@nthony

There have been many square ones. There will be many more, I hope. I recently found this on my shelf - well I say found - I knew it was there... but I took it out, looked, read, remembered.

The Sinclair ZX81 for me was the start of what I do now. Early eighties computing involved a membrane keyboard, just about enough memory to write something functional before spilling into screen RAM - with games you could stop while loading and look through, and possibly even re write yourself (seriously - 1K RAM, 8K ROM, think about that). It was a world of old humming black and white TV sets for me, with fizzing resolution, and a long pause when you pressed New Line. It was a beginning. My beginning with this fascination that still plagues me. [ READ MORE ]

Upgrades. Today saw the addition of a second processor to the backup/secondary server, along with accompanying voltage regulator module, and heat sink. Two spare drives had their firmware flashed, and prepared for use, and short of the now overdue battery backing (*stamp stamp stamp*) for write cache enabling on the secondary host (while I have a spare 64 bit U320 RAID controller with batteries... there is no internal DB68 connector, grrrr) - all is now done and dusted on a hardware front. Now just for the remainder of the data / mail migrations! It is surprisingly cathartic to be be making with the "Do as I do" as opposed to the "Do as I say" if that makes sense. [ READ MORE ]

Yesterday saw a minor curiosity of one of the domains I look after getting a bunch of attention. It is quiet around here, but relatively shouty yesterday as a peak level of 2 emails a second where knocking at the door to come in, and being politely rejected with "no, try again later". Curiously enough, they where not trying again, these where mostly unique one off mails, from mainly .JP .BR and .BD (yes I had to look it up too - Bangladesh of all places). Like some kind of slow motion mailbomb. But to what ends? [ READ MORE ]

...
Hit http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com lucid-proposed/universe Packages
Fetched 11.1MB in 29s (375kB/s)
...

... I read as I do an update of Ludic Lynx before shutting down for the evening. Half speed download. I recall once upon a time downloading an NT service pack of 15MB ... and it took an entire day, and several attempts without it disconnecting. [ READ MORE ]

Hoarding. I am not bad. I am not like the people you see on obscure TV programmes who never throw things away... but I do sometimes look at things and think "I will need that again". To this end for technical things I have two rather sizeable containers for said things, one marked cables, one marked hardware.

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You know sometimes when you get that "is it me, or is it everyone else?". Well the other day I had one of those that was specifically "everyone else". MOST reassuring.

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This last weekend we took a trip out to Eglwysbah to it's annual Agricultural an Horticultural show. "Pimp my bull" - as well as sheep, lamb, horse and so on. Much oiling, combing, trimming and general beautification. Amazing for an 'outsider' to witiness. Add in some chair sized cabbages, and the BEST bara brith I have ever tasted and you have a fine day out.

A while back now, I used to play IL-2 on the PC (Ilyshin 2 being the first real multirole plane, albeit of a rugged Soviet design). Pretty much the only flight game since Falcon3 (back in the days when hills where green vector pyramids) that captured my attention for more than a fleeting moment. The involvement in the dogfights, the thinking in groups, judging the physics - great stuff.

Anyway - demo is out on xbox360 for IL2 Birds of Prey - 1.2Gb download.

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Last night I was reminded that I can think, learn, do - despite my advancing chronological age, and greying hair.

I decided that I wanted to design-prototype-build a better wallet/slip case for my laptop. This is quite a big thing - so I thought I would see what I could do for something smaller - say - my phone, and thus a minor adventure involving mess, sketches, and all manner of other stuff started within the confines of the dining room table. [ READ MORE ]

A long time ago I used to trouble myself with the physics of braking - moreover friction. Size of the friction surface versus the force required taking into account heat but leaving out compound. A school project I seem to remember went with smaller shoes higher force - but I was never sold.

Having gone through the (necessary) death is your nemesis of the CBT and being shown the contact area of various bikes types. On running onto the dry slate at work I was surprised to see how wide it was. SO, I am now left with power to weight calculations to figure out, and contact area per tonne still left weighing on my mind. 'Getting out more' on my ToDo list. [ READ MORE ]