Ubuntu mounted an HFS+external drive from our Macs without complaint. This is good.
Blog
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ill-advised name, great store
BM-Electronics swapped my ill-fated nVidia card for a shiny fast MSI ATI PCIe card with no restock fee; yay BM!
They’re rapidly becoming my favourite computer store; they always have what I need, and it always does what they say it does. It may look a bit grubby, but it’s great
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almost as much fun as X-CAD Designer
Just played with QCAD for a bit, and remembered how much fun I had doodling with my ancient Amiga CAD package.
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okay, which wise guy …
… made PCIe slots able to hold but not use AGP graphics cards? In the old days, there would have been a key in the slot to make it impossible to fit an incompatible card.
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nice bike
I found a picture of the bike I probably enjoyed most of all I’ve ever owned:
It was originally a 19967 Gary Fisher Nirvana, but by the time this picture was taken, the only original things were the frame. the stem, and the beautiful curved bars. Everything else was swapped out, mostly due to wearing it out from my daily commute.It wasn’t that it was a very expensive bike. It was just right; a nimble climber, nippy through traffic, yet stable enough to be ridden home when tired.
I still have the saddle; it’s on my Brompton. I gave the bike to Eddie Moore before we left.
I wonder if he still has it?He still has it. -
Goodbye, childhood
Goodbye:
- headache glue cracking from finger tips
- badly-painted pilot with obvious thumb-prints
- squint and/or torn decals
- undercarriage installed backwards, if at all
- spilled tin of Humbrol enamel
- leftover sprue rattling in cardboard box with an unidentified piece still attached
- curious v-shaped stand that never quite stood level
- hung squintly from bedroom light by white thread until dusty wing missing from too many runins with parental heads
- taken down for final flight whirled round head on string until dashed against clothespole or arcing up up into neighbour’s fir tree (it’s still there today)
- when older, packed with cotton balls nicked from sister, doused with turps, crashed flaming kamikaze onto the compost heap (sorry dad, your onions never did well on paint thinner and burnt plastic)
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mame is lame
I suddenly got a retrogaming jones on, and had a strong need to play Robotron. So I downloaded MAME and some ROMs, but no dice — every archive was missing files. Seems that to get the few games I need, I have to download a 16GB torrent of ever game that MAME supports.
My arcade game sensors withered about 18 years ago, so nothing past about 1988 registers with me. You could probably fit every pre-’88 ROM onto a couple of floppies. And it’s not like I’m not allowed to play the ancient Williams games; I have the Arcade Classics CD somewhere which has the games in licensed (but MAME-incompatible) form.
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back to 32-bit
I think I’ll have to install Ubuntu for i386 on the Sempron box, as too many hardware things don’t work. At the moment, I’m stuck with unaccelerated graphics and wired etherent; the via graphics driver isn’t yet 64-bit clean, and none of my wireless adaptors have 64-bit drivers, either.
Maybe at the next release I’ll go 64-bit.
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Maybe it was too easy …
Configuring the rest of the Sempron box has been a slog. It seems that there isn’t a single wireless adaptor that works with 64-bit Linux. I might have to resort to a wireless ethernet adaptor, like the D-Link DWL-G820. They’re not cheap, but they may be the only option.
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the computer does work
Picked up the new computer from Canada Computers yesterday. High-end it isn’t, but it’s more than adequate. It’s an AMD Sempron 3000+ (on a Foxconn K8M890M2MA-RS2H motherboard), with 1GB RAM, 80GB SATA disk and a DVD±RW drive. There was change out of $400, including tax.
It’s running Ubuntu for AMD64. While there are a few things I don’t have configured, it was all installed in under an hour. It reminds me a bit of OS X. There’s one thing it does better than the Mac; it knows about duplex printers, and assumes you want to be able to print duplex. Under OS X, you have to choose two-sided every time you print. Thanks to Davey for originally putting me on to Ubuntu. My life’s too short to mess with linux configs.
Now I need to move the old hard drive over as a spare, and fit the various cards from the old machine.
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kaboom!
From Apple’s Battery Exchange Program iBook G4 and PowerBook G4, it looks like I’ve got one of the defective ones. It’s good that I’m getting a new battery, as I’ve noticed this one doesn’t have the life it used to.
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worst geolocate ever
Never had my GPS being so far out. It used to say here was 28.59742, -81.21251, but now it’s saying 28.59603, -81.21274. That’s about 150m off.
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east coast, but further west
Strange to think that I’m on the east coast, but actually further west than home in Toronto. That whole curving away to the Gulf of Mexico thing will get you if you’re not careful.
The strange thing is, if you take my current longitude, and the latitude of our house, you get a point near Rte 16 near Brussels, ON that I’ve been through on the way back from the wind farm. That’s like, y’know, stuff, and some like other stuff too, whoah!
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eBay.ca: music tapes 2nd imaginary symphony /neutral milk hotel (item 200017937813 end time 22-Aug-06 21:04:40 EDT)
eBay.ca: music tapes 2nd imaginary symphony: one of Julian’s original CD-Rs is up for sale. Looks like it’ll go for over $100; eep!
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furthest south
I am in Orlando for work, which is probably the furthest south I’ve ever been. Even southern Japan was further north than this.
There are good lizards here.
