This morning, I went downstairs. It was chilly, and the light outside was slightly grey. I lit the fire.
This brought about intense nostalgia!
My mother's house was mainly heated by fireplaces, so this is the kind of thing I would have been doing on non-school days during late autumn and winter when I was a kid. And for some reason, I've always liked this time of year more than the summer. It's a time for staying indoors, looking out into the twilight, as I worked on exciting projects, alone or with my friend Lorenz.
It also reminds me of a time when computer games were more fun. Indeed, I was struck by a strong desire to play StarGoose.
Looks like I'll have to resurrect my 486 and install DOS, though...
Mmmm, my fanless mini-ITX motherboard is now running.
NetBSD is happy with it - had to deal with fxp0 turning into vr0 and the UPS being on tty00 rather than tty01 (it only has one serial port), but apart from that, all is now fine.
So all my files are back!
Right, now to resume the backup job I was in the middle of when the server died... always a nasty time to have a server death...
In the meantime, for the BSD geeks out there, here's my dmesg:
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A friend of my mother's (who I have never met), upon hearing my mother was going to become a grandmother, decided to make the baby a rather special spiderweb shawl.
Make no mistake, this is a massive undertaking - something between knitting and lacemaking, as far as I can tell. It certainly looks ornate.
Anyway, since we now have unpacked the camera and the photo printer, and got hold of more photo printer paper, we were waiting for a nice day to take a good picture to send to the maker of the shawl, showing it in action, as a thankyou. And today that weather came, so here's the picture:
Here's a close-up:
Just imagine how long it must have taken to carefully make that delicate thing. Yes, I know, Jean took 9 months - I was talking about the shawl 🙂
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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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...
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Alaric | alaric | 
Sat 5th Nov 2005 12:21 pm | 
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