Geek

Old friends, now obsolete

Ah yes, New Years’ resolutions. Gotta love ’em.

However, I have too much stuff. There. I said it. I mean, I firmly believe in the William Morris quote, however, times have changed.

This collection of Elektor magazines I grew up with — obsolete.
A collection of GE Ham News that someone spent money on to have nicely bound — obsolete.

Byte magazines? Obsolete.

Creative Computing? Not quite yet obsolete.

And even if I can’t find it online, scanning and dumping* is better than storing the originals until my container is auctioned off one day.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m still keeping mountains of stuff. Just not… this stuff.

* Yes, Jason doesn’t like dumping. I’m not dumping anything that’s even slightly rare, so chill.

2015-01-14 by wrm Computers Electronics Geek Get Off My Lawn 0

Windows 7 on the Dell 910

I suppose the URL of this blog gives it away, so nobody will be shocked to hear that I’m often slow to adopt technology.

So I only recently moved to Windows 7 from Windows 2000. You see, there’s nothing really wrong with Windows 2000.

What is wrong is that the latest ChromeFoxEra doesn’t run on Windows 2000 any more, and the latest Flash plugins don’t plug into the earlier versions of ChromeFoxEra, and the older Flash plugins won’t play Youtube movies any more because of a completely misguided opinion that one can make it impossible to download movies off the ‘net if you use the latest greatest features of Flash.

Or something like that.

And with both my home PC and my work PC now running Windows 7 (Classic desktop theme, animations and special effects very much “off”) it was time to upgrade the Mini 9 from XP to 7.

Google gives many hits on how to do this. But those websites / blogs don’t exist any more.

Fortunately we have the Wayback Machine, which saved a copy of multimolti‘s blog which is OK and a copy of Rick White’s blog which is excellent.

So I followed that, except that I used the very excellent Rufus to make a bootable USB stick.

Peeve: vlite is a nifty tool, but it needs the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). Download vlite, 1.4 megabytes. Download WAIK, 1.4 gigabytes. Microsoft needs to take some lessons from Steve Gibson.

Vendor 197B, Device 2382 / 2383 : Card Reader from JMicron, download drivers here.

ACPI\CPL0002: Battery meter, install R192569.EXE.

Touchpad driver: From Synaptics. Yes, you have to download the 118 megabyte file for Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8, 32 and 64 bit. I guess it’s more convenient for them that way. And you then have to go to Device Settings / Settings to turn off tapping (which is the only reason I needed this driver anyway).

(http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/dell-mini-9-guides/2707-drivers-dell-inspiron-mini-9-910-a.html)

2014-09-10 by wrm Computers Geek 0

August 21st, 2017

In 1961, Frank Drake helped organise the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) conference. In preparation for his speech, he came up with the Drake Equation, which effectively multiplies a whole lot of unknown probabilities together to come up with a figure which may or may not tell us how many real live aliens there might be out there trying to communicate with us.

Drake’s Equation is little more than an interesting thought experiment, since every single variable is a SWAG. Still, people use it to come up with a figure that motivates them to aid the search. Nothing wrong with that.

But even if Drake’s Equation convinces you that there are many many civilisations out there, there’s reason to believe that the Earth is unique, or at least very rare, in one way. From where we stand, the sun and the moon both occupy about 30 arc seconds, or to put it differently, the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon and also 400 times further away.

Where the unique becomes sublime is when we have a total eclipse of the sun. If the moon were bigger, we wouldn’t see a halo. If the moon were smaller, it wouldn’t be a total eclipse.

Which is why Iain Banks, in his novel Transition, suggests that instead of watching the great American eclipse of 2017, you should rather be looking around. Many of the spectators might have hitch hiked a number of lightyears to observe the phenomenon.

2014-09-04 by wrm Farting around Geek 0

Truecrypt and physical hard drive errors

So you have a hard drive encrypted using Truecrypt. A very good solution to keeping data secure, but it does make your data more fragile. When* the drive goes TU, you can’t just run a recovery program on it, because encryption.

And of course so it came to pass. My hard drive developed read errors.

First thing, make a backup copy. For this you need a Linux box and ddrescue. And a large drive to recover to.

# ddrescue /dev/hdb /mnt/large-disk/diskimage /mnt/large-disk/logfile.log

(This takes a while, but when it’s done you can unplug your faulty disk, save it as much trauma as possible)

You now have an image of the whole disk. You want an image of the partition.

# fdisk -lu diskimage

Disk diskimage: 0 MB, 0 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2fa13928

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
diskimage 63 976768064 488384001 7 HPFS/NTFS

Your partition starts at “Start” x “Units”, which would be 63 x 512 = 32256 in this case.

# losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 diskimage

You can now attempt to recover /dev/loop0. I found this easier in Windows, so

# dd if=/dev/loop0 of=/mnt/nfs-volume/diskimage.tc

And then back in the Windows world, you can use truecrypt to mount diskimage.tc and if you’re very lucky your files will be there. If you’re unlucky, truecrypt won’t recognise the image as a truecrypt volume, and you’re in more shit than I can help you with today.

In my case, truecrypt mounted the volume but Windows did not recognise it as a drive (i.e. a corrupted file system). There are tools for this. Unfortunately most of them work on physical disks, not virtual ones. Thank Finagle for google, who told me about GetDataBack. Specifically, GetDataBack 4.25. Pointed it at the virtual disk (G:) and it recovered all my files with absolutely no worries.

* Not if.

2014-08-08 by wrm Geek 0

Yes!

2014-07-16 by wrm Farting around Geek 0

Thirty years later…

… I still think it’s a bloody good movie.

http://youtu.be/y-YHw1sqjL8

Here’s an interview for you.

The final act of ‘Top Secret!’ spoofs ‘The Blue Lagoon,’ a 1980 film starring Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins — a film that was the ninth highest grossing film of 1980, but hasn’t retained a strong presence in popular culture today. Despite the disparity of their original box office totals, today ‘Top Secret!’ is a more popular film than “The Blue Lagoon.’

2014-06-22 by wrm Farting around Geek 0