I vote for graphite on paper. Ink will run if the paper gets wet. Of all the damage that has occurred to my papers, water is the most common. I keep a copy of important phone numbers written inside my wallet in case I ever lose my phone. Between an unexpected rainstorm, to an unchecked pocket before putting pants in a washing machine, to a spilled drink, I have gotten my wallet wet several times. Every time I used ink, I had to rewrite the list, but now with graphite, it isn't a problem.

Only ordinary dye-based ink will run if the paper gets wet.

It is easy to find either roller pens or ink for fountain pens that are pigment-based, lightfast and waterproof. It is very easy to test yourself that with such ink water has no effect whatsoever over the written text (after a minute or so of drying after writing). For example, there are many kinds of Uni-Ball roller pens with waterproof ink, but there also many other brands with similar products. (Only fountain pens, roller pens and gel pens may have pigment-based ink, the paste ink used by ball-point pens is easily washed by alcohol or other organic solvents.)

In my experience with graphite on paper, it is a much worse choice, because the writing will fade over the years, due to the rubbing of the paper sheets from each other.

The pigment-based black inks also use carbon, like graphite pencils, but any ink contains not only a pigment, but also a glue that binds the pigment to the paper, so it will not be rubbed out by touching it.

Thanks! I appreciate the input.

Do you just use regular graphite pencils, like with the HB scale or something?

I just use the same BIC mechanical pencils with #2 lead that I picked up in college. No reason to get complicated.

I haven't used badblocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badblocks in about 10 years, but I was annoyed that this exact feature wasn't available for testing accidental swapping of block locations. badblocks only writes the same data to each block and thus they are all indistinguishable.

TIL `badblocks -t random` repeats the same random block over and over :(

You can however set the block size to something quite large, which means you write the same random pattern spread out over multiple blocks repeatedly. If you pick an "odd" block size (like say, your native block size multiplied by 47), it's highly unlikely your disk under test will be swapping around "groups of 47 blocks." (I usually just do a nice multiple, like 4K16, but if you're super paranoid a weird multiple should be pretty much good enough). You won't get reporting of which exact* blocks on the drive are failing, but these days, that isn't really useful information - if any blocks are failing, warranty or ditch the drive.

ddrescue can read from /dev/urandom and write to any device. This can come in handy when you have a device with bad blocks but still would like to "shred" all the still writable parts of.

there's no point in writing actual random data - you won't be able to check correctness without another copy

If privacy is your primary problem with cloud storage, I would suggest veracrypt containers. And if you aren't storing too much data, I would also suggest DVD/BluRay optical media with DVDisaster and PAR2 archives. I keep a DVD spindle in a safe deposit box that gets updated each year.

I've seen "dd if=/dev/removable of=/dev/removable" suggested. I don't know if it actually works or if the OS optimizes it to a no-op.

Certainly the OS can't optimize it to a no-op, since `dd` makes separate read and write syscalls.

I suppose your `dd` implementation itself could do so, but I don't know why it would.

the risk of catastrophic data loss from misuse of `dd` makes my hackles rise just looking at this.

I will never forget when I mixed up `if` and `of` during a routine backup.

`cat /dev/sda > /mnt/myDisk2` is so much safer, explicit, and in unix norms. It's also faster because you don't have to tune block size parameters.

Plus you can also do `pv /dev/sda > /mnt/myDisk2` to get transfer speed details.

Friends don't let friends use `dd` where `cat` can do the same job.

I stopped getting scared of `if` and `of` about a decade ago when I started explicitly saying (in my head) "input file" and "output file" rather than "if" and "of." You still can mess up the order, but imo no more easily than you can swap `cat in > out` for `cat out > in`.

> Friends don't let friends use `dd` where `cat` can do the same job.

Technically yes... but I like being able to explicitly set block sizes and force sync writes.

I think you both are arguing about how to fight a bear with your bare hands. To win in that, you simply need to not fight with a bear.

Let's say someone made an expansion board with a cool feature: there are 5 documented I/O addresses, but accessing any other address fries the stored firmware. What would you do? No, not leaving a lot of comments in code in CAPS LOCK. No, not printing the correct hexadecimal values in red to put the message on the wall. You make a driver that only allows access to the correct addresses, and configure the rest of the system to make sure that it can only work through that driver.

Let's say there's a loading bay at the chemical plant with multiple flanges. If strong acid from the tanker is pumped into the main acid tank, everything is fine. If it is pumped into any other tank, the whole plant may explode and burn. What should be done? No, not promising that drivers will be fired, then shot by the firing squad if they make a mistake. Each connection is independently locked, and the driver only gets a single matching key.

You have wonderful programmable devices that allow you to solve non-standard problems with non-standard tools. What should be done is making a wrapper for dd that just does not allow you to do anything you don't want to happen. Even the most basic script with checks and confirmation is enough.

I DDGed for mar a lago look and first hit was a Wikipedia page. I was not expecting that lengthy of a page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_trends_among_American_c...

Redundancy is closer to "layoff" than "fired". One is for a clear cause, the other is just "we don't feel like paying you money because a second employee can do that job in addition to his own".

The image search is terrible on DDG. If I search for multiple keywords, the search only cares if an image matches just one word. Google ranks the results so that images that match all the keywords are presented at the top.

I would add sugar.

Egg nog is listed on the triangle as away from flour, but it is extremely high in carbs. When I was a kid, I loved egg nog and a couple of years ago I decided to purchase some. I liked it so much I drank the whole half gallon in a day. That night I had horrible painful bloating and looked at the ingredients label to find "sugar", "cane sugar". "corn syrup", and "high fructose corn syrup".

It's not so much that it's high in carbs, it's extraordinarily high in fat. Its main ingredients are egg yolks and heavy cream along with the sugar. What you're describing is like eating an entire cheesecake or drinking a pitcher of melted premium ice cream. The bloating is from the enormous amount of fatty calories that are slow to digest. Not really about the sugar. (And of course it has sugar, it's essentially a dessert drink.)

My money is on the amount of lactose in all that dairy. There's a lot of lactose in a half gallon of nog.

Right? I felt bloated just thinking about drinking a half gallon of nog.

I can't remember what the topic was, but I remember hearing a story about a company that was soliciting ideas from the public for maybe a joke book or maybe tv show plots. They got into a lot of legal hot water once they found out that the ideas weren't original and people were actually just taking them from other sources.

If anyone else knows what I am talking about, I'd like to know the name of the company.

When my state was debating creating a state-run lottery to fund education projects, my preacher gave a sermon on the evils of gambling. Religions can't realistically stay out of politics because every law can be reinterpreted as a moral argument.

That's fine. It's different when it's telling people how to vote.

Some people buy lottery tickets specifically because of who they benefit, which is very different than going to Vegas or certain forms of investment. (IE, uneducated investment is often just gambling.)

I think that was the previous posters point - any teaching on a moral issue will ultimately have overlap with real world issues.

A homily about gambling would be right in line with religious teachings - the timing is really what is at the apex of your post.