omz13

As a few of you may know, I’ve started gaming. Now, I don’t normally do games, but Osmos is different… its a bit like life, it obeys the law of physics, the music (such as The Shape Of Things To Come from microscopics) is very trippy (and a bit like Hallucinogen), and despite its simplistic nature its highly addictive and great fun… so now you know why I haven’t blogged for ages… I’m chillin’ and trippin’ to Osmos and The Shape Of Things To Come respectively..

Remember that sweet DC945GCLF2 that I’m using to replace my aging hardware with? Its not as sweet as I expected. Somebody at Intel who bought the components on the BOM for these boards obviously went for the noisiest cooling fan they could get their hands on… its driving me crazy… so, I surfed over to Quiet PC and picked up a replacement fan: a Mini-Kaze 40mm x 10mm. Just undo the four screws attaching the fan to the heatsink, remove, unplug from the motherboard, and do the reverse with the replacement. Nice and easy. According to the specs its only pumping out 14dBA, which is pretty low. Interestingly enough, its also only sucking .06A whereas the original fan sucked .18A. Nice going Intel, not only is the original fan noisy its a power hungry too. Now, I know the profit margins on these boards is thin, which probably explains why they’re supplied with a cheap cooling fan, but these days we all expect out computer gear to be unobtrusive, so that means it has to quite and not cause the dials on the power meter to fly

For the past few years I’ve been using gentoo. Mainly as a server, but also as a desktop so I can learn/play with linux.

And then, two years ago, I picked up a MacBook. As as I tell anybody who listens, “It Just Works”. I spent a long time agonizing before I bought the MacBook. Was I prepared to turn my back on Windows and become a follower of Steve? With things like Parallels and VM Ware, I could run Windows too, so that eased that issue (and there are two Windows applications that I absolutely must run: Visio and FrameMaker). So after visiting the local Apple Reseller and developing a case of what could be be described as “lust”, I picked up a Black Mac Book. Sorry, the white one just felt wrong, and I wasn’t quite prepared for fork out for a 15″ Mac Book Pro (not to mention that those babies are heavy to lug around).

Now, when people speak of Apple and OS X, everybody tends to think of its über-slick GUI; but under the hood its all unix. Not only is it unix (its Darwin which is based on BSD), its certified too. Its the real deal. Now, while I like eye-candy as much as the next dude, the combination of eye-candy atop and certified unix underneath get me more than a little excited.

Two years on, I spend 99.9% of my time in the land of OS X, and about 0.1% ssh’ing into my gentoo system to do some BOFH maintenance. So I’m ditching gentoo for FreeBSD, because two years of BSD on OS X have warped my mind and themy future is BSD/unix and not linux.

At the same time, the hardware running my gentoo systems is getting a bit old, so I’m replacing that too. Instead of getting some ugly el-cheapo black or beige tower, I’m going for a mini-ITX based solution using the Intel DC945GCLF2 board, which means a sweet dual core Atom-based system that is not going to make much of a dent in the electricity bill and take up hardly and room too.

Finally, wordpress 2.7.1 is available as a gentoo ebuild, so I’ve done the emerge and webapp-config dance, and upgraded this site.

The more eagle-eyed readers may have noticed my recent lack of posts to this site. This has been caused by a number of factors, not least of which is that I have been diagnosed with a bit of a medical condition and have been taking things easy whilst I pop the medication and wait for things to sort themselves out, which they should do, given time. Fortunately I was diagnosed very quickly and the treatment appears to be going well.

Further to my earlier post about The 56 Geeks Project, Scott has, as part of the Build A Geek Project, inked my very own geek: The Caffeine-Powered Geek. Those who know me know that I tend to drink coffee in humungous quantities.

Here’s the announcement on the EL site, and as you can see Scott’s other custom geek released today is The Chocolate Geek, which is quite funny since I have a bit of a chocolate addiction too (although more for white than Rashid’s dark chocolate).

Today, I had a few hours to spare, so I bit the bullet and upgraded WordPress to version 2.3.1, which brings me, your humble scribe and site administrator, a few benefits (and also hopefully a few less security holes, etc.). The main benefits being native tag support and an inbuilt editor that now works with Safari and not just IE. As the server is running gentoo it was a matter of typing a couple of lines into the bash shell and the upgrade was almost done… a quick visit into the admin pages to upgrade the database, and the site was up again. When I need to make a few behind the scenes tweaks, with 2.3 I can now use the Maintenance Mode plugin, so this was installed and activated whilst I did things like import the article tags from Ultimate Tag Warrior so that they are now managed by the native engine, and upgraded the theme from Copperleaf Plus 1.18 to Fluid Blue. I hope everybody likes the new theme and layout. I have tried to keep the layout nice and clean, and the first page has been greatly simplified.

Those who subscribe to this site using RSS will notice that articles now have a copyright banner and a link to the original article.This is all being done by a spiffy WordPress plug-in called FeedEntryHeader.How did I discover this wonderful plug-in? As ever, it came from one of the feeds that I read: Column2. In an article called Fun with feeds, Sandy talks about FeedEntryHeader, and refers back to an earlier article (on how her feed was abused) which explains why these things are sadly necessary.

Well the storms have now hit us here in Luxembourg.

Here in the northern part of Luxembourg we’ve had two blackouts lasting about 95 minutes and 60 minutes… the duration was longer than we had contingency planning for, so the batteries in our UPS were exhausted and everything safly shutdown and came back on again when the juice returned. This is only the second time that we’ve experienced a long duration blackout that’s exhausted the batteries, but it does show you can never have too much UPS on tap.

Many roads in Luxembourg have been blocked either by falling trees or flooding as the local rivers and streams have burst their banks; as of one hour ago the local authorities are reporting 324 incidents! Fortunately the trees on our land still appear to be intact, and we’re over 100m higher than the local river so no need to worry about being flooded out.

The wind appears to be lessening, so I wonder what the view outside will be like on the morrow.

p.s. I’ve been thinking of installing my own power generator, and beefing up the UPS system, and the recent weather is making it more of a priority.

When I flicked th switch to only allow registered users to post comments to this site, I though that the amount of spam I would have to deal with would stop. And, in fact, it has. Its been great not to have to deal scanning through and deleting hundreds of spam comments.

But, now, I’m starting to see pingback and trackback spam instead. Groan. So now I’ve enabled askimet, a wonderful service provided by the folks behind wordpress (the software that manages this site) to help keep this out.