Marc's Public Blog

Dave first played on the Root Society Art Car which we had to locate on the playa to find him by biking randomly and hoping to find it :)

We eventualy succeeded

After his set (the end of which we listened to by biking next to the art car so as not to abandon our bikes somewhere random on the playa, we migrated to BAAAHS, where Alvin was playing and Afik was going to take over. He however had the treat to have Dave do a b2b with him, and it was a great set

lovely unbreathable air :)

good thing those things are somewhat rugged

Afik had fans :)

That was a great 4H+, thanks a bunch to Dave, Alvin and Afik for the great trance, which otherwise is somewhat lacking at burning man :)

the delta where ephemerisle takes place

Mt Rose ski resort

Reno Airport

Pyramid Lake

And after just around 2H, we arrived at BRC:

the man looked small this year

the city was surprisingly full for a sunday mid-day, especially with the road closed

the folly was an interesting multi level structure

I wondered what this was and would out later it was the art car DMV registration line

more of the DMV line

the airport already had some customers

barely anyone at the entrance because the road from reno had been closed due to a fatal accident

the temple, kind of a weird shape for this year

the runway was hard to miss

happily on the ground

taping everything up

After a week at burning man, it was time to go back

definitely more people in the exodus on sunday afternoon

the lucky folks who made it to the road

Then, a few pictures from the flight back:

pyramid lake

truckee train

northstar ski resort

If you'd like to use my pictures in a commercial setting, drop me a line to discuss and I can give you full resolution pictures (marc<at>merlins.org).
If you'd like to say thanks with cash, please donate money to one of the many camps and art installations that are often out of pocket after burning man.

Summary:

I again tried to enjoy the moments and interactions more than bike every last street, but I still covered a lot of ground. I biked 261km/162 miles in 7 days, not a record, but again I tried to enjoy the moment more, so that's a win I think :)

This year, I had a much upgraded LED outfit with 37440 pixels/LEDs. If you're interested, I've written a full article about it, and the evolution of my light outfit over the years.

I also brought back 4096 neopixel matrix, but unfortunately, it was damaged by playa dust quite a bit last year, and pretty unreliable this year:

My RGBPanel P3 shirt has 64x96 pixels vs the 64x64 pixels on the neopixel matrix

sigh, I kept having to fix dead pixels

During the day, I was wearing my snowboarding gear :)

my night outfit was only good enough for night/sunrise/sunset (and I had to recharge its big battery packs)

The flight to BM was uneventful which is good (more pictures):

cool to see the DMV registration line from the sky

Anyway, let's get on with the pictures:

Black Rock City

After tying up the plane, we got greeted by the nice airport folks:

I was soon greeted at the airport by Paul, one of my friends and coworkers

The airport infrastructure has been improving every year:

they had a picture display, featuring some of my pictures

Another year, another Burning Man with its infrastructure:

Another Burning Man and Center Camp

This year, I probably found the most wildlife of any year:

we found a fearless bird

Of course, day panoramic views are fun, but night ones are nicer:

Random table I found in the middle of the playa at night:

Oh yeah, the alcaline dust, honestly what I like the least about BM. I bought my PM2.5 particle meter, and it topped out during a dust storm, saying "OMG, do not breathe this air". I had NOX95 filters and they were essential:

baseline is good

dust storm is terrible

Art

Night art was very nice (sadly my day art pictures were lost):

Paraluna was still very nice

this year's Centered was shorter than sonic runway, but still nice

you could still barely bike through it

Mega Mega was a fun art piece with a door code that you had to find. The code ended up being 8764, as shown on a truck in a video that wasn't always playing ok. The inside was hillarious:

this was the inside

The Folly was this year's deeper Playa Art of size:

lots of lines to get up, even on the first day

nice views from the top

I enjoyed the Xmas tree looking art:

Deep playa fence had lots of random small art:

Camps

Like last years, we stayed at Dustfish. I tried to improve our solar system for this year, and managed to make just enough to power all our electronics: my power hungry flashlights, and LED outfit, soldering iron, and laptop:

100W of panels across 3 panels was barely enough, especially with the playa dust

one meter shows the solar power flowing in, and bigger meter the poewr that flowed out the storage batteries

Dustfish had a cabaret show and musicals, including rent:

During the day, we biked around as many streets and camps as we can. So many, only a very few shown here:

one camp had rooms for loan with their own decors

nice, a camp to celebrate my now defunct favourite night club

fresh panties camp was a great idea

been there before, but what's not to love?

Circle J had a nice store I missed the previous years. Best store on the playa :)

My friend Tinic and his friends setup the excellent Duck Pond:

Thank you soft landing for the teahouse and the talks this year again:

Rick Doblin gave another talk on the status of MAPS

Thanks for what you do and all your efforts, Rick

Thank you to all the camps that were offering food in various ways:

this lost boat captain was asking for help

a nicely gave you yummy fish if you tried to help

lots of grilled cheese, a playa favourite

yummy meat in some camps

a Russian camp had lots of yummy Russian treats

pizza on the playa in the middle of the night, yum

More Camps at night:

its bigger brother

one camp had some very nice rooms to win for a night

Jennifer suggested we tried roller disco, which has been there forever, but I never tried, so we did:

Jennifer's backpack worked well at night

Black Rock Gladiators was rightfully upgraded from street F to Esplanade, good for them. Their announcers were fantastic:

Multiple camps had nice LED setups:

sadly, she was still working on the code at BM, and I didn't see this matrix runing later

duck pond still had their technically impressive massive RGBPanel array, similar to my shirt, but bigger

fun matrix

very cool LED cube

interesting design, which when rotating gives the one below

another nice rotating one, nice design

I enjoyed the LED Grand Piano again:

Another different Piano in the middle of the playa

Erotica Hypnotica had fun hypnosys show, what the video for details:

Illuminaughty had an LED meetup on wednesday night:

nice raver cube demo

One big highlight music-wise, was Dave Dresden playing great trance on the Root Society art car, and then B2B with Afik and Alivn on BAAAHS art car, with another great sound system. It was lovely being able to spend a sunny and then dusty afternoon with them (more on this page).

Root Society had a nice art car with great sound system

nice to have a picture with Dave Dresden

Then, we have the sound camps:

Root Society was in the Place of Opulent Temple this year

Slut Garden has powerful lasers this year

747 was back this year, stronger than ever:

People

We ran into my good friend Brian, running ESD coms:

Jennifer and I also got to try a one wheeler:

I missed some parades this year, but at least got the Billion Bunny March:

Night pictures:

Jennifer and I had a 64x64 RGBPanel backpack

Fire

The Lama Fire:

The Mega Cake had great fireworks:

Sympathetic Resonance:

The Folly:

that fire was dicey, and dropped a lot amber and flaming stuff into the crowd

looked pretty though

And there were many more, hard to catch them all:

Vehicles

this is where all the street signs have been

awesome vehicle, like every year

cute

Of course, it gets better at night:

Some of my coworkers did those very cool high tech surf boards. We went to visit their camp:

they have their own radio system to track the boards across the playa, nice

I was lucky enough to try one out, they are tricky to ride and make sharp turns with

they look great at night of course

Mayan Warrior was still a favourite, with more upgrades:

But there are more, like Pulpo Mecanico and BAAAAHS:

Fewer fancy bikes than in the earlier years, but I found this one:

Of course, like everything else, it gets more fun at night:

fancy job on this bike

Temple

The temple had a weird shape this year, I can't say I loved it, but here are a few pictures:

The Man

Like every year, the fine folks doing a big BBQ on the man, were back. Sadly, I got a throat infection and had to get some medical help and sleep, so I wasn't up all night to see the sunrise:

in the meantime I'll take a grilled cheese sandwich, thanks :)

While my burn wasn't an all nighter due to my infection and need for sleep, it was still a great burn, and I left the next day to get home and get some rest (as well as better air for my throat).

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this report. Feel free to say thanks to me by simply sharing it with your friends, and see you on the playa in the future (or you'll see me at night with my lights).

Tips

Thanks

you can see the puffy capacitors and one of them died and took the motherboard with it

First, I tried to see if I could move all this to another VA Server I had laying around at home, a mighty dual P3 800Mhz. It would have been a downgrade, but would have brought the machine back up:

However, I quickly found out that the machine was way too old, and incapable of booting from Sata when a sata card was plugged in, or anything plugged via USB. Maybe the fact that the motherboard was from the late 90's had something to do with it :)
This time, I thought I'd be smarter and use the 2 unused Dell Poweredge 2950 servers I had sitting at home for a sunny day (maybe for up to 10 years. This time, I'd use a proper server and it would be easier :)

Also, I would finally upgrade to a 64bit kernel (my previous servers could only run 32bit, which started to be a problem with some software that was 64bit only, badly tested on 32bits, never mind code that needed more than 2GB of RAM (I mean technically you could run more than 2GB of RAM on a 32bit kernel, but it was through bounce buffers and non contiguous memory, with still a 2GB limit for each user space process).

But of course, I didn't look up that those servers dated from 2006 and were totally obsolete in 2019. I figured, it wouldn't matter, they were better than the previous even more obsolete free motherboard a coworker gave me and that I managed to fit in a VA Linux server case. Also, they had serial console and even remote serial console over network via a separate IP, luxury!!!

It also had nice disk hardware for SATA drives, so things were going to be great. I however found out that the required Perc Raid card (required because of the backplane the drives were plugged into and cabling), did allow some kind of Sata passthrough, so that I could do software raid with linux (I've never trusted hardware raid, it's always been too slow and vendor dependent). Sadly, it was terribly slow. I then went on the internet a bought some upgraded H700 Raid cards that were supposed to be faster. First I found out they needed new cables, sigh, but even once I got all of this, the entire system disk I/O was still unbearably slow.
In the end, with time running out (days had gone by while I had the old drives running off a server shell on my desk at home and serving queries and Email)

So this was the new server, looked nice inside:

Unfortunately I was forced to use the weird and slow raid card, which was still slow after upgrading to an H700:

4 Cores, 16GB of RAM, luxury in 2006 :)

Did I say it was slow? Here is a raid rebuild. I think reads were ok, but writes were terribly slow probably because they were forced to go through some writeback cache on the raid card that I did try to remove. Yeah, this first rebuild shows about 1 week for 7TB :-//

md3 : active raid5 sda6[7] sde6[6] sdf6[4] sdd6[8] sdb6[9] sdc6[2]
      7118325760 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/5] [_UUUUU]
      [=======>............]  recovery = 42.9% (611422712/1423665152) finish=3325.8min speed=4070K/sec

Interestingly, if I rebuild the array on the 7th drive, connected directly via Sata, it's 10x faster:

md1 : active raid6 sdg3[9] sda3[6] sde3[5] sdd3[7] sdb3[8] sdc3[2]
      419164160 blocks super 1.2 level 6, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/5] [UUUU_U]
      [======>.............]  recovery = 38.7% (40655068/104791040) finish=19.8min speed=53705K/sec
      bitmap: 1/1 pages [4KB], 65536KB chunk

The previous server was really built on happy thoughts and good luck, it's amazing it ran for 11 years and I didn't have any major double disk failure (I did have some drives I had to replace over time, but nothing major and never an emergency or with any downtime). This time around, I did things seriously:

I really really wanted to just put a big sata card and plug it onto all the drives, but the Dell backplane and drive power routing made it mostly impossible. So after the raid card upgrade, I realized it was a lost cause, and changed plans to boot from a 4TB SSD and use it as the main boot and data drive:

you can see the 7th drive sitting on top of the motherboard and using a spare sata port, and the 4TB SSD on top

Now, the 4TB Sata SSD, which I got for free after one in a set died an early death, taking all its data with it, did not fill me with confidence, but it was fast and fixed my slow raid issues, so I made the call to use it as a boot drive. Thanks to my btrfs send/receive snapshots setup, the SSD was backed up hourly to spare filesytems on the raid, and it would be easy to switch over remotely with virtually no data loss if it died.
I found out in Oct 2025 that it survived 6 years without dying. I still wouldn't trust it much, but it survived, so good enough :)

As laughable it was to setup what turned out to be a 2006 server in 2019, and putting aside the issues with very slow write speed through the raid card I never solved, this was the most overbuilt system I ever built

What filesystems looked like:

sdh4          400G  0 part  /mnt/btrfs_boot
sdh5          1.6T  0 part  /mnt/btrfs_pool1
md0           953M  0 raid1 /boot2 (spare ext4 linux boot/recovery system)
md1         399.8G  0 raid6 /mnt/btrfs_bootb (btrfs send/receive of sdh4)
md2           1.6T  0 raid6 /mnt/btrfs_pool1b (btrfs send/receive of sdh5)

Quad boot system:

/dev/sdi1          63   24191   24129 11.8M  1 FAT12
/dev/sdi2       24192   48383   24192 11.8M  1 FAT12
/dev/sdi3  *    48384 4011839 3963456  1.9G  b W95 FAT32

/dev/sdh1        2048       4095       2048    1M BIOS boot
/dev/sdh2        4096    2111487    2107392    1G EFI System
/dev/sdh3     2111488   39063551   36952064 17.6G Linux extended boot
/dev/sdh4    39063552  877924351  838860800  400G Linux filesystem
/dev/sdh5   877924352 4283699199 3405774848  1.6T Linux filesystem
/dev/sdh6  4283699200 4317253631   33554432   16G Linux swap
/dev/sdh7  4317253632 4585689087  268435456  128G Intel Fast Flash
/dev/sdh8  4585689088 7501476494 2915787407  1.4T Linux filesystem

Then 2 more raids with data:

This is actually the only version of magic I built and that didn't die. I only replaced it with, ironically enough, a duct taped frankenstein Raspberry Pi 5 that really doesn't look solid, but that I hope will work as I write this in 2025. The reason for the switch, is it uses 20x less power and is almost 3x faster, so it's pretty much 60 times more efficient and takes the power use from 400W-ish to 15W

Price of Power use

Price of power is no joke:

Silicon Valley Power (Santa Clara): $0.175/Kwh	$613/year
Palo Alto Utilities (Palo Alto): $0.22/Kwh	$771/year
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E): $0.425/Kwh	$1,489/year

Further reading

Ulrich helped out hand out CDs

Thanks Craig

Craig then started his massive 6H set:

Video summary:

After so many good tunes, the long night was over

The set is here: https://m.soundcloud.com/craigconnelly/ccsfotc19

As for SayMyName, trap is typically not my music, but I heard him at EDC and he played an interesting mix of trap with a few trance songs here and there, and put on a good show in general, so I figured I would go check him out. Sure enough, he was quite energetic and put on a good show:

Video summary:

Spanish steps, nicely done

Next, we went to the Japanese Garden in the golden gate park, had been there a long time ago, but it's been a long time, it was nice to visit again:

From there, we went to the presidio for nice views of the coast and the golden gate:

earthquake damage

Then, we went to another nice vantage point before it was time for dinner at La Folie: