Google Photos Takeout Download using Firefox

Four months ago I exported all photos from Google Photos to import into immich, and scheduled followon Takeout runs every two months. I had naively assumed the subsequent exports would be incremental changes from the first one, but they are instead complete exports again. Two months later, download of the first scheduled Takeout repeatedly failed until Google disabled the download links, leaving me unable to download my photos at all.

After another two months, I made another attempt with the next scheduled export. I tried downloading the first archive using Chrome, and it failed twice. I switched to Firefox to download instead of Chrome, and it worked much better. Firefox appears to not give up so quickly and keeps trying. I was able to download all fifteen ZIP archives, fifty Gigabytes each, with only one download failure where I had to start it again.

Hurray!

Electrified USPS Fleet

In its initial proposal for a refreshed fleet of delivery trucks in 2022, the US Postal Service and its contractor Oshkosh Defense proposal listed a combined vehicle + cargo weight of 8501 pounds. This is a remarkably specific number, exactly one pound heavier than emissions rules would constrain. Were the vehicle 1 pound lighter it would be required to be considerably cleaner — and likely electric, to meet those requirements.

With more effort, and additional $3 billion in funding from the Biden administration, by the following year this proposal was revised and proposed that most of the fleet be electric. A gasoline version would be used for long routes in rural routes, areas without sufficient charging infrastructure. Initial electric vehicles were delivered in September of 2024, apparently to excellent reviews by postal workers using them.

Oshkosh has delivered only 100 electric trucks thus far, production was expected to ramp up from the initial deliveries a few months ago. The Oshkosh Defense CEO now says they'd be happy deliver the rest of the order as solely gasoline vehicles. It is difficult to see this in any positive way.

Google Cloud Four Cent Bill

I'd say not to spend it all in one place but I think the maximum number of places they could possibly spend it is four, so... go ahead. Live your best life, Google, with my compliments.

OPNsense 25.1 and ZFS

OPNsense 25.1 has been released. I'll update in a week or two, it looks neat.

My OPNsense instance is a VM running on a Proxmox host, where Proxmox uses ZFS as its storage. I doubt the ZFS support within OPNsense will be applicable, I think it sees a raw block device. I wouldn't want OPNsense to create a ZFS filesystem using the blocks which reside within the Proxmox ZFS filesystem. While I'm sure it would work, it seems like it would just be confusing without really being beneficial.