From Futility Closet

By philosopher Steven M. Cahn:

1. Assume that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, omnimalevolent Demon who created the world.
2. If the Demon exists, then there would be no goodness in the world.
3. But there is goodness in the world.
4. Therefore, the Demon does not exist.

A demonist who wants to deny (4) would need to deny (1), (2), or (3). No demonist would question (1), and it’s difficult to deny (3), but we can escape (2) only by claiming that the world’s good is somehow necessary, that every good in the world is logically needed in order for this to be the worst world that the Demon could have created.

This is the familiar “problem of evil” turned on its head. The notion that all the world’s good (sunsets, Socrates’ free will) is necessary to create maximum evil is just as improbable as that all the world’s evil (bubonic plague, Hitler’s free will) is needed to create maximum good. Unless demonists or theists can produce further evidence in favor of their positions, “the reasonable conclusion is that neither the Demon nor God exists.”

(Steven M. Cahn, “Cacodaemony,” Analysis 37:2 [January 1977], 69-73.)

From time to time, it’s necessary to access a computer remotely. Over the years, TeamViewer was the tool of choice, but it has fallen into a bloated annoyance recently, so for many moons now I’ve been using Rustdesk - a FOSS toolset that works ideally for my use cases.

My daily-driver is an Asus X515 laptop running Windows 11. I picked this up a few years back when it was on sale at a good price, knowing it was a little underpowered for my long-term needs. But it served the short-term purpose, and was great for travel. It came with a single 128gb NVME SSD and 4gb of RAM, which sounds pre-historic now but met my needs at the time. The system has a single NVME slot, and an empty spot for a 2.5" SATA hard drive or the equivalent SSD.

A couple of years ago I upgraded to a single 1tb SSD. This was partitioned as a 128gb C: and 840gb D: drive, although my reasoning for this is sketchy nowadays. Last week, I noticed that both the C: and D: drives were at 90%-plus of capacity, and there were no easy choices on what to move/delete to free up space.

Most of the heavy-lifting is now done with a Synology DS220+ system, which handles all the media and utility services. My personal files are handled by a Beestation, so the working files on my laptop are replicated there automatically, but these files have grown over time resulting in the over-use of the D: drive. The C: drive just fills up as Windows updates come in, new apps are installed - the usual creep.

Here’s the upgrade plan I came up with.

I found some good deals on the pre-Prime Days sale, so I ordered two new drives: a 1tb NVME SSD, and a 2tb 2.5" SSD. The NVME arrived first, so I mounted it in my USB enclosre, and used DiskGenius to do an OS Migration of the system partitions and the C: partition.

The next day, the 2tb 2.5" SATA SSD arrived early in the day, but the cable I needed to connect the drive inside the laptop wasn’t going to arrive until the early evening. I connected the drive to a SATA USB adapter I had in my e-junk box, and used DiskGenius to clone the existing D: drive.

When the cable came in, I installed the 2.5" drive in the bay, ran the flat cable to the connector on the motherboard, and used some of the adhesive pads that came in the cable package to hold everything down securely.

After you do this kind of work, the first power-on is always a test in humility, but thankfully the system booted right up without issues. The new C: drive shows a total of 930gb with 824gb free, and the new D: drive shows a total of 1.81tb with 1.08tb free. This should be plenty of headroom for a year or two at least.