General updates

Been doing various things lately that have kept me busy.  I built a support board to go under the seat cushions on the blue sleeper sofa, so that it’s now possible to sit on it without it eating you.  I think it needs some Velcro to hold the cushions in place though.

Before that, I finished revarnishing the rail on the main deck with three coats of polyurethane (specifically Minwax Polyshades Classic Oak stain/varnish — product placement!), and sanded off the top of the kitchen bar and refinished it too.  Unfortunately, while the end of the bar top nearer the dining room came out pretty nicely except for the patch where I tried to recoat a dry-looking spot too soon and left some ripples, the other end has several bad spots next to seams where the varnish just couldn't seem to wet the surface and flowed away from the seams no matter what I did.  My best theory is that I didn't sand that end aggressively enough and still had a few tiny patches of the original finish left, and the new polyurethane couldn't wet that.  So at some point I'm going to have to do it all (or at least that end of the bar) again, and this time sand that end of the bar even more aggressively than I did.  But at least now, the surface is flat, smooth, and doesn't have any cracks.

Outside in the front yard, I took down the rhododendron thicket next to the driveway with the Mighty Fiskars Brush Hook of Doom (thank you again perspicuity), and have been working since on expunging excavating exterminating ... well, trying to tear out the root system.  This turns out to be quite the herculean task.  The stuff spreads both above and below ground; where the branches touch ground, they re-root, and where branches/roots touch in the ground, they join.

I have concluded that if rhododendron is not yet classified as a noxious pest, it should be.  Other invasive plants just take over the areas where they're planted.  Rhododendron installs a damned rootkit.

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On geekier fronts, cymrullewes' current laptop, ceridwen, is back in service again after a hard disk failure.  Since pretty much all of our data is on the main network server anyway, ceridwen really only needed enough disk to boot from, so we replaced the hard disk with a 16GB SSD.  As a result, ceridwen now boots literally several times faster, and in addition now has no shock-sensitive moving mechanical parts whatsoever.  Combined with the recent switch from a PCMCIA wireless card to a salvaged Intel ipw2200 mini-PCI internal wireless card, it should be pretty much immune to minor drops now.  I also managed to figure out the necessary magic details of drivers and configuration to get its cooling fans working (the reason the hard disk failed in the first place was overheating because the cooling fans weren't running), so it should run cooler now, though I may have to do more tuning on the thermal fan control zones yet.

(For reference, the notebook is a Dell Inspiron 4100, and in order to make the fans work you need the i8k kernel module and the i8kutils package, but before loading i8k, you must remove acpid and disable acpi in the kernel, otherwise as the moment the i8k module is loaded the keyboard and pointing devices will be disabled.  USB HIDs will continue to work, but the built-in ones will be out of action until you reboot with either i8k or acpi disabled.  Don't allow anything to reinstall acpid.)

Our critical shortage of network ports has been alleviated for now thanks to milktree, who just gave us a Netgear FS524 24-port 10/100 switch, giving us 40 ports (38 usable) with my existing FS516.  (Yes, the FS524 is now primary, the FS516 is daisy-chained off it.) This will work fine until I can spare the money for a new gigabit core switch.

milktree also gave us two computers, a Dell Optiplex GX150 that will become the Silly Goose's new machine as soon as I can replace the faulty RAM in it and finish setting it up, and an eMachines M5309 laptop.  The Dell is a 1GHz P3 which, with the new BIOS I just reflashed it with, should be able to take 1GB of RAM, and will be a big improvement over her existing PII/300 with its 256MB of RAM and dead CDROM, particularly if I can come up with an AGP video card for it a bit more modern than the Riva TNT2 that's in it now.

The M5309 has been giving me some frustrating, but also entertaining, times.  It had no hard disk in it, so I mounted the failed disk out of ceridwen as a scratch/sandbox disk to experiment on.  At first it was horribly, and apparently irremediably, unstable; my first attempt to install Gentoo on it failed because every time it tried to extract anything, bzip2 blew technicolor chunks.  After reflashing the BIOS with a BIOS for a French laptop that uses the same motherboard, I successfully got Debian 5.0 installed on it, but found that since the last time I used it, Debian has become unpleasantly hand-holdy, nearly as bad as Ubuntu.  (What do you mean, "The system administrator is not allowed to log in from this screen"?  This is MY machine, and I WILL DECIDE who may log in from where on it, fuck you very much.)  Debian also reported that the battery has about 32% capacity remaining ... so not really usable untethered, but enough for portability.

After doing some stress-testing, the BIOS update seems to have greatly improved stability (I'm given to understand that one thing the update does is slightly slow down the memory timing), so I blew away Debian, reformatted and surface-tested the disk, found no surface defects, and started reinstalling Gentoo.  This time it worked fine, including configuring and building a kernel, right up to the point at which I needed to emerge syslog-ng and dcron; it successfully emerged the first handful of dependencies, then errored out with a complaint that the C compiler (yes, the one I'd just built a kerrnel with) could not create executables.  And then the disk started going ka-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-chunka again.  Yup, disk surface may be good, but the controller's toast.  New disk time.

But at least I know it works now.  Once I get it set up, it ought to be a pretty decent laptop, despite the lackluster eMachiness name on it.  It's a 1.8GHz AthlonXP-M with a beautifully crisp 15.4" 1280x800 TFT screen, ATI Radeon M graphics (a Radeon 9200 equivalent, I understand), one of the nicest and sanest laptop keyboards I've ever used and a nice featureful (if slightly twitchy) Synaptics trackpad, built-in 10/100 Ethernet, Firewire, three USB2.0 ports, 768MB maximum RAM, and a mini-PCI slot for an internal wireless card — though it appears to lack an internal antenna, so I need to either find a mini-PCI wireless card with a built-in antenna in order to get usable wireless signal, or use a CardBus wireless card.  And, of course, it needs a new hard disk.  (I haven't decided whether to go rotating-disk or SSD yet.  The 16GB SSD I put into ceridwen would be a bit marginal for Gentoo, and 32GB SSDs are still pretty spendy.  On the other hand, I've read mutterings about overheating problems on the M53xx series, though I think adding some rather taller rubber feet to improve airflow to the cooling air intake on the bottom will help.)  It will become the new whitestar.

General updates

Been doing various things lately that have kept me busy.  I built a support board to go under the seat cushions on the blue sleeper sofa, so that it’s now possible to sit on it without it eating you.  I think it needs some Velcro to hold the cushions in place though.

Before that, I finished revarnishing the rail on the main deck with three coats of polyurethane (specifically Minwax Polyshades Classic Oak stain/varnish — product placement!), and sanded off the top of the kitchen bar and refinished it too.  Unfortunately, while the end of the bar top nearer the dining room came out pretty nicely except for the patch where I tried to recoat a dry-looking spot too soon and left some ripples, the other end has several bad spots next to seams where the varnish just couldn't seem to wet the surface and flowed away from the seams no matter what I did.  My best theory is that I didn't sand that end aggressively enough and still had a few tiny patches of the original finish left, and the new polyurethane couldn't wet that.  So at some point I'm going to have to do it all (or at least that end of the bar) again, and this time sand that end of the bar even more aggressively than I did.  But at least now, the surface is flat, smooth, and doesn't have any cracks.

Outside in the front yard, I took down the rhododendron thicket next to the driveway with the Mighty Fiskars Brush Hook of Doom (thank you again perspicuity), and have been working since on expunging excavating exterminating ... well, trying to tear out the root system.  This turns out to be quite the herculean task.  The stuff spreads both above and below ground; where the branches touch ground, they re-root, and where branches/roots touch in the ground, they join.

I have concluded that if rhododendron is not yet classified as a noxious pest, it should be.  Other invasive plants just take over the areas where they're planted.  Rhododendron installs a damned rootkit.

---

On geekier fronts, cymrullewes' current laptop, ceridwen, is back in service again after a hard disk failure.  Since pretty much all of our data is on the main network server anyway, ceridwen really only needed enough disk to boot from, so we replaced the hard disk with a 16GB SSD.  As a result, ceridwen now boots literally several times faster, and in addition now has no shock-sensitive moving mechanical parts whatsoever.  Combined with the recent switch from a PCMCIA wireless card to a salvaged Intel ipw2200 mini-PCI internal wireless card, it should be pretty much immune to minor drops now.  I also managed to figure out the necessary magic details of drivers and configuration to get its cooling fans working (the reason the hard disk failed in the first place was overheating because the cooling fans weren't running), so it should run cooler now, though I may have to do more tuning on the thermal fan control zones yet.

(For reference, the notebook is a Dell Inspiron 4100, and in order to make the fans work you need the i8k kernel module and the i8kutils package, but before loading i8k, you must remove acpid and disable acpi in the kernel, otherwise as the moment the i8k module is loaded the keyboard and pointing devices will be disabled.  USB HIDs will continue to work, but the built-in ones will be out of action until you reboot with either i8k or acpi disabled.  Don't allow anything to reinstall acpid.)

Our critical shortage of network ports has been alleviated for now thanks to milktree, who just gave us a Netgear FS524 24-port 10/100 switch, giving us 40 ports (38 usable) with my existing FS516.  (Yes, the FS524 is now primary, the FS516 is daisy-chained off it.) This will work fine until I can spare the money for a new gigabit core switch.

milktree also gave us two computers, a Dell Optiplex GX150 that will become the Silly Goose's new machine as soon as I can replace the faulty RAM in it and finish setting it up, and an eMachines M5309 laptop.  The Dell is a 1GHz P3 which, with the new BIOS I just reflashed it with, should be able to take 1GB of RAM, and will be a big improvement over her existing PII/300 with its 256MB of RAM and dead CDROM, particularly if I can come up with an AGP video card for it a bit more modern than the Riva TNT2 that's in it now.

The M5309 has been giving me some frustrating, but also entertaining, times.  It had no hard disk in it, so I mounted the failed disk out of ceridwen as a scratch/sandbox disk to experiment on.  At first it was horribly, and apparently irremediably, unstable; my first attempt to install Gentoo on it failed because every time it tried to extract anything, bzip2 blew technicolor chunks.  After reflashing the BIOS with a BIOS for a French laptop that uses the same motherboard, I successfully got Debian 5.0 installed on it, but found that since the last time I used it, Debian has become unpleasantly hand-holdy, nearly as bad as Ubuntu.  (What do you mean, "The system administrator is not allowed to log in from this screen"?  This is MY machine, and I WILL DECIDE who may log in from where on it, fuck you very much.)  Debian also reported that the battery has about 32% capacity remaining ... so not really usable untethered, but enough for portability.

After doing some stress-testing, the BIOS update seems to have greatly improved stability (I'm given to understand that one thing the update does is slightly slow down the memory timing), so I blew away Debian, reformatted and surface-tested the disk, found no surface defects, and started reinstalling Gentoo.  This time it worked fine, including configuring and building a kernel, right up to the point at which I needed to emerge syslog-ng and dcron; it successfully emerged the first handful of dependencies, then errored out with a complaint that the C compiler (yes, the one I'd just built a kerrnel with) could not create executables.  And then the disk started going ka-chunka, ka-chunka, ka-chunka again.  Yup, disk surface may be good, but the controller's toast.  New disk time.

But at least I know it works now.  Once I get it set up, it ought to be a pretty decent laptop, despite the lackluster eMachiness name on it.  It's a 1.8GHz AthlonXP-M with a beautifully crisp 15.4" 1280x800 TFT screen, ATI Radeon M graphics (a Radeon 9200 equivalent, I understand), one of the nicest and sanest laptop keyboards I've ever used and a nice featureful (if slightly twitchy) Synaptics trackpad, built-in 10/100 Ethernet, Firewire, three USB2.0 ports, 768MB maximum RAM, and a mini-PCI slot for an internal wireless card — though it appears to lack an internal antenna, so I need to either find a mini-PCI wireless card with a built-in antenna in order to get usable wireless signal, or use a CardBus wireless card.  And, of course, it needs a new hard disk.  (I haven't decided whether to go rotating-disk or SSD yet.  The 16GB SSD I put into ceridwen would be a bit marginal for Gentoo, and 32GB SSDs are still pretty spendy.  On the other hand, I've read mutterings about overheating problems on the M53xx series, though I think adding some rather taller rubber feet to improve airflow to the cooling air intake on the bottom will help.)  It will become the new whitestar.