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  • Was The House Of Wessex “Welsh”?

    Well, not “Welsh” but Brythonic. The Anglo-Saxon royal dynasty called the “House of Wessex” was supposedly founded by a certain Cerdic. The interesting thing about this character is that his name is Brythonic in origin, and of course that he defeated a Brythonic king to take his territory.

    Now if we skip a few centuries to when the Anglo-Normans invaded Ireland, the Norman mercenaries were invited by a certain deposed Irish king – Diarmait Mac Murchada. A not uncommon solution for a king having been deposed was to try and raise an army to take the kingdom back, and if you have plenty of cash, mercenaries may well be part of that army.

    There is no evidence for this, but what if Cerdic was a deposed Brythonic king, or a disgruntled Brythonic noble who hired a bunch of germanic mercenaries. And if he had offered them land as well as gold, that could easily explain how a bunch of Saxons ended up living here.

    Which may go some way to explaining why the Brythonic people didn’t really disappear but got absorbed over the centuries.

    It’s a crazy idea and there’s no evidence for it. But it’s an interesting hypothesis.

    The Round Table

  • Resurrecting Messiah Craze

    No, not that one (no disrespect to Native Americans intended); rather a small band from Swansea around in the late 1980s. That’s where I went to university and I was rather a fan and saw them numerous times live. I also have a tape they released privately which I’ve been unable to listen to for many years.

    So I “resurrected” it, and this post is to document how it was done :-

    1. Obtain a tape player and connect it to your computer’s “Line In”. In my case an old Sony TC-TX515 (which is good enough for this purpose).
    2. Fire up Audacity
      • Set the input device appropriately.
      • Set the bit depth to 24 bits (the default of 32 can be problematic with some tools).
    3. Fire up gtk wave cleaner
      • Detect clicks.
      • Detect songs
      • Use the song markers as a guideline for selecting tracks (in the bottom so you get both left and right channels) and saving each individual track as a WAV file.
    4. Convert each individually to a flac file :-
      • flac -o 01_track.flac 01_track.wav
    5. Add meta information :-
      • Add replay gain (optional): metaflac --add-replay-gain *.flac
      • Add individual tags: metaflac --set-tag=TAG="Value to set" 01_track.flac. The tags set for each track were: TITLE, ALBUM, TRACKNUMBER, ARTIST, GENRE, and DATE.

    The first side of the tape came out surprisingly well; the second not so much (which is why it is not included below) as it was a live recording from the Mandela Bar (every student had a Mandela Bar to visit in the 1980s).

    I’m going to link to a ZIP file containing the tracks from the first side of the tape. The music remains copyrighted by the band :-

    1. Tony Brown
    2. Mark Holownia
    3. Richard Jouault
    4. Dusty Kennedy
    5. Steve Leatherdale
    6. Andrea McCulloch
    7. Tony Skiller

    If any of those have objections to their music being distributed like this, please contact me.

    As to the ZIP file, it’s available here.

    And just for once an almost relevant picture …

  • Do You Need A Separate /home Partition for Linux?

    Ah yes! The eternal debate on how to do storage under Linux (and previously Unix). This debate has been going on since Unix found itself with some disks.

    No, but …

    First of all, in the simplest case of installing Linux onto a machine with a single disk isn’t the only possibility here. If you are in that situation, you do need to consider a separate partition for the /home file system.

    But there are all sorts of other possibilities here – for example my own workstation has a separate /home file system but it comes from another (ZFS) storage pool of disks. So my system disk doesn’t have a separate partition for /home. If you are using extra disks you’ll almost always want a separate /home file system.

    But before we get too deep into the technical terms, what exactly are they?

    1. When setting up a new disk, you can divide it up into 1 or more partitions which to the operating system look pretty much like disks – you can use nvme0n1 to create a file system, or you can use nvme0n1p1. On a system disk you will very often have three or more – one each for /boot, /boot/efi, and / (at the least).
    2. Once Linux has taken over a disk and “formatted” it for its use, it has a data structure on it that makes it a file system of one type or another. This file system can be mounted at any point in the hierarchy, so historically (when we had much smaller disks), there could be file systems mounted at /, /usr, /var, /var/spool, /usr/local, etc.

    So do we need a separate /home file system? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a wise thing to do.

    If you’re setting up a throw-away laptop that won’t ever store anything important, then sure a separate /home file system is probably a waste of time – it’ll probably only ever store some configuration files. If the system you’re setting up is your main machine and /home contains all your files – past, present, and future, then a separate /home file system is worth considering.

    1. If you ever re-install the operating system, your separate /home could be preserved so that you don’t have to restore from backup. That isn’t safe (so you should always have a backup elsewhere) but it can be done fairly easily (with enough practice).
    2. If you upgrade your storage, a separate /home file system can be quicker and safer to copy (at the file system level) to the new storage. Doing it on a file-by-file basis (such as with the excellent rsync) is likely to be very much slower than doing it at the file system level (such as with zfs send).
    3. It should be a great deal easier to take important backups if all the important files are on one file system.
    Peering At Each Other

  • Comparing To 1930s Germany

    There has recently been some controversy regarding a certain football celebrity comparing current events – in particular the treatment of refugees looking to claim asylum – with the events in Germany in the 1930s. The first was just silly – suspending the celebrity for saying something that had nothing to do with his professional life.

    The second is more serious and were objections from Jews comparing current events to the Holocaust. They certainly have a point – too many relatively trivial things get compared to the Holocaust. But in this case, they’re wrong.

    First of all no mention was made of the Holocaust which strictly speaking began in 1942 with the enactment of the Final Solution (although many Jews were killed when Poland was invaded).

    Secondly it specifically compared current events with events in 1930s Germany; not saying they are the same, but have certain similarities. Warning us that those who would daemonize certain groups – Socialist, Communists, Roma, and Jews in the case of 1930s Germany, Refugees (and Roma) in the case of the UK today – can become dangerous if ignored.

    If the UK is sliding into fascism, warning about those signs indicating the slide is not only the responsible thing to do, but the thing every sensible person should be shouting about. And it is indeed the case.

    And silencing such warnings with sensitivity about the Holocaust is very very wrong.

    Tunnel of Arches

  • Why Do Vegan Substitutes Look Like Meat?

    One of the things that keep cropping up whenever vegan food crops up in social media, is why does it always resemble meat? Or “faux meat” as I call it.

    It doesn’t.

    As a vegetarian of over 30 years (and thus aligned with vegans; even if I’m not a “good vegan”), I very rarely eat faux meat; and when I do it’s out of curiosity. Not to see how closely they resemble meat, but to see if they were a viable choice.

    V* (meaning vegetarian and vegan) food doesn’t need a meat substitute. There’s plenty of fine choices out there that don’t miss the rotting corpses a bit.

    So where does this belief come from? There’s three possible reasons why faux meat choices exist :-

    1. New v*s miss certain meat dishes and seek faux meat to fill the gap in their diet. Fair enough.
    2. Meat eaters who for one reason or another seek to swap out meat for a meat-free alternative. Fair enough.
    3. Companies who market these products as being what v*s actually want. Whether they’re right or not kind of depends on how large groups 1&2 are.
    Ducks swimming on water in a line.
    Ducks In A Row