CPU fans (by alaric)

Ugh. The CPU fan on my home file server died on Monday. I'd been suspicious of it in the past, since the machine kept hangling oddly, but opening it up showed a fine spinning fan, so I assumed it was just bad luck.

But the day before the kernel paniced deep within VFS locking code, during a dump. And after a reboot, gcc threw a signal 11 and died, but worked when run again. Then the machine paniced again on Monday. so I rebooted into the BIOS to look at the hardware monitors (the NetBSD envstat drivers didn't find anything they liked in my chipset, alas) and found the CPU at 75 degrees.

Uhoh!

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Colour (by alaric)

Not a lot of people know this, but...

...computers these days handle colour really badly.

Now, most people are happy with computers representing a colour as 'levels of red, green, and blue light'. But this, as we shall see, is dreadfully imprecise... Read more »

Structure of the Software Industry (by alaric)

Much vehement ranting has been written about Microsoft's anti-competitive activities.

And many have ranted back that the capitalist system is based around companies competing as hard as they can; survival of the fittest then ensuring that the most efficient competitor wins.

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Cute pictures (by alaric)

Jean seems to be having a cute day today.

Babywearing (by alaric)

I've been quite intrigued by the idea of Babywearing, both for me (so I can carry Jean while I work) and for Sarah (so she can carry Jean further with her back problems).

So today I found a big enough sheet, and decided to give it a try:

It's working pretty well - I'm still a bit nervous about bashing her on things, but she seems to be quite happy when worn (either looking around with interest, or falling asleep), and I like looking after her while I'm working!