Your SIGMA shared drive

You should already have a portable USB drive with many of the shared files for the team. If you don’t have one, ask MB about it. These instructions are meant to help you set up synchronisation between your drive and the rest of the teams’ drives.

Organisation of the drive

Principally, we’re avoiding premature optimisation by refusing to design a structure before we need it. Thus the main organisation principle here is to observe what structures emerge as part of our day-to-day work and what works well.

So far, the drive is typically organised by name of the organisation and material within their collection. We try to keep things in tidy folders that are about the size of each task. MB generally uses the name of the organisation; JPA likes to use an ISIL (ISO 15511) when one exists and invent ISIL-like codes where one doesn’t.

The files in the sub-directories may be named in all sorts of ways, but the most important thing is that they stay in the right order, which is generally the order in which they occurred in the archive. If you want to change the order, prefixing numbers like 001-image-cool.jpg, 002-imageb.jpg, 003-image-another.jpg, etc. can work well.

You can also use numbering to insert a inventory or description of the files. That is, 000-inventory-and-description.md will come first.

Syncing your drive

MacOS users should install homebrew, update it, and then install syncthing by typing:

brew install syncthing

Then you can run syncthing by typing syncthing into the command line, where you can see the logs and errors as they occur. Once you’re comfortable with how syncthing works, you can also type brew services start syncthing to keep it running in the background.

With syncthing running either on the command line or background, navigate a browser to http://127.0.0.1:8384. This is the web interface for controlling syncthing.

In the lower right, you can see the machines your instance of syncthing knows about. Ask J.P. for the device ID for the Raspberry Pi server named “cantor” on Teams, WhatsApp, Signal, email, or whatever. And while you’re at it, tell him your device ID. You can find yours by clicking on the shorter strong on the right called “Identification.” Both will be a long string of arbitrary numbers and letters, so you probably want it somewhere you can cut and paste from on your laptop. Once you have it “Add Device” and insert the string for cantor. On the tab “Sharing”, check the box for “Introducer” and then click “Save.”

Assuming cantor isn’t down–sometimes it is–your computer should spot it. J.P. will spot you on cantor’s end and share the “sigma-share” folder with you. Once that happens, you will get a notification that cantor is sharing a folder. Accept it, but change the folder path to your SIGMA drive, e.g. /Volumes/SIGMA-XX/sigma-share where XX are your initials if J.P. set up your initial drive. This will save you some time because most of the files are already there.

After saving this, the web interface will tell you that it is scanning your drive, then syncing, then updating. It’s likely things will be somewhat out of sync, so you may have to “override local changes” before the sync is totally ready. As long as you haven’t made any changes, this is a good idea for the initial sync.