Month: February 2009

It Only Slightly Sucks Now

I think I finally figured out the problem I was having with syncing my iPod via Amarok. The key seems to be that some other KDE services need to be running in order for the iPod to be fully identified properly. Without those services, it shows up but gets treated like a generic, unidentified iPod and there’s no history for it to sync against.

The thing that made it inconsistent was that I wasn’t always running the full KDE environment. Sometimes I’d export it via X11 to my laptop, and after the recent reinstall I was running Gnome instead of KDE for a while. I should be okay as long as I keep using KDE as my desktop and always run it at the console, which shouldn’t be too big a deal as it’s about the only thing I use the console for nowadays anyway.

The Spam Rolls On

Subject: Be satisfied for life!

You know, most DMs fulfill that kind of Wish request by doing something like killing you instantly…

Subject: Enter the New Year without ED dysfunction

ATM machine. PIN number. ED dysfunction.

Subject: Your dream is reality You have 70% cut off in our software shop

Er, which 70% of me do you intend to cut off?

Subject: Amaze your gf with your new dimension

Hey, I have enough trouble navigating through three dimensions already.

Subject: Embarassed over what you have in your pants?

I swear, officer, I have no idea how that squirrel got in there.

(En)Closure

After all the trouble I had with various hard drive enclosures earlier, I’ve finally found one that works well: the Antec MX-100. No problems at all with reliability, speed, or physical construction quality with it so far.

I ordered two, so that I can finally put my offsite backup plan into effect. They’ll each have the same size hard drive in them, formatted as an encrypted filesystem and set up to be the same mount point, but only one of them will be hooked up at a time. The daily backup script will sync everything to the drive, and then once a month or so I’ll disconnect the drive, swap in the other one, and take the old drive to the office and stick it in a desk drawer. That way I’ll be covered even if fire, theft, or some other catastrophic event takes out my system and the currently-attached backup drive at the same time.

Unfortunately they only support SATA drives, and I still have a couple of 500GB and 750GB PATA drives that are still perfectly good, so maybe I’ll throw them into the gaming box. Or put one in one of the sucky old enclosures and hook it up to the PS3. Or play Frisbee…