nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category computers

On The Edge

October 29, 2007

Well, after a few months of on again, off again, waiting for carryout, eating lunch, toilet, and bathtub reading I finished On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore.

It’s quite worth reading if you have an interest in the history of Commodore / Amiga and are curious about where things went wrong. It assumes a fair bit about ones’ technical knowledge, just diving in and occasionally talking about how / why some decision or another was bad, but it’s pretty easy to read.

computersfound thingsmoved from livejournal

OS X 10.5

October 26, 2007

So… 10.5.

To start: Finder no longer sucks. I’m copying 85,000 files (old maildir archive) and it’s behaving as one would expect.

I’m having some weirdness sending photos over from my phone via Bluetooth. Not sure what is to blame yet.

New Terminal is interesting. Not sure if I prefer it or iTerm more, but the concept of building profiles which affect everything the old terminal could do is great.

Mail.app 3.0 seems nice. We’ll see how it does incorporating my old mail.

Stacks are excellent, particularly when /Applications is added as one.

Uhm… More later. Right now I’m particularly waiting for my music library to start copying back so I have stuff to listen to.

computersmoved from livejournal

Disk Shuffling

October 17, 2007

So, I think with the install of OS X 10.5 and some potentially new-to-me 500GB hard disks I’m going to set things up as follows:

/Volumes/Alpha (320GB): Boot disk, OS, ~, iTunes Music, Apps, other normal stuffs.
/Volumes/Bravo (320GB): Photos, Misc Storage, 60GB (or so) partition for Bootcamp running XP, which will also be usable from VMware.
/Volumes/Charlie (500GB): Backups
/Volumes/Delta (500GB): Backups

Backups are things like sync’d copies of most of the home directories on rowla.nuxx.net, data from the other volumes in the machine, stuff from my work laptop, and various other things.

I’ll then have two external 320GB disks left over, and I think I’ll use those for offsite backups and backups of my parents machine and such.

The really nice thing about going to all internal disks is that there will be an overall power savings (no need to run external adapters), SMART stuff can be polled from all drives, there will be less noise, and I will (hopefully) avoid some of the external drive problems I’ve had with OS X in the past.

The VMware / Bootcamp thing should also be nice, because then I can have just one XP instance available virtualized for normal use (development work, Quicken, etc) or full speed, running natively if I want to play some games. With the VM essentially having its own spindle it should run quite quick as well.

computersmoved from livejournal

rowla.nuxx.net Problems

September 14, 2007

Oh boy. I don’t need this now:

c0nsumer@rowla:~> dmesg
[...]
ad0: FAILURE - device detached
subdisk0: detached
ad0: detached
GEOM_MIRROR: Device hotbackup: provider ad0 disconnected.
c0nsumer@rowla:~>

No SMART warnings, nothing. On Sunday the disk reported a clean healthcheck with 17970 hours of power-on time. ad2 had 24195 hours reported in the same log file. I’d expect it to go soon, too.

Thankfully ad0 is one of the first two disks on a secondary pair of disks in the box which aren’t critical. I first copy backups to those disks then copy them from there down to my house each night. Having half of that mirror set gone isn’t horrible, but I’ll have to take care of it at some point.

Maybe I’ll just throw one of the 320GB disks I have here on there in its place and finally get around to moving all my backup drives here internally. Time to check prices on new disks at Newegg I guess.

UPDATE: For $120 I can get a 500GB Seagate which would go nicely in my Mac Pro as a backup volume. I could then use one of the 320GB disks it would be replacing it as the hot backup in rowla.nuxx.net. I’d then have a spare 320GB I could leave attached to the Mac Pro via the FW800 enclosure, turned off, as an offline backup of photos.

Or I can leave it and wait until the other half of the hotbackup mirror set (ad2) falls over. The replacement 500GB disk will probably be cheaper at that point and it’ll require no work to be done right now.

This will be decided tomorrow.

around the housecomputersmoved from livejournal

Connect360

August 26, 2007

For those of you like me who are new to the Xbox 360, and who also have Macs as their main machines, check out Connect360. It shares out your iTunes stuff automatically so that the music on it can be used in the 360.

I just finished getting the Professor of Giraffeology achievement (score at least 10 million in the tutorial) with ~16mil while listening to some Analord. That worked quite well. Even though the music in SG is good, having something you really know seems to make it even better.

Now it’s time to start thinking about leaving for work, as I’m supposed to be there from 2pm until things get done, and I want to return some stuff to Radio Shack and get some lunch on the way. (Probably a BK veggie burger, as they are decent and salty foods are sounding good. Last week I had purchased some phono plugs at Radio Shack and I can’t get them open. They don’t unscrew and pulling with pliars just deforms the connector. Stupid Radio Shack parts.)

computersgamesmoved from livejournal

OS X 10.4.10 FTP Client

August 22, 2007

Well, it seems I’ve broken OS X 10.4.10’s FTP client:

ftp> get ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso
local: ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso remote: ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (208,70,29,143,149,3)
150-Accepted data connection
150 4283032.0 kbytes to download
100% |*************************************| 2078 MB 142.81 KB/s --:-- ETA

That was unintentional.

computersmoved from livejournal