Technomancy

I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

Now on the the WD I'd had to set the jumper on the back to limit the drive to SATA I (150Gbit/s) in order for my old Asus/Nvidia socket 754 motherboard to recognise it. It runs quiet and cool and should I need to replace it it'd probably be a bigger power supply, a new case, and PCI Express graphics card. This would be expensive and overkill when the Nvidia FX5200 graphics card is perfectly adequate for displaying digital TV. I digress.

The new samsung disk requires one to use their software (ES-Tool, well hidden on their website and the kind of thing that expects you not to need a manual) to adjust drive settings. The problem is the computer needs to be able to detect the disk before the software can adjust the settings, but when the problem is the computer can't detect the disk in the first place there's a bit of a problem. The software in question is a dos-based bootable CD. I try using the the much newer PC in my room, that can't boot the CD, something to do with an out of memory error. This might be something to do with said PC being a modern multi-core multi-GPU 64-bit machine. It can, however, communicate with the disk so I know it works. My trusty Dell Precision is similarly too old to cope with the new disk.

Finally I get both the disk and the setup software running on my mum's desktop, which appears to finally have a feature that's made it really useful. It's an early EMT-64 capable 3Ghz P4, not as fast or as economical or as stable as anything else in the house but today the damn thing redeemed itself. I, on the other hand, need a small dose of public ridicule for not checking how to set the drive to 150Gbit/s before ordering it.

Having complained lots, it is very quiet, draws very little power, and and is more than quick enough to serve as a repository for myth recordings, however it'll be obsolete by the time I can tell you whether I think mine's reliable.

I wake up eary Sunday morning to find a laptop outside my bedroom door. This is generally indicative of sermon-stopping technical issues. I go searching for explanatory notes and the all important power brick and find them next to the kettle where I usually find instructions for locating whichever meals I've managed to sleep through.

The problem: mother cannot get pictures into PowerPoint.

On further examination the pictures are kindly wrapped in a PDF. Great. Not wanting to be permanently empolyed as a human PDF to JPG converter, I asked google. Google's answer, any number of shareware, nagware, registerware and part-with-$69-before-you-discover-it's-crapware. Great. Further searhching suggests some online tools that are full of fail, some imagemagick wresting that's garanteed to make my presence required for future operations. apt-cache search pdf isn't helpfule either. I'm 3 cups of coffee into fail.

And then I remember my old friend the GIMP. That's the GNU Image Manipulation Program, not an aquaintance with interesting tastes. The GIMP is all to eager to open the PDF, but Vista takes exception to a window being opened for each page of the PDF. Not wanting to fiddle with importing a few pages at a time, I sit down at my mum's desktop, which runs Ubuntu. No complaints there about opening about 50 GIMP windows. Open Source takes the win twice.

EDIT:It is entirely practical to use the GIMP under Windows as described, but if you're doing a lot of pages, use the import range option to process about 10 at a time or you might run into a few problems.

I had to share this: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages . Awesome, somehow related to history yet wrong in the most amusing of ways.

I've not been posting here in a while, mostly through being occupied with another hobby that gets a similar descriptions. I'll post photos when I've dealt with the latest in a series of annoying tech issues.

I found a fantastic little article that attempts to explain Technomancy.

A shame it misses out on crucial techniques like having a set of MS-Dos floppies to hand as an example of what might happen should the hardware misbehave.

The article is published under a Creative Commons(CC-BY-SA) licence, so the article probably wrote itself given the authors description of Open Sourcery.