Medical note: This essay uses Addison’s disease and adrenal crisis as a systems-level analogy for thinking about computer failure. It is intended only as conceptual and educational discussion. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or a treatment guide. Adrenal crisis is a potentially life-threatening medical emergency; suspected adrenal crisis requires urgent medical assessment and treatment according to established emergency guidance and the individual patient’s clinical plan (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence [NICE], 2024; Bornstein et al.,…
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Technology
How a VPS Turned a Network Failure Into a Full-System Outage (Tracing a Cloudflare WARP Failure from DNS Errors to Disk Exhaustion)
I was not looking for an interesting systems failure. I was expecting a boring one.
On August 16, 2026, I received an UptimeRobot notification saying that one of my WordPress sites had gone down. This was running on a very small Scaleway VPS, and my first thought was almost automatic: the disk was probably full again. I had seen that kind of problem before. UpdraftPlus could leave backup archives on a small root filesystem, free space would disappear, WordPress would…
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Deletion Is a Claim, Not a Command: Can “Deleted” Ever Be a Promise?
After finishing a long investigation into Git deletion, I thought the difficult part was over. The repository had been the experiment; the broader lesson seemed to be that deletion has several observable states. Then a more uncomfortable question appeared. If a system says that something is deleted, what exactly is it claiming, who defines the scope of that claim, and who gets to decide when the process is truly finished?
I documented the original technical investigation in Deleting in Git…
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Deleting in Git and Rethinking (Philosophically) Deletion as a System Design Question
Yesterday I removed a file that no longer belonged in one of my Git repositories. It had already been committed and pushed several times, so rather than simply deleting the current copy, I decided to clean up the corresponding history as well.
What looked like a straightforward maintenance task became more complicated once I started verifying the result. The file disappeared from the current branch, then from reachable history, but some of the old commit IDs could still be resolved…
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冬夜在嘎嘎家， 3DMark 06 和罗马
今天在海弗利一家中餐馆吃饭时，突然想起了一幕场景。那是我高中时，大概是2009年或2010年左右，一个冬夜。那应该是寒假期间，我在外婆家——也就是我妈妈的妈妈家，我们用湖北方言叫她嘎嘎。
我当时正在用我爸爸在我奶奶的劝说下买的电脑玩（更准确地说，是“使用/运行”而非“玩”） 3DMark 06 演示版。
From 3DMark 06 to Rome: A Winter Night at Gaga’s House
Today, while dining at a Chinese restaurant in Heverlee, a scene suddenly came to mind. It was me in high school, probably around 2009 or 2010, on what I think might have been a winter night. It must have been a night during winter break at my grandma’s house, my mother’s mother, whom we call Gaga （嘎嘎） in the Hubei dialect.
I was on a computer that my dad had bought at the urging of my grandma, playing the 3DMark 06 demo.
File Share authentication issue in MacOS (including SMB and AFP) in an unusual circumstance
*updated on September 19, 2022
I tried the MacOS native File Share feature since I need to share data between the two Macs via LAN. Naturally, this function, which by default is based on SMB, also supports AFP.
An accidental irreversible event happened during the attempt to authenticate, and the error form seemed to have the incorrect user name or password. However, I am confident that the login credentials are correct. Even after reinstalling the system from High Sierra to…
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How to use vintage Spyder 2 and Spyder 3 in basICColor display 5.8.1
Preface
O ne fact can be confirmed is that basICColor display has canceled the support of Spyder 2 and Spyder 3 since version 5.7.2. Perhaps basICColor thought Spyder 2 and Spyder 3 were too vintage to make use of:
Installation and optimization of “Audiophonics ES9028Q2M”
*updated on December 24, 2017
Preface
I really shouldn’t say much about the desire to have a wireless PC-Hifi setup. Despite having a large collection of CDs and LPs, I feel that digitizing my music library would be beneficial in some circumstances.
Though Audiophonics’ official website shows compatibility with Volumio (a multi-platform music player), I have spent a great deal of time in the last several days and, honestly, had quite a terrible experience when piecing together Audiophonics and Volumio.1 Even so, I am really pleased with the sound from DietPi, which is more distinct and pure, as well as the efficient start time and UI design, and, ultimately, the stability when compared to Volumio.
As a result, the purpose of this article is to serve as a resource for serious philharmonicgeeks who have a limited budget but a need for “adequate” high fidelity quality.
The General Workflow
