No more CPU fans (by alaric)

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: Read more »

Spiderweb Shawl (by alaric)

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 🙂

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!

Read more »

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.

Read more »