http://www.aquarionics.com/category/computing en-gb Aquarion (nicholas@aquarionics.com) Site Admin (nicholas@aquarionics.com) Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:46:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2008/01/25/LoFi I am a qualified sysadmin. Whilst I currently am in a “I will never be on-call ever again” phase of my career (Very much like the “I will never drink again” phase of a hangover, with much the same future), the fear of people coming to your desk at 17:25 saying “The little lights have stopped flashing on my disk drive, and I’ve got a report for the board due,... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2007/03/24/Piracy “And this, this is just cheating.” “It’s a valid critical form, and it seemed to go down well.” “Pah. It got needlessly self-indulgent towards the end. The punctuation stuff? Far too self-referential. Avoid it in future.” “I should avoid talking about the form within the form?” “Indeed you should.” “Bit late,... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/05/18/Geek Levels of Geekness: Watching Anime DVDs Watching Anime DVDs on your Laptop Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook, which is displaying them on the TV screen Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook, which is displaying them on the TV screen, and using your bluetooth mobile as a remote control. Win http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/04/24/Secret_Lessons_Of_Tech_Geeks%2C_Part_Two Check to make sure there isn’t any chocolate melting on your laptop before you close it. This check will not reap results very often, but you will not only be glad that you did, you will have chocolate. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/04/24/Secret_Lessons_Of_Tech_Geeks%2C_Part_One When attempting to install your freshly burnt ISO, remember that booting is helped considerably by putting the CD in the drive with the pretty shiny side down. You moron. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2006/03/18/Woe Stage One. Buy new Powerbook. Also buy USB external hard-drive to back it onto. Do so regularly. Stage Two. Home desktop starts making clicky-whirring noises of death. Live with this for a little while, but eventually get The Fear for my data. Stage Three. Open up the USB external hard drive and rescue from it the IDE drive it stores things on. Put that into desktop. Stage... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/12/15/Web_in_a_nutshell This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general. In The Beginning was the Command Line just in case you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it recently. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/12/13/New_Flat_Adventures_-_Setting_up_IPCop How to set up IPCop with a Conexant ADSL Modem (AKA Dynamode ADSL PCI Modem) Put PCI Card into machine Put network card into machine Download and burn IPCop ISO Install it. Put the ADSL Settings in the ADSL Settings Page. Do something more interesting with the time you saved not [m]ucking around. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/11/22/Reminder People whose weblogs didn’t import cleanly into Gregarious, try again in the morning. http://www.caomhin.org/wibble/ http://www.bentbacktulips.co.uk/index.xml http://www.caomhin.org/linklog/index.rdf (Kevin? What have you done now?) http://www.dearg.org.uk/diary/index.php?flav=rss (Invalid... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/10/22/Bash_one-liner_of_the_day Mirage:~/Data/CD aquarion$ find . -name *.m4p | sed -e"s/m4p/mp3/g" | while read FOO;do BAR=$(basename "$FOO");locate "$BAR" | tail -1; done | while read FOO ; do cp $FOO .;done Okay, so I need to do the rm *.m4p afterwards, but still. So, question one, what does it do, and question two, what is it for? http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/10/16/Mute So, on the weekend I finally get BF2 and am able to play CoV… My soundcard craps out. DamnDamnDamnDamnDamnDamnDamn http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/08/21/Amiga Panic Lives Panic was the name given to my old Amiga 600, currently sitting in my grandparent’s spare bedroom along with all the other Amiga stuff, but I took a backup of its contents a couple of years ago (It had a 40mb hard drive which contained everything I owned. The computer I’m typing at has 100 gigabytes), and with that, WinUAE (which recently hit 1.0) and Amiga in a box I... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/07/27/Sun_Power_Point “We had 12.9 gigabytes of (Microsoft) PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, ‘What a huge waste of corporate productivity.’ So we banned it. And we’ve had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if they would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket.... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/07/09/Useful_Extensions Extensions Linky Open Selected Links In Tabs. I cannot live without this extension. FireMule Open ED2k links properly Hash Coloured Tabs Group tabs from the same website together Image Assistant Open This Image In PaintShop Pro Reload Every Reload this tab every $foo seconds. Add & Edit Cookies Artificially extend the life of your session... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/06/17/The_Vanishing_Mirage This is a tragady. It may also be funny. One of the reasons it took me quite so long to buy a laptop was because I don’t trust them. I trust, to some extent, every machine on this network, because I built it by myself out of the very-expensive-lego that is the PC hobbiests stock in trade. Zephyr was built by me, Boilingpoint is made out of old bits of Reef is made out of old bits of... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/04/25/Backups Back everything up to /dev/null. Takes seconds, and you can always get them back from /dev/random. Eventually. http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2005/04/16/Power_Failure Grr. My computer keeps randomly powering down. Sometimes it lasts ages, sometimes just minutes, but always it powers down like someone just unplugged it at the wall. I’ve made sure all the cables are reseated, I’ve tried unplugging things until it works – which it doesn’t – I even ran Memtest overnight to see if it was that and reinstalled Windows. The only thing... http://www.aquarionics.com/article/name/Making_the_Lexmark_Z515_work_under_Debian_Linux Lexmark printers are notorious for being crapper than a crap thing on St Craps day, whilst playing Craps in a pile of crap on the planet “Crap” within the solar-system “Crap”, especially under Linux. Nevertheless, I bought one. Because it was cheap. (It does, I should warn potential followers in my footsteps, come with a half-filled colour cartridge and no black.... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2004/11/21/Deadness So, it appears that the partition with /home on it is fine, but the partition with /data on it has crashed, trashed and burnt. Won’t even mount. /data, as it happens, contains /data/music, /data/web and /data/aquarion/projectsVault. So that’s a large pile of MP3s that have ceased to be, my backup of Aquarionics and all my archived projects, unless there’s some magic way of... http://www.aquarionics.com/journal/2004/11/13/Dayze So, the week then. Tuesday I got home from work at about 20:00 as usual. I discovered that atoll, my main server and home to my life, documents, music and email was thrashing at a 50.00 load average and the terminal was spewing out line upon line of “DriveSeek Failed” errors. This was not an unknown error, Atoll’s previous hard drive (Identical make and model) died in a...