In yesterday’s post about sunrises, I made a snarky offhand comment about certain places being in the wrong time zone.

Today I drew a map that highlights the locations that are more than 7.5 degrees from the central longitude of their time zone. (US time zones are spaced every hour, which corresponds to 15 degrees of longitude.)

If you are in the correct time zone, then your average solar noon is between 11:30 a.m. (if you live on the far eastern edge) and 12:30 p.m. (on the far western edge) Standard Time.

A few states and parts of several others are clinging to the Eastern Time Zone when they should join Central. The Great Plains states and Western Texas should really join Mountain Time. My birth state of Idaho should observe Pacific Time.

Instead, these locations are all running 30-60 minutes later than they should be. And of course, if we do end up switching to full-time Daylight Saving Time, that will become 90-120 minutes, which seems pretty ridiculous to me.

Then again, they already spend two-thirds of the year in that condition, so this misalignment isn’t exactly new.

(You may notice that a tiny sliver of Maine is actually too far east for the Eastern Time Zone, but that one seems like not a big deal.)

Inspired by Dr. Drang’s plots illustrating the potential effects in Chicago of a move to permanent Daylight Saving Time in the US, I wanted to investigate which places would have the hardest time in the dead of winter.

I ended up with this map of the USA Lower 48, with regions shaded by the latest sunrise time that occurred between January 1 and January 15, 2026.

If any location were to switch to permanent DST, their latest sunrise would be an hour later than shown in this map.

I have very little sympathy for the orange and red zones, which currently see their latest sunrise after 8:00 and would move to a post-9:00 sunrise. Parts of Washington, Montana, and Michigan are very far north and there is only so much we can do to help. In all other cases, you are in the wrong time zone anyway; this one is on you.

I do feel for the green areas, which are properly situated but would have to suffer through at least a few sunrises between 8:30 and 9:00.

Of course, I think it is silly to use permanent DST rather than permanent Standard Time. Sure, a lot of our habits have been built up around astronomical noon being closer to 1 p.m. for most of the year, but I’m sure we would figure it out quickly enough.

I’ll be fine either way, since I’m right on the boundary between dark and light blue. I would survive shifting our worst-case winter 7:00 sunrise to 8:00.

Note that, ignoring DST, the latest sunrise is typically in January rather than at the winter solstice. But also in some southern areas (including where I live), the seasonal variation in sunrises is small enough that the latest sunrise time is actually in March or November, right after the shift to DST or before the shift back to Standard Time.

I’m not going to post the Python code I used for this because it was AI-assisted and sloppily thrown together. I used geopandas to read Natural Earth time zone data (both AI choices), and skyfield based on my previous experience with astronomical calculations. I used scipy to solve for the boundary points and then shaded the regions using matplotlib.

Earlier this week, I put together a quick Jupyter notebook to figure out who plays which third-place team in the Round of 32.

I parsed the Wikipedia table into a Pandas DataFrame with 20 columns:

• Twelve columns named 'A' through 'L' with values True or False, indicating that the third-place team from that group qualified for the Round of 32.

• Eight columns named 'vA', 'vB', etc., for the eight first place teams that are slated to play a third-place finisher. The value of these columns is 3A, 3B, etc., for the matchup that will result for the set of third place finishers determined by the values of the first eight columns.

For example, this is the row of the table assuming that the third place finishers from groups A, C, H, and K fail to advance (with True/False shortened to T/F for brevity):

Now I have been whittling down the options with the following Python code, where df is the name of the DataFrame.

from itertools import combinations
from collections import Counter
import pandas as pd

IN = 'FBEID'
OUT = 'H'
ORDER = 'CAG' 
ix = True
for x in IN:
    ix &= df[x]
for x in OUT:
    ix &= ~df[x]
for x, y in combinations(ORDER, 2):
    ix &= (~df[x] | df[y])

print(f'Options remaining: {sum(ix)}')
counters = []
index = ['vA', 'vB', 'vD', 'vE', 'vG', 'vI', 'vK', 'vL']
for x in index:
    counters.append(Counter(df[ix][x]))
dff = pd.DataFrame(counters, index=index).fillna(0).astype(int)
print(dff.replace(0, ""))

The ix variable is a Pandas index selector. For each character of IN, the corresponding column must be True. For each character of OUT, the corresponding column must be False. And finally, for each of the undetermined teams in ORDER, which are sorted by their current ranking, it cannot be that the lower-ranked team gets in while the higher ranked team does not. In Boolean logic terms, this is “x implies y”, which is the same as “(not x) or y.”

Then sum(ix) will get you the number of selected columns. Finally, I arranged everything into a new table that has as its rows the vX labels, as its columns, the 3X labels, and as its values, the number of scenarios left for which that matchup is possible:

Options remaining: 8

   3E 3C 3J 3G 3B 3D 3I 3A 3F 3L 3K
vA  7  1                           
vB        1  7                     
vD              8                  
vE                 8               
vG        2           2  4         
vI                          8      
vK  1                 3        4   
vL        1           3           4

You can see from this that one of the most disruptive scenarios left would be for 3C to play against 1A, but there is only one scenario left in which Scotland makes it through at all, which is that every single match today goes their way. That would mean Croatia losing by 3 or more, Congo failing to win, and some kind of lopsided win between Austria and Algeria.

I rent a post office box. It is an unnecessary expense, but I enjoy a walk every now and then to pick up the mail. My youngest child often joins me. He enters, takes a big sniff, and tells me it is his favorite smell. It smells like mildew.

I also have a return address stamp, typeset in Gorton Perfected, part of Marcin Wichary’s Shift Happens project.

If my 7-year-old ever sees me “hacking,” that is, typing terminal commands, he asks to help, which means me transcribing commands for him to type.

I started to explain IP addresses to him after he configured part of the network, but he told me he knows what an IP address is, he saw it on Magic School Bus.

With my new home server, I’ve made some changes (improvements, hopefully) to my backup system.

Previous backup systems

To back up my Mac, I’ve always started with Time Machine. It has good operating system support, and it can do frequent incremental backups, even when you aren’t connected to the backup disk. It isn’t great for long-term backups though, because every year or so, it gets corrupted and you have to start over from scratch, losing old versions of your files. It seems to be worse when backing up over the network, so I only use Time Machine to a directly connected hard drive.

I’ve used Backblaze, which does internet backups. You can also configure it to keep old versions of your files, although beyond a certain point you have to pay per gigabyte. Backblaze has been pretty reliable, although if you have multiple devices, the per-month price starts to add up.

I’ve used Arq, backing up either to a network drive or to Backblaze B2. This seems to work pretty well. The concept is very similar to Backblaze except that it is more flexible on where you put the data. I don’t use this on my main machine any more, but my kids do on their laptops because it is good about sending data over the internet to my home server (using RustFS to run an S3-compatible server).

ZFS network backups

All of these backup systems do somewhat complex things to allow you to store multiple versions of files, which is a very important feature for a backup system, in case you accidentally delete or change something and you want to get it back.

A different strategy is to make the backup client dumb but the storage system smart. Since I’m using ZFS for my home server, I can do snapshotting and versioning there. Not only does this simplify things for the client, it gives me more flexibility, for example, to keep many snapshots on the large home server but only send one or two versions to the smaller offsite backup drives.

SuperDuper

SuperDuper focuses on exact copies of the entire filesystem. It typically uses an APFS-formatted external drive, but it also has support for network shares. As of MacOS 26, these network backups use Apple’s new sparse image (ASIF) format. On the server side, this looks like a giant file big enough to store all of your data.

After each backup, I have SuperDuper trigger a ZFS snapshot, which allows me to travel back in time to see a day’s backup even after future SuperDuper “Smart Updates” have changed the live version of the sparse image on the server. And ZFS doesn’t have to store an entire copy of each sparse image, just the parts that have changed from one instance to the next.

You don’t get a fancy browser that can see all former versions of a file, the way that Time Machine does. From MacOS’ point of view, you have an entirely separate sparse image per backup, just stored in a way that they don’t have to duplicate unchanged data. You do get all of the Apple-native file features, since the backup targets are full APFS filesystems.

Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy Cloner is more flexible when making copies to an attached hard drive, including using APFS snapshots to store multiple versions of a file, the way that Time Machine does. But it is much more limited when using network storage: it copies individual files and doesn’t support versioning or other APFS features.

I find it useful, especially when combined with ZFS snapshots, because it makes it easy to see a file’s change history over time. It is more transparent than sparse images, even if it is less faithful.

Backups of a ZFS system

I also want an offsite backup, to make sure that I’m safe in case both my Mac and home server are taken out at the same time. For this, I use an old hard drive big enough to store just a few of the latest snapshots, and a Perl script called syncoid (part of the snapshot manager sanoid).

The backup script looks essentially like this:

syncoid --identifier=offsite --compress=none \
    --recursive --sendoptions=w \
    --delete-target-snapshots \
    main offsite/main

The first time this is run, it creates a snapshot of the ‘main’ dataset and then copies that snapshot to the offsite dataset, which is stored on the external drive. The identifier is used as part of the snapshot name, in case you want to set up multiple backup targets.

On subsequent runs, it creates a new snapshot, and then sends everything that has changed since the previous syncoid snapshot (including any snapshots that you make by other means) to the backup target. Then it deletes the previous snapshot.

Compression is turned off because I am copying to a USB hard drive, not over the network (although syncoid will work over SSH as well). The ‘w’ option sends raw encrypted datasets, which isn’t strictly necessary since you can always configure the target to re-encrypt everything. Deleting the target snapshots means that if you delete a snapshot on the source, it gets deleted from the target.

I keep two identical backups, one connected that is receiving daily syncs, and the other at my office. Every 2-3 weeks I swap them, so that the office copy isn’t more than a month out of date.

Earlier this year, I built a new home server and data storage system. From the hardware side of things, this was a whole new experience for me. But the software side also gave me a lot of opportunities to experiment.

Synology, TrueNAS, Docker, etc.

My previous storage system was Synology, which is appliance-style software. The operating system is set up to be mostly foolproof, and additional software generally requires applications to be packaged specifically for Synology.

It is very convenient to have so many decisions made for you, and my original plan was to use TrueNAS as a replacement. Like Synology, TrueNAS has a web-based UI to manage the core services, and an app store to download additional software, all very connect-the-bricks. And if you can’t find an app you want, you can configure anything by using Docker.

The more I considered it, though, the more I realized that I didn’t want the limitations of being inside an opinionated system. When everything goes right with appliance-style software, it’s great. But if you veer too far away from the defaults, or if you run into problems, you find yourself fighting against the system instead of working with it.

Even Docker, which can make handling multiple services and dependencies both easier and more reliable, adds a level of complexity that can be a drag. Besides, I spend my time professionally running containerized, productionized services, writing config files that are used to generate other config files that eventually run and manage the services.

Bare metal

So instead, I decided to go bare metal, and I installed Debian. I have some experience with this from my Mini PC that I was using to complement the Synology. It is very common for software to have a Debian installer. And it isn’t too hard to write or change a systemd config file if you want to install something more obscure or customize things a little. I think you do need a better understanding of how the different parts of the system work together, but as a result, I feel like there is no magic, which means there is no limit to what I can do.

Void Linux

And then, mostly by chance, I stumbled into a Linux distribution called Void Linux. I was most intrigued by its service management system, which is called Runit, because instead of config files it has shell scripts. I don’t have anything in particular against systemd, but if my goal in going bare metal was to get rid of abstractions and config files, then this seemed like an even better fit for my hobby project.

One downside is that not as much software is packaged for Void compared to Debian. And I probably wouldn’t recommend Void to someone who isn’t comfortable with or willing to learn to write shell scripts. Also, setting up Runit services can involve a little bit of boilerplate, which some people (not me) are allergic to.

But if you clear those hurdles, the simplicity is your reward. The system boot scripts are just shell scripts. Service definitions are just shell scripts that are auto-restarted every time they terminate or fail. Instead of a complex dependency management system, your service can just quit if something is missing, and the next time it starts, maybe things will be in a better state. Instead of writing a config file to create a custom /run directory or /tmp directory, you can just put a mkdir inside the shell script. To enable or disable a service, you put a symlink into the /var/service folder. To write logs, you just print messages to stdout. And so on.

Anyway, that is the current state of my home server. It feels light and fun and unixy instead of cumbserome and enterprisey.

I was playing around with IPv6 on the VPS that hosts this blog when I realized that, at least over IPv6, I no longer need virtual hosts.

In the old, old days, a “host” was a physical computer name, mapped to an IP address by DNS. As HTTP spread, it made sense to host multiple websites on the same machine, so browsers were required to send the “Host” header to tell the server what site they were looking for. Now a single server could do something different in response to www.example.com vs example.com.

Today, the vast majority of the web is served through a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Cloudflare, where millions of sites are assigned to the same IP address, and the Host header is used to route the request through the CDN to see if there is a cached version, falling back to the “origin” server if not. At that point, the origin server is likely serving a dozen or more sites, and it again looks at the Host header to actually figure out what content to return.

In an nginx config on the origin server, this might look like this:

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name example.com;
    ...
}

This says “use the following settings if you get any request on IPv4 port 80, or IPv6 port 80, as long as the host matches example.com.”

The server that hosts this blog hosts a dozen others, many of which are just redirects like www.nathangrigg.com -> nathangrigg.com. Until today, these all used the same IP address, with an nginx config to route the different virtual hosts to different sites on the same server.

While I wouldn’t want to pay for that many IPv4 addresses, which typically cost a couple dollars each per month, IPv6 addresses are plentiful. My host will give me, at no charge, a “/64 block”, meaning a 64-bit prefix for which I can use every address contaning that prefix. Since IPv6 address are 128 bits long, that is 2^64 possible addresses to use.

So I added a startup script on my server that runs

ip -6 addr add 2a01:7e03:e001:1ac::1/64 dev eth0
ip -6 addr add 2a01:7e03:e001:1ac::2/64 dev eth0
...

(That is my assigned 64-bit prefix in four groups of 16, and the double colon means “a bunch of zeroes”.)

Then I updated my DNS entries to map each domain to a different IP address, and updated my server block to say

server {
    listen [2a01:7e03:e001:1ac::1]:80
    ...
}

(I had to keep a separate server block with virtual hosts for the IPv4-based routing.)

Now, over IPv6, nginx uses the incoming address rather than the host name to decide what to serve.

Is it better? Probably not. But it lets me pretend like I have a different computer for each little website.

If you want to see it in action, try curl -vIL6 www.nathangrigg.com, and you can watch the procession from www-port-80 to www-port-443 to bare nathangrigg.com. (v for verbose, I for headers only, L to follow redirects, and 6 to force IPv6. If it fails for you, you may have to remove the 6 and watch the boring IPv4 version, where the IP address is the same for every request.)

Catalyst

I like having network-based storage, so I can have a place to store backups, large files that I’m not using, copies of media that I’ve purchased, audiobooks, etc.

For the last 10 years, I’ve accomplished this with a four-bay Synology, which I eventually replaced with a second four-bay Synology, keeping the old one as a backup.

You can run various programs on the Synology because it is basically a low-powered server. The UI was helpful for me as a beginner.

In the long run, however, I wanted more customization than I could get from Synology, which eventually led me to buy a mini PC to run everything except the basic file server and backup functions.

Finally, I decided that I wanted even more customizability, I wanted a way to put all of my drives in one machine, and I was itching for a fun side project. I briefly looked into other network storage options and decided that, since I had never built a computer from scratch before, it would be fun to try a custom build.

Parts

I don’t remember exactly how it all came together. There are a lot of options, a lot of decision to be made, and I didn’t really know what I was doing.

I wanted room for a lot of disks and the ability to hot-swap, which led me to the Jonsbo N5 case, which holds 12 disks. It was great for a first build because it is quite spacious.

I wanted a way to access it without a keyboard or monitor, so my main requirement for the motherboard was something server-grade with IPMI. The motherboard I bought has a separate ethernet port that presents a web interface to configure the firmware settings as well as to connect remotely to a virtual monitor.

I wanted a CPU with integrated graphics, and I went with a mid-line Intel chip (“Core Ultra 5”).

I also needed a host bus adapter to be able to connect so many hard drives to the motherboard. This goes in a PCIe slot.

Finally, I wanted ECC RAM (very expensive thanks to AI), and some SSDs to run the operating system. Plus a power supply, a bunch of cables, and some fans.

Build

The build was like an expensive Lego project except I might have bought the wrong pieces. It really was fun to see all of the different pieces come together.

I had a hard time getting the CPU cooler attached and I was worried I had done it wrong.

I had some annoying fan issues because I had some giant 14-inch fans for the front of the case that max out at 800 RPM. If they went below 300 RPM, the motherboard would think they had failed and start pulsing all of the fans, or else blowing them all full blast. I eventually solved this by connecting them to a fan hub so that the motherboard wouldn’t know how fast they were going. I’m sure there are better ways.

Those issues notwithstanding, I did manage to boot it up on the first try. Unfortunately, I had a couple of suspicious crashes in the first few days, mostly when I was transferring large files to the new computer. I realized that before I started trying to install anything, I should have done some diagnostic checks.

When I ran MemTest86 to check whether there were RAM issues, it froze four seconds into the first test. It failed so hard that I figured I must have done something wrong with seating the CPU, or that the motherboard was faulty.

I tried reseating the CPU to see if I’d screwed it up, but eventually resigned myself to buying more RAM. This was a painful choice because RAM was 1/3 the cost of the full build. But it was the right choice; the new RAM passed MemTest86, and I got a refund for the first batch of RAM.

So with that, I had a working computer. It was a really fun way to spend some of my free time. I wouldn’t say it was easy or frustration-free, but I learned a lot. It was also a good complement to my day job, where I wrangle computers like they’re herds of cattle without ever seeing or touching a single one.

Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Big Sur, California

Limekiln State Park redwoods

Limekiln State Park near Big Sur, California.

Writing go code is a thousand paper cuts but then you get that nice beautiful binary and you put it wherever you want and I’m still not sure it’s worth it.

Well done Bruce Springsteen. I’m touched by the designation “Winter of ‘26.” Some events are too momentous for a descriptive label. Here’s hoping we remember it as a turning point, a wake-up call to the complacent.

US politics are more about identity and power than principles, even though we like to pretend otherwise. In my high school in conservative, rural Idaho, we would debate the virtues of small, limited government, second amendment freedoms, family values candidates, and I was duped into thinking the choice was between Platform A or Platform B, when it was really a choice between giving power to a “friend” or an “enemy.”

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that my principles were more aligned with the Democrats, even though I felt “more at home” among the Republicans. But I have also changed, trading Idaho for Seattle, then Los Angeles, to the point where today I feel more at home in a city coffee shop than a county fair or a church service.

While I have always voted against Trump, I have supported some candiates that I now strongly regret. And I try my best to see the humanity in those who did vote for him, because everyone has their own journey.

But today, everyone must oppose the Trump administration, with its calculated, provocative, performative violence, including but not limited to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We cannot accept the lies, obstruction, and cover-ups that have followed. Anybody involved in or responsible for these violent acts or their cover-ups should be impeached, removed from office, and/or put in jail for their crimes. Every person in power who refuses to hold these offenders to account should be voted out of office and remembered as the cowards that they are.

We cannot wait until the next election to take power away from these monsters. Speak up today, set the record straight if you’ve had a change of heart. Call your representatives and tell them to defend us and enforce our laws.

ICE is not our friend; Trump and his enablers are our enemy.