I was literally ready to roll in minutes. Most of the applications I needed were present, although I chose to replace the outdated version of LibreOffice with the latest one, downloaded from the LibreOffice Website, and installed manually, using one terminal command I had learned from the Crostini experiment. I had everything configured to my liking within an hour, and quickly realized this computer was exactly what I was trying to turn my Chromebook into, but which it was simply not capable of being, and thus the Chromebook was almost instantly retired.

The novelty of having a new (to me) computer was enough that I set my old MacBook Pro aside to take some time to acclimate myself to the Dell, but the funny thing was I never really picked it back up again, except to retrieve needed files and transfer them to the Dell via a Web-based tool called Snapdrop. After a couple of months, I realized that it, like the Chromebook, had effectively entered retirement.

The eBay seller from whom I had purchased the Dell had thoughtfully included a bootable flash drive with a copy of Linux Mint to be used to restore the system, if necessary. But after being greatly satisfied with the Linux Mint experience on the Dell, I decided to use it to load the operating system onto my HP Windows 10 laptop, creating a dual-boot system. I did this so that I would still be able to access both the files I had on the HP and the applications with which I had created them. Linux Mint ran marginally better on that computer than had Windows 10, but in the end, it was just too slow, especially compared to the lightning fast performance of the Dell. Such are the joys of running a system with modest system requirements on a machine with resources far greater than that system needs.

About a month after I had acquired the Dell, I spotted an eBay listing for another Dell 7490 laptop at less than half the price I had paid for mine, albeit with a quarter of the onboard storage capacity. Its internal solid state drive held 256GB, versus my Dell's 1TB. Still, for such a modest price, I decided it would make a good replacement for the HP, so I took the plunge. The computer was advertised as not having an operating system, but in fact had an unregistered copy of Windows 10, loaded down with enough adware to make it next to useless. Within an hour of being delivered, the second Dell was booting into Linux Mint, courtesy of the same flash drive, never to see Windows again.

Over the past year, a couple of things about Linux have been reinforced for me. One is that desktop Linux need not be difficult to use, and the other is it isn't just for programmers. It is true that there are dozens of Linux distributions out there, and some have steeper learning curves than others, but if you stick with the more mainstream distributions, such as Mint or Ubuntu, you will find they are mature, user friendly, well supported, and well suited for most users. Some people think the only legitimate way to run Linux is from the Terminal screen, and that's their prerogative, but I am no programmer, beyond knowing the rudiments of HTML, and I almost never type commands into the Terminal. When I do, I most often just copy them from a Web site, and if it doesn't work, it's because I mistyped something. Day in and day out, it's just point-and-click, no different and no more complicated than Windows or Mac OS. The ironic thing is many people don't realize they're using Linux already, as both ChromeOS and Android are based on Linux.

So, for the past year, I have been using Linux Mint on both of my daily driver computers, and for the first time in more than 30 years, I do not have a Mac OS machine in daily use. This was never a scenario I would have imagined a year ago, but I feel just fine about it; in fact, it is rare that I even think about what operating system I'm using, or that I have become a full-fledged full time Linux user. I'm just using my computers to do what I need to do, and they're far more than adequate for my needs. I won't say 'never' again, but I have no desire to ever own a Windows computer again. I use them at work, because that is what my employer supplies, and they drink deeply of the Microsoft Kool Aid. Another, Mac at home? Maybe someday, but for now, count me firmly on Team Penguin!*

 

*For those who are not aware, Tux the penguin, as pictured at the top of this article, is the official Mascot of Linux.