Category Archives: Geek

Mental Note

Leave a non-optimized kernel installed on your system. You never know when everything is going to die and your K7 kernels aren’t going to boot on the new 686 processor.

Got the raid fixed up last night. Need to get the Nvidia Video driver going again, as well as clean up all the cabling and such.

Hardware has been ordered

Did a bit of research, hopefully I haven’t screwed myself by going too bleeding edge.

Getting a Core2Duo E6420, 2x1gb of Kingston 533mhz, evga 7300gt 256mb and an Asus P5B-E.

This is rather eery, I’ve never run an intel proc in my workstation. The times are changing indeed.

Workstation is dead again

Last night neo locked up hard, and after a reset the RAID5 didn’t come up cleanly. I was able to massage it back to life. Logged back in, took Carla home, and then crawled into bed.

Woke up this morning with a hard-locked machine again. Reset it. Issues with one of the disks in the raid and possibly the root disk as well. Didn’t have time to do much with it this morning, so I left it. I hate feeling homeless.

If a graphic designer comes up to you…

and it looks like somebody kicked his dog, don’t worry. Knoppix can fix it. I had said GD come up to me and tell me his flash drive wasn’t being recognized by windows on his machine and he had some photo’s on it from a trip last year he hadn’t backed up (lecture on that followed later). He wanted to know if there was anything I could do. I told him to leave the drive with me and I’d see what I could do.

So I popped our trusty friend, Knoppix 5.0.1, into the drive of my work laptop and rebooted. At the knoppix prompt:
knoppix: knoppix 2 dma

This will boot knoppix and dump you onto the console. I plugged the drive in and got a few errors about no partition table, but it was able to recognize the device info. It listed the device as /dev/sda. This led me to believe that the first section of the flash memory had finally died due to extended use (Flash memory does have a finite number of writes before it fails). So the first thing I did, being that it was only 256mb was take a raw dump of the drive to work on. The laptop has enough memory in it that the ramdrive is big enough to hold this. Other options are to the hard drive in the machine if it’s formatted with a FS that knoppix can write to or an external hard drive/flash drive. If you’re writing to a fat32 drive, anything over 2.0gb will be problematic.

root@knoppix# cd /home/knoppix
root@knoppix# dd_rescue /dev/sda rawdump

The first line moved our working directory to the ramdrive, the second one invokes the raw dump. During this time, you will most likely see errors scroll across the screen. Eventually, dd_rescue will get to a good part of the drive, and you will motor through. At this point, we can run photorec on the file.

root@knoppix# photorec rawdump

This will launch photorec and tell it to use the dump we’ve taken from the drive. Follow the onscreen prompts, and it will analyze the dump file looking for files that match the type you specified and put them in a recovery folder. At this point you can copy the recovery folder to a flash drive/hard drive/across the network.

At this point you burn the files to cd, have the graphic designer almost cry, then you lecture them about backing their shit up.

New headphone day

I’ve now got the last piece of equipment on the current list for the streaming setup. Today I went out into the big blue room with a stack of CDs as reference material. I picked up a set of Sennheiser HD-555s from a rather nice audio shop in Edmonton called Gramaphone. I managed to convince the little brother to finally get a set of cans as well, and he decided to get the same set I did.

I still need to decide what I’m going to do with the mixing console. I’ve been pondering building a sound-treated enclosure to put my mic in, and if I do that I’ll probably put it above an small incline for the board. Said enclosure would also give me the opportunity to build in a switch to turn the mixer on and off, as behringer neglected to provide with such. And because it’s dave, I would most likely put in some sort of light to illuminate the mixer. Also tied to the switch, of course.

After cleaning up a little tomorrow, I’m going to post pics of the new kit. It’s only right to include geek-pr0n with a post-toygasm entry.

Show Number 0

Last night made me happy because I found Jamendo. Tonight made me happy for a different, though related, reason.

Tonight, as I type this, the last three tracks on the playlist for my show tonight are rounding out. I’ve completed the first episode of “Take the Next Step” on Hypatia Media. For the last month and a half I’ve been doing private test streams but tonights show is the first official show. The first above board, completely CC licensed show. I’m absolutely ecstatic. It was brilliant, despite how sad it was. I was so excited to finally be picking CC music for the show that I forgot to get material together to talk about.

There’s definitely a list of things to be taken care of. I still need new headphones, I want to find some better software to stream with, I might need a new sound card and I want to have the live tags working for song info. But ultimately we’re alive. We have no idea where our fearless leader is but I don’t care. I’m just going to keep streaming, keep pushing, and hopefully keep hooking people in. I’ve got some homework for the week. I’m hoping everyone out there will heed my call and provide some bumpers over the next few weeks.

The Next Step You Take Episode Zero ( 63:23 )

Playlist for the show follows:
Continue reading Show Number 0

Day 2 of what I believe to be a 12 day break

I have spent all morning playing Wii Bowling.  I took my Mii, who’d never bowled before from 0 to pro.  I’ve now managed two 200+ games.

I fear I must actually do something with today or I will feel rather… unhappy with myself.  So that something is going to be installing working on a spam filter for my main mail server.  The time has come. Details to follow of what I do.