Teyrnon

I intended to be posting more this year but here is the second of March and this is my first post here since December. There really isn't that much going on of late. At least very little that'd make for interesting reading.

The biggest news of the month is probably that a section of the ceiling in my garage fell making a huge mess of broken glass from the large fluorescent bulbs, brownish dusty insulation, broken sheetrock, and sundry detritus that the previous occupants stuffed in the attic. The fluorescent light wasn't secured to a beam as it should have been, it was just attached to the sheetrock of the ceiling. It's not the first example of shoddy and ill thought work I've discovered in this house. I doubt it'll be the last, sadly.

In other news the Raspberry Pi I fiddled with off and on throughout 2015 has found a more long term use. It's now running a wiki I'm using for notes and whatnot. Would like to get add a RS-232 port to it so I can attach an X10 firecracker so I can set up cron jobs to turn lights on and off.

The headaches that plagued me throughout 2014 and 2015 are still with me and making me quite irritable from time to time. There isn't much to be done about it at this point. Curiously coffee with a teaspoon of ground cayenne pepper per cup has a really potent ameliorating effect. So far it's the most effective remedy for these headaches that I've found.

I've returned to working on a little writing project I've been dabbling with off and on for too many years now. I'm going to be in need of test readers for it before too much longer, I hope.

That's all for now.

The desk chair I bought a few years ago was recalled. Apparently the weld on the base has been known to break causing the base to separate from the seat. The potential for injury is obvious. I've been sitting on the chair just about daily in the years I've had it and haven't had the weld fail yet. Though looking at it, it's plainly visible that it's not a good weld. I wasn't going to bother with the recall until someone recently reminded me that people do visit me occasionally and many of those people are heavier than I am. I'm a fairly small person. Someone closer to average adult weight or heavier might be just heavy enough to break the weld. After more thought I went ahead and took it to the nearest store and got a gift card in return for it.

I had intended to buy a new chair while I was there but upon looking at the rather meager selection of chairs they had I couldn't find one that appealed to me.  At the moment I'm sitting on a rather uncomfortable stool as I type this. It'll be a week before I can get a ride to another store to look for a new chair.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to do in the meantime. I guess I won't be sitting at this console all that much. I'm still not really up to speed on the new computer and I'm still hoping I might be able to get the old one up and running again.

My lower back is starting to ache so I'm going to close here. I'll try to post something again soon.

The computer I use for just about everything is currently nonfunctional. A capacitor on the motherboard is blown. Until something can be done about replacing the cap the machine is unusable. Unfortunately for me I have no way to access that hard disk which means the project I'd planned to work on this week will be delayed. That was the only functional desktop I had that can handle SATA drives. The other fast machine in the house with SATA needs every cap on its motherboard replaced. Actually everything I'd planned to do this week will be delayed. There are an embarrassing number of files I'm now wishing I had copied to a thumb drive.

This is the trouble with working with older machines. Every motherboard failure I've ever had was due to bad caps. On the positive side they can usually be replaced.

This is a follow up to my post from last week. The first of two. A comment to that post posed a few questions that I felt called for answers too long to fit into a comment. I thought I'd address the technical side of things first.

When I was little I was a bit of a storyteller. I'd make up elaborate stories and tell them to anyone who'd listen. My father was encouraging of this. Certain other people weren't. When I was in the sixth grade someone suggested I start writing my stories down instead of simply telling them. I began just that. I filled several spiral notebooks with my scrawl. Most of these are lost. I think my mother threw them out when she found them.
( Read more... )

I find myself sitting here waiting for files to copy and this backup to finish. This morning I discovered that my file server is flaking out. It seems to be the hard drive. It's over 4 years old so a failure isn't entirely surprising.The file server itself is a Linksys NSLU2. It's been sitting quietly on a desk with its hard disk all these years. Once I've got all the files copied to an external drive my brother was kind enough to help me get today I'm going to shut the NSLU2 down and bring its hard disk over to my main system and see if I can get more information about what's happening than the rather unhelpful "scandisk failed" message it returned when I used its own disk scan option.

In other news I've changed my userpic again. It's a fairly old picture as evidenced by the hat I'm wearing. It's not the fedora I wore in the 90s nor is it a baseball cap as I've worn this last decade. I only dimly remember the hat in this picture. It seems to have a white puggaree. I don't think I have it anymore. If anyone can identify what kind of hat it is, let me know.

Don't you just love harddisk crashes and mystery plumbing leaks? If it's not one thing it's another.

The new batteries are here and have been installed. If anyone is interested in aging what a 15 year-old, heavily used UPS battery looks like I'll post pictures. Let me know. That's the one that the ravages of age are bad enough to really show up in pictures. The other two were just bulging badly and I don't have the lighting equipment to set up a shot that'll highlight that. The battery from the primary unit was bulging so badly it was difficult to squeeze it out of the case,

Now begins the process of determining if they all work properly. Fun times ahead.

I'm still somewhat offline as I write this. The frequency of the power outages seems to be increasing. I'm not sure what to make of the weird behavior of the UPS. Whenever there's a glitch it won't let me power anything up off it for several hours. Exceedingly annoying. If it's not working shouldn't just not work? Since my UPS has of late been my powerstrip plugging into the wall directly doesn't afford me enough outlets.This room has a shockingly limited number of outlets.

At anyrate measurements have been taken and the needed batteries have been identified and will very soon be ordered. Knock on wood.I figure in about two weeks everything will be back up and running.

In the meantime I'll be catching up on a little reading. Speaking of which could I get some book recommendations for cool things I might not have read yet? Which pretty well means anything published in the last four or five years, really. In particular I'm interested in any new space opera and urban fantasy novels.

I have a 200 Mhz Pentium MMX based machine that I bought (very) used in 2000. I got it to experiment with Linux without messing up the system I used for everyday stuff. After a few minor upgrades it worked great and I tried a dozens of different distros on it. It's been a very good, solid backup machine. Although every capacitor on the motherboard had blown by 2004 and all had to be replaced. It now has a bunch of oversized capacitors and is still running all these years later.

Since 2004 it became the machine I run FreeDOS on. There are several DOS programs I still use now and then. Largely stuff I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s. Of course, I have it as a dual boot with Linux. That's been proving a bit problematic as all of the major distributions these days are hideous on a machine that slow.

Today I decided to fix an issue I'd been having with the DOS partitions. Namely that I needed two of them instead of just one. That was relatively painless. Decided to install Damn Small Linux this time around for that side of things. That was not so painless. For whatever reason, they pulled a Slackware and assumed the boot drive was hda for the grub install and provided no way to change it. After a number of go arounds I almost opened up the case and swapped around the IDE cables. (My coordination has been bad lately thanks to this bug I had recently and I was worried about doing serious damage to things if I tried mucking about inside the case.) Instead I decided to try installing lilo instead of grub. Lilo, as it, turned out worked fine. After a bit I wrote a lilo config file pointing to both Linux and FDOS and installed it. Worked fine and I set to work updating FreeDOS.

While doing that it occurred to me just what patchworks these operating systems I use are. Version numbers of the key components are wildly divergent and sometimes it's a major pain to figure out what version of what you should be using. The large distributions make this easy by doing the work for you, but with something like FreeDOS if you're not doing a clean install you have to watch it or you'll end up with a mess. Though it goes very well with the hardware which is also a patchwork of disparate components that you can only hope and pray works together with a minimum of conflict.

While working on this I got to thinking of the various computers I used in the 80s. These were all largely fixed hardware sets without the wild variations you see on the modern pc landscape. I'm feeling very nostalgic for those days just now. It was just easier, things made sense.

Recently, at the request of a friend, I decided to try WoW. Got to looking and realized I don't have a machine that can actually run the client software. (Before you say it, sdaemon, no that box can't run WoW. The graphics adapter in it is sadly underpowered, it crashes if you try to actually use the drivers allegedly for it, and it may possibly be the culprit in a couple other strange quirks I've found in the system.)

In order to resolve an issue that's been of some concern to me over the past month, I've reinstalled Ubuntu 7.04 on the Compaq this evening. Now begins the process of bringing the system back up to speed.