I was generating some thumbnails for the gallery, when all of a sudden, it became unresponsive. The power light was on, nothing else was. A sure sign of overheating. I removed the power cable, powered it back on, and watched the CPU fan. It went at about 3RPM whilst making some ongodly scratching sound. It was dead. I’m awaiting a replacement heatsink/fan from the good folks at ebuyer. I’m a bit upset that my attempts to temorarily move the server software to another machine resulted in failure. That might be one thing I sort before I bring the whole thing back online. The server software is a bit of a mess!

Right, moving on. I’ve really not got much that I can type about. Most of the time when I’ve been in the house, has been playing some of the games that Steam have had on offer over the past couple of weeks. Therefore, not that anyone cares, but here’s a quick run down of some of the shit I’ve purchased…

Peggle Complete Pack 6.99 GBP

Yeah, Peggle.

I originally discovered this at work, when it was downloaded as a demo on the works PS3. I played it until I completed it, which took me all of 10 minutes, as the PS3 demo is very short. It was available for the PSP too, and after Kris at work purchased it, it became a bit of an urban legend after he posted this on facebook…

… with “Peggle on the toilet” becoming a short-lived catchphrase for those who also liked the game.

The “Peggle” phenomenon wore off, until the recent sale on Steam, where I purchased both versions of Peggle (original and “Nights”), then posted this on FB…

Admittedly, I have yet to take my laptop into the toilet and enjoy a nice steamy peggle, but at least the opportunity is there…

Puzzle Kingdoms 0.80 GBP

80p well spent. Saying that, the game doesn’t need a storyline. Expect me to know the puzzles are going to get harder as I play though the game. Like Peggle, this game works on my laptop.

Super Laser Racer 0.75 GBP

Glad this was only 75p, because this wasn’t 75p well spent. I don’t enjoy this game at all, despite some of the music coming from the Amiga music legend that is Bjorn Lynne. The music is by far the best part, as the gameplay is incredibly basic.

Shatter 1.75 GBP

Talking about good music, the soundtrack to this one is jizz-tastic. The game iself is simply Arkanoid on acid (or, Batty on acid for those who remember this awesome Spectrum game). It’s very easy, however, with extra lives being thrown out at regular opportunities. But, back to the music. I love it. The soundtrack is apparently available for almost 10 times the cost I paid for the game. As much as I love it, I’ll not bother.

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage (ROW) 1.70 GBP

I loved the Burnout franchise on the original Xbox. This game appears to be an xbox game , converted to PC, simply so they could show off some odd ragdoll physics engine that the manufacturers wanted to sell. Each level contains several thousand objects that can be knocked flying, though you do have to raise one eyebrow when a fence you make contact with can go the same distance as a water tank. The ragdoll physics enginemakes you raise another eyebrow as several mini-games cause you to fire the driver out of the car windscreen and control the flailing corpse in such tasks as hitting a wire mesh fence as high as you can, knock down as many skittles as you can, and skim the dead body across a swimming pool as if you’re skimming a stone across a pond.

The music is an absolute abomination, presumably from several shit indie bands. I think there’s about 5 tracks, all sound exactly the same as the last. You apparently can’t change the music. After the sale, this has gone back up to £16.99. Despite all of this, I have enjoyed playing it, but it’s not even woth close to full price. Wait until it comes back on a sale.

EDIT (SEVERAL WEEKS LATER): Good news everyone! Turns out you can delete all of the music files – just browse to…

\steamapps\common\flatout ultimate carnage\data\music

and you can delete all of the files in there. You’ll still get the game of which tune is meant to be playing, but obviously, you get no music! Oddly, the files are simple .ogg files, so I was hoping it might support custom .ogg files, but after creating a couple, it didn’t seem to recognise them. This game is also infinitely more enjoyable with a gamepad.

You can return to looking now.

Oh, OK. For those who didn’t see it on facebook…

That is all.

Other things contributed, such as the fact that I’ll only be able to use it when Daddykins doesn’t want to watch the telly. Also, life is too short for gaming. I suppose I could say the same about blogging too! On that subject, I’m glad to see that Chad is still reading, though not commenting.

Seriously though… nah, not my scene anymore. I made the same mistake with my original xbox. It got hammered for a week or two, then became an ugly, very dark green paperweight, before being shoved in a cupboard for three years. It would have still been there if I hadn’t been given a load of games for free, and somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen with the PS3 any time soon.

Hopefully, this will answer the question I get asked occasionally… “When are you getting a PS3?”

I’m tempted to put something in its place, as in some type of media server, but I don’t know if/when that’s going to happen. I’d comment a bit more on this, but I’ve just finished a nightshift, and am considerably goosed.

While I remember on, unfortunately, it’s bad news for the webcam on this site, I’m afraid. You may remember that it used to catalogue my entire life for many years. Unfortunately, since I have now upgraded to Windows 7, my Logitech Quickcam 4000 simply will not function on it, which means even though it’s not actually done so for many years, it’s never going to return. And considering that I rarely use this site now for anything remotely “recent”, I can’t see me investing in a Windows 7 compatible model. It’s a bit of a shame. I always trusted Logitech and their “futureproofing”. Unfortunately, it seems that I was wrong to do so. I can’t even get the driver to begin installation, although I did get the “setup” screen by changing a command in the setup.ini file.

While I’m geeking about computers, I might as well make a mention of the newest hard drive in my 1TB commection. I have 4 drives at 1TB. 2 internal ones in daily use, and 2 external ones to back up the internal ones. Buying a new drive was an easy decision for me to make, especially as someone I know lost pretty much his entire life when his hard drive died in his laptop. The trip to Maplin also involved the first trip to the store formally known as the Euro Trade Warehouse, now called usave. Those of you who followed the blog before the mass purge earlier this year will remember some of the classic things that has been purchased by the Percivals, such as the radio toilet roll holder…

You’ll not be surprised to find this still gets regular use, as a toilet roll holder, clock, and radio when somebody is in the bath. Altogether, this was a worthwhile purchase, and one that we have had for over 6 years now. This means, however, that the plastic’s started to turn yellow, which means it doesn’t look as fresh as it once did…

Anyway, back to the other days’ Euro Trade Warehouse usave purchases. I didn’t get that much, to be honest. Instead of coming out with a black binbag full of tat, I came out with a few huge crates to store my tat in, for you see, next week will see the 2010 edition of “Life Laundry”, where I go through the stuff which I’ve hoarded over the years, and bin as much of it as humanly possible. I’ve got plenty of stuff to chose from, and after only an hour at it, I already had a load of stuff landfill-bound. There’s also the fun prospect of actually cataloguing what I’ve got, and which box it’s in for future reference, should I actually need any of it again.

One thing I did avoid buying in Euro Trade Warehouse usave, were these “specialist” knives…

Oh, and while I remember, yes, yes, I know I haven’t updated much. That beast of a thing called “a life” is keeping me away from the computer. You may find I’m a little silent on everything at the moment, even flickr. In fact, that image you see above is only the 6th image (5th photo) I’ve published on there in 2010. In fact, let me know you a little league table of what I’ve done over the years. Here’s a quick rundown on previous years stats…

Jan/Feb 2007, 176 photos.
Jan/Feb 2008, 612.
Jan/Feb 2009, 68.
Jan/Feb 2010, 5.

I blame the weather, I really do.

Whilst I was looking for a way to lessen the noise, I moved the wires around the CPU fan, even though I know they had nothing to do with it, and managed to catch my finger in the CPU fan, shearing one of the blades on the fan, and leaving my finger with a nasty red blotch on the tip.

This means that the fan no longer works, and therefore Beastbits is out of action for now. And I have a poorly finger to attend to.

Anyway, in response to Noscere’s post, I’m going to post some of the WordPress plugins I use, just so you know what goes on “behind the scenes”. Note that I won’t mention security related plugins here!

First up is Akismet. Nothing really much to say about this particular little utility. It saves me having to delete spam, and with just over 45,000 spam comments at the time of typing, it’s saved me some work!

Secondly, there’s iMax Width, and no, it’s nothing to do with the branch of cinema. It forces any image I post on here to a maximum width of 500 pixels. Normally, this is the case anyway, as most of the photos I post come from Flickr, which automatically have a width of 500, but I’ve seen on a couple of occasions, I’ve posted one of the bigger sizes, meaning that if this plugin wasn’t there, the page would look like shite. And what do you mean by “it does anyway”?

Next up is Stapress reloaded. When work stalled on the original Statpress plugin, several spin-offs were released. This is just one of them. I’m not sure if work has halted on this too. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still usable. Unfortunately, it seems that this is the number-one cause of slowness on the site, as the database size grows quickly.

And then, we have Twitter Tools. I must admit to still not fully understanding Twitter. Why would I want to limit myself to 140 characters to say something? And if I want to send someone a private message, I don’t want that 140 characters eaten in by whoever’s user name it is. I use it mainly for giving a quick twitter update, announcing a new blog post (which I’ll probably do with this one), and for quickly creating a bit.ly link, should I want to pass the link to someone else. I’m sure someone will give me a reason why twitter is so… erm, needed. Saying that, when a celebrity is reported to be dead, it’s the first place I look.

WordPress Database Backup is pretty much redundant to me, as since installation, I have other backup mechanisms in place. I don’t think I’ve used it in about 2 years. It’s infinitely slower than my other methods, and I only keep it in place for emergencies.

And if it isn’t our old friend, Google XML Sitemaps up next! (You can tell I’m really starting to struggle for introductions to these) which creates an XML sitemap readable by Google, presumably so it understands the site better. Or something.

Last up, because I can’t be bothered to do anymore, and I can already see Chad’s eyes glazing over is WP tags to Technorati, and is the reason there’s two sets of tags in here. I assumed it would help the blog get “noticed” (though I always seem to complain or get overly paranoid when it does get partially popular), and was installed after the “tags” feature was added to WordPress. I’m not sure if it provides any benefit anymore, as the plugin hasn’t been updated since the iron age, and the amount of hits I get from technorati is negligible, so I’m not even sure if it works anymore.

To answer the questions you weren’t thinking of, no I don’t use any type of cache plugin. It caused me headaches last year, and to think this blog generates any type of server load that would require cache usage, would simply be delusion on my part. The only time I’ve generated noticeable server load was when I posted that Jeremy Beadle had died about 2 years ago. It soon quietened down as soon as word started to spread across the interwebs. Obviously, with the introduction of the afore-mentioned twitter, I wonder how many people do the same as me, and just bypass Google altogether….

Right, that’s it for now. Hopefully, I’ll get my body in order shortly. I’m off work for the next few days.

The past few months at work have been OK, but it’s now the silly period, and it’s even sillier than usual. I could go into details, but as the Facebook Grass (the “person” who grasses up lowly employees to the higher management should they even breathe a word of truth about our place of employment) is doing his/her thing again, I’ll just say one thing. “LOL”.

Mind you, I don’t think many people at work actually read this site any more, so I could sit here and blurt the whole thing out. It’s pure pantomime stuff, it really is.

Tonight, however, I’m going to hopefully forget about the whole fucking place, and let my hair down, for I shall be attening The Studio tonight, to watch a few local bands play, including Accidents By Design and the almighty Infernus. Should be a good night.

Back to the subject of blogging, I have completed blogging about that stupid sodding hard drive. It works, that’s the end of it. Therefore, the other morning, after another shocking 12-hour shift, I came home and decided to write a blog about music. I’d been listening to one of my favourite tracks, and decided I’d write an indepth blog about what I liked about it. Only thing was, I’d written an identical blog 18 months ago, and didn’t realise until I’d just about finished it.

ironically, that previous post also gives details about hard drive upgrade problems I’d been having around that time.

Anyway, because I’m not going to waste an hour’s worth of typing, here’s the post in its entirety..

I’ve had a shit day at work today, so you’ll have to forgive me for having one of my “ooooh, a song I like, and how I came about it” blogs.

It turned out that for the purpose of using it as a TV theme, it was sped up by approximately 10%. I think I prefer the original, slower version.

I’ve just noticed that this post contains more swearies than any I’ve written for a long time. Ah well, never mind, eh?

EDIT: Ooooh, I do like these edits. Missed out a quote mark which meant that the first section of text was missing. Quickly fixed, so sorry if the post didn;t make much sense originally.

UPDATE: YES, IT WORKS!

Now, let me just start off my saying that, once again, this site suffered downtime. This is the second time there’s been issues in as many days, and for all the reliability that 34sp have given me over the past 8 years, it seems like the move to their professional hosting package was a bad one. I’ve experienced over 8 hours of downtime in the past week alone.

Anyway, enough of my whinging about the website. I’m happy to announce that the 1Tb hard drive is working. It turns out I DID have to change the SATA interface speed to 150. Easier said than done, and unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as sticking a jumper on the back, like in the good old days. You have to use the software provided by the manufacturer.

Neither of the computers I own that can take SATA drives would recognise it, so the manufacturers’ solution of loading their software to change the speed was dead in the water. I knew what needed to be done, but there was no way of doing it.

So, I had to find somewhere with a SATA 300 interface. Thankfully, at work, I sit right behind a lovely, fast modern computer with more SATA 300 ports than…. er, my machines, obviously.

I slip the side off the machine, connect the cables, load the Samsung software disk, change ONE option, switch the machine off, and that was literally it. The menu option was changed, and everything I hoped was good to go. Of course, I couldn’t test this theory until I got home. 12 hours of drudgery sat before me, as I looked at my little shiny drive, in its fetching plastic case, waiting, nay BEGGING me to connect it and give it some information to store.

I burst through the door this morning, running up the stairs, clutching the drive in my puny little hands. Before my coat had even hit the floor, I was connecting it up, ready to give the drive its first taste of proper binary.

Within minutes, I was rebooting, hoping to see a drive called “BIG” in my computer. I did! WOOO!

I’d copied a few files over when I was messing about with USB connections, so I tried to delete them and start from scratch. It wouldn’t delete them. Erk.

I tried to format the drive, it wouldn’t do that either..

I rebooted and drived the same thing. It still wouldn’t.

I deleted the current partition, and created a new one. Phew, this time it would format. I assume it just didn’t like the format that Vista gave it. I just performed a quick format, however, as a full format would have taken forever. Probably not the 12 hours it took while it was connected via USB, but it would still take some time.

Data is now copying across from the old drive onto the new one with no errors or ill effects so far, and it should take another couple of hours. As for filming it, there really wasn’t anything to see. I did intend to put the machine on this desk so I could see the monitor, but I realised there was no point. It would either work, or it wouldn’t.

I’m going to have a celebratory beer and hopefully draw the line under what must be the most boring series of posts in the whole history of blogging.

It’s clearly not the first time this has happened, as you can probably tell by my constant whinging over the past few posts. I really hope that 34sp get to the bottom of this.

In other news, the weekend has been an entire write-off! I’ve done absolutely nothing, and most of the time has been sat in front of my shiny new keyboard typing bletherings over the internet. I shall let this continue, and also give a little bit of an update on my hard drive situation. I still don’t have a solution to this.

You may remember my update to the original post. Basically, I ruled out the drive as being faulty by connecting it via a USB2 adaptor. It worked fine. that was on Vista.

Now, the machine I wanted to connect it to (my “media” server) is running Windows 2000. Not much of a problem. Especially when I connected it and got the “Your hardware is connected and ready to use” message. Fair enough. I entered “My Computer”… Hmmm, no drive appeared. A bit strange. I knew it was formatted (that fucker took 12 hours) and that the USB adaptor wasn’t faulty.

Right clicked “My computer > Manage > Disk Management”. It didn’t see the drive either. What the fudge?

I entered Device Manager, and noticed that instead of saying the model of drive that was connected, it simply gave me “USB Hard Drive”. No model number, or anything of use. Aaaargh.

I was spitting blood at this point. Predictably, the SATA > USB unit came with a tiny driver CD. This didn’t help, as the driver disk included only had drivers for Windows 98SE. No drivers for Windows 2000! The drive is still completely useless to me.

I have one last ace up my sleeve before I invest in a PCI SATA card. I’ll know by this time tomorrow if my hair-brained solution has worked. The PCI SATA idea has taken a set-back, however, as it appears you can’t get SATA 300 PCI cards, only PCI-Express, which none of my systems have.

I really don’t need another external 1Tb drive, but that looks like what I’ll have if this doesn’t work.

Whilst at work a few days ago, I decided that my little MP3 server at home could do with a bit of a boost. It’s currently running 2 IDE drives, 1 60Gb IBM Deathstar, and a 200Gb Maxtor. The 200Gb drive is completely chock full of stuff, and the Deathstar is ancient and noisy, I really didn’t fancy putting anything on it that I could risk losing.

Off I toddled to my normal place of computer hardware purchasement, Ebuyer. I noticed that they had a Samsung 1Tb drive for sale. A Spinpoint HD103UJ, should you care.

Now, I’ve had “trouble” with Samsung drives in the past. My first 500Gb drive was a Samsung, and it began to show signs of dying within 3 months, though this technically may not have been the drive’s fault. This 500Gb still serves a purpose, however. its magnets are now used to keep the oven door closed since the handle snapped off it.

I ordered the drive, after deciding to give Samsung another chance, along with a few other things… another keyboard, which I intend to use at work, and a SATA/IDE to USB adaptor.

Despite the fact I paid nothing for the “super-saver” delivery, it was delivered within 36 hours of me placing the order. The doorbell rang, and I hurriedly rushed downstairs, met the UPS guy with a grin from ear to ear, ran back upstairs clutching the afore-mentioned parcel, and ripped it open like a kid on Christmas day.

I’d just finished nights, and the drive was cold, so to avoid any possible condensation damage, I decided to leave fitting the drive until I’d had some sleep.

I awoke at roughly 6PM, looking forward to the procedure of opening the machine, taking the old 200Gb drive out, connecting the new 1Tb one, then connecting the old drive via USB, copying the data over, ghosting the 60Gb system drive, writing the image to the 200Gb drive, making the 60Gb redundant.

It all sounds so very seemples (squeak).

Firstly, i disconnected Beastbits so I could use the power cables and the monitor so I could actually see what I was doing. I took out the old drive, fitted the new one via SATA, and powered on the machine. The SATA detection screen came up…

“No devices found”.

Confused, I checked my connections, and sure enough, I’d not connected the power cable to one of the molex connectors. Bohh, fucking idiot.

In it goes, reboot, aaaaand, yes, “No devices found”.

This was the shit that I’ve always dreaded. It means that the drive is a SATA 3.0Gbps, and my motherboard is a SATA 1.5Gbps. According to the scrappy little pice of paper you get with the drive, “you should switch your drive to SATA 1.5Gb/s speed with a software which we are providing via www.samsunghdd.com”

Um, OK. I couldn’t see how a piece of software could possibly help if the hardware can’t actually see and detect the drive. I played along, and found the appropriate software on the Samsung website. It came as an ISO image. And, the only machine capable of writing ISOs in the whole of Mercuryvapour Towers is Beastbits, which was sat on the floor, totally disconnected.

Almost in tears, I swapped the computers back, and burned the ISO to a DVD, and swapped them back again. Lo and behold, the Samsung software totally failed to recognise the drive, so it was impossible to change the settings.

Now, I’m not disfamiliar with the whole “SATA 1.5/3.0″ issue, and I know that all of my other drives have a jumper you can change to allow it to work. This particular drive does indeed have a set of jumpers on the back…

Unfortunately, these are undocumented. Nothing on the label of the drive, nothing in the shitty little scrap of paper you receive.

I spent the next 20 minutes looking for a hard drive with the jumpers still attached to it, so I could use one of these. Turns out both jumpers do absolutely nothing to rectify the issue, and the drive still remained undetected.

OK, fair enough, I couldn’t do anything with that computer. It was a lost cause, so I thought I’d try and connect it to Beastbits to see if I can get it to detect. Success! Er, sort of. It would get as far as the SATA detection screen, and it would hang.

Note how the first drive has the size printed next to it, but the Samsung drive doesn’t? Yes, that’s because there’s a known issue with the SATA controller on my motherboard with drives over a certain size! JOY! It’s well documented here.

Seems like the only solution is to get a SATA controller card and hope for the best. and there wasn’t as much ranting as I’d originally planned. But for now, I have a 1,000Gb paperweight. Tits.

Anyway, yes, the past week since the wasp attack has been spent with me doing computery stuff, as I try to get rid of the few niggling bugs I’ve had with the machines I own. I’m happy to say that these fixes have been mostly successful

Firstly, I managed to get the mysql server running on scribcam.co.uk. I was getting a message that some of the system tables were corrupt, every time I tried to change any of the parameters, or create a database. This was likely because I’d upgraded the mysql software, but copied all of the data files from a (very) old version, including the system tables. It really didn’t like it. I’d forgotten that the majority of the mysql settings are actually stored in one of those data files. Whoops.

I left it chugging for a few weeks, as a few apps on the server relied on it. It got to a point though, where it was useless to me, as I couldn’t use it as a backup server. I had the idea of dumping the tables, reinstalling mysql, recreating the users and then reimporting them. It was all bound to go horribly wrong.

It didn’t, and within about 5 minutes, I was wondering why it had all gone so very, very smoothly. There is no answer. It just did. That was a bonus. I was expecting to fight with cryptic error messages and stuff I didn’t really understand. Didn’t happen.

Last night came the greatest challenge yet. You may, or may not know, that thanks to an absolute disaster with Windows XP, and my inability to perform a clean install of it on Beastbits, I have been using ubuntu as a substitute until I get a new machine, and I’m liking it.

Now, thanks to the many hardware problems Beastbits has, I decided it was not a good idea to keep all of my data and the OS itself on one drive, and decided to separate the two. Since I installed Ubuntu, there’s been a 250Gb drive used as the system drive, and data, and a 500Gb drive doing nothing, except holding inaccessible data. Last night, I made the decision that Windows was never going back on here, so I thought it would be nice to have my 500Gb drive as the data partition, and the 250Gb as the OS drive.

Sounds complicated enough, and sure it would kill an hour or 6.

Again, this went oddly well, and I’ll explain in a very quick, shit, and probably incorrect way of doing this…

Mount drive and partition, in my case, this was /dev/sdb1 and mounted to /media/New olume
Check all data is backed up
Unmount drive (sudo umount /dev/sdb1)
Load gparted (sudo gparted)
FInd out gparted isn’t installed by default
“sudo apt-get install gparted”
load gparted again
Delete partitons
Create ext3 partition, and name it “Home”, just to complicate matters
Have beer and/or wank whilst drive builds itself
Wonder what happens, when drive doesn’t appear
Reboot
Watch with glee, as newly formatted drive is mounted to /media/Home
Cry in horror, as your normal user doesn’t have write permissions to the drive
Out comes Google.
“sudo chown -R username /dev/sdb1″
Watch with glee as drive becomes writable
“cp -a /home/* /media/Home” (I think)
Construct a small fort from CD cases. Learn to play the recorder. Sort your blood cells into alphabetical order. Basically, I had 133Gb of data to copy across. I’m trying to get across that this took an age.
With the help of spike1 from #speccy (which has now moved home, it used to be on Astrolink, it’s now on irc.coldfront.net ), run a check on the copied data by comparing file sizes
Burst into tears when you realise that there’s a 1Gb discrepancy between the original data and the copied data.
Breathe a sigh of release when you mounted /home/www during the copy procedure so you could move mirc across.
Confirm this with… er, a command I’ll enter later, as I don’t have it to hand, which creates the two directory listings, then compares them.
Edit /etc/fstab
Insert line “/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults 0 2″
Bonus step: login as root, remove the old /home directory. This isn’t necessary, as linux will automatically mount the new mountpoint over the top of the previous one. I did it for completeness, and because I’m a rebel, and also wanted to see how much space the OS itself used.
Reboot. Hope for the best. Actually, I don’t think you have to reboot, but I did.
Scream with joy when “df” reads something like the following:-

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             227G  3.9G  212G   2% /
/dev/sdb1             459G  127G  309G  30% /home

Feel a bit guilty when you realise there’s 212Gb free which you’ll probably never be able to use.

Well, that went on a bit longer than I expected it to. I forgot there were so many steps. Let’s move on quickly. Sooo, er… I happened to be walking around the confusing, brightly lit aisles of my local Tesco the other day, and noticed something new. Yes, there is now a rival of the humble Pot Noodle, in the form of something called “The Nation’s Best”, which are manufactured under the “Golden Wonder” brand.

Now, the first thing that struck me as odd is the use of the Golden Wonder brand, was for many years, they used to manufacture the original Pot Noodles.

As a self confessed slob, and a shit cook, Pot Noodles are a staple part of my diet. Well, at least when I’m at work they are. I was interested how these new noodles fared up to the old veteran of the lazy man’s cupboard.

No “convenience food” would be worth its salt (and most of them have plenty of that!) without a curry variety, and I’m pleased to say these also have one, in the form of “Chip Shop Curry”. Awesome. Noodles in a curry sauce, with raisins and apple.

The pots are slightly smaller than your average Pot Noodle. One bonus is that the lid of the pots is plastic, which means that it’s less likely to get punctured. If there’s one annoyance I have about the original Pot Noodles is the ability to burst the foil top, and the powder going everywhere, meaning that everything sharing the same bag also stinks of Pot Noodle, for weeks afterwards.. No problems like that with these!

So, I’ve talked enough about the packaging. What about the actual stuff itself? Well, to be honest, it seems a little devoid of ingredients. There’s the noodles, but where’s the dried out veg? Nowhere to be seen! At least when you eat the veg in a pot noodle, you can actually pretend that it’s doing you some good.

There are little bits of “apple”, and even though raisins were promised, upon initital inspection, these are few and far between. This is probably a bonus, as rehydrated raising tend to be one of the nastiest things that can ever be consumed. Except for sushi. (True fact: I only mentioned sushi there because I’m listening to the extended version of the 1992 hit “SuperMarioLand” which features the line “I’ve eaten sushi in Japan, but there ain’t no place like SuperMarioLand. Oh, and the thought of eating raw fish turns my stomach)

In conclusion, bring back Pot Rice.

I reported the issue on the webhost’s support forum, but unfortunately, nothing happened for approximately 4 hours, and the site was left in a state of limbo, until someone from 34SP spotted the problem and rebooted the server…

Thankfully, this type of thing doesn’t happen too often, and it’s the first downtime I’ve noticed since my switch to the new server a few months ago, and to be fair to the hosts, this type of downtime should have been brought to their attention, and they’re looking into why it didn’t occur.

Sadly, this website feckup also occured with yet more flickr downtime, and as one of my forum haunts ObscureInternet is hosted on the same server as this site, it also suffered the same downtime as I did, which means that my entire nightshift was wasted actually doing work. Oh, OK, I only posted that last sentence to see if the “facebook grass” has spread onto personal websites yet!

Now, if you don’t mind me, I’ve got some Roger Whittaker to listen to.

Beastbits, has once again been experiencing pains due to its elderly nature. I’ve said many times now, that the poor bugger is getting on in years, and is no longer the powerhouse it once was. Many parts have been replaced or rejigged, and every time I look at it, I feel a little twinge of sadness as I know it is moving ever closer to the big wheelie bin in the sky.

Yet another problem has been occuring over the past few days, with random shutoffs due to what was possibly heat. The room the machine resides in, isn’t the coolest room in the house, so I put those shutoffs due to it not having adequate cooling. I would touch the CPU’s heatsink to see if I could find any major heat source, but it felt “normal”.

I would also occasionally receive a waft of warm air from the machine, sometimes co-inciding with a smell of cooking silicon. The CPU fan was OK, and the graphics card fan… well, that was OK because it’s not made the grinding noise it normally makes when it needs a clean.

I was sat here a while ago, and got a faint whiff or warm dust. You know, that smell you get when you switch on a gas fire after it’s not been used for a while.

Something was definitely cooking. The CPU fan was OK. I checked the graphics card fan, aaaand promptly burned my finger on the heatsink. Yep, it turns out that the fan was “stuck”. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that one of the power wires for the fan had become detached. from the plug. What a bugger.

I have no way of telling how long it was like this for, but it remains to be seen if this fixes the powering off issues.

In other news, since I’m logged in and typing for once, Chad, my number 1 troll is back in Hartlepool, but thanks to my work commitments and his travel plans, it is very unlikely that we’ll get a chance to meet up again. Hope something can be worked out though.

EDIT: Nope, Bestbits’ problem still remains, still powering off, right when I was in the middle of something I really didn’t want to do anyway. Amazingly it still works after I punched it, watched it slide across the desk before falling over. I’m getting really, really fucking sick of it.

I believe this is Eldon Grove.

Acoording to the mail, the images should be online “at the turn of the year”

EDIT Feb 3rd 2010… Well, the year has turned, we’re into the second month, and there really hasn’t been any update on the Street View situation. Unfortunately, I’ve not got any new info to add, though some of the major motorways hav been added, as long as parts of Durham. Literally, only parts. I will keep checking, however.

EDIT March 2010… You’ll hardly have failed to notice its live… in case you have…

View Larger Map

Yes, it’s a Thurday, and our bins still remain unemptied, at the time of typing. It’s almost 9AM. Tsk. What do I pay my council taxes for?

Anyway, back onto the subject in hand, the subject of this post…

“Keyboard is locked – unlock the key”

I booted up Beastbits this morning and got this error message…

After marvelling at the specifications of Beastbits, you may notice the error message at the bottom of the screen. It’s a bit cryptic. I have no idea why it would mention a key lock, when I’ve not seen one of those on a PC this millennium. No idea how or why it cropped up, as I rebooted, and everything was fine.

I think it’s just another little message reminding me that Beastbits is ready for the scrapheap, or at least a retirement acting as some type of pointless server.

the error message is entirely incorrect, however. Surely, it should say “Unlock the lock”. I have found it physically impossible in my time on this planet to actually lock a key. Maybe the BIOS writers just want to confuse as many people as possible.

Oh, and the binmen turned up approximately 4 minutes into typing this post. But now I can’t be arsed to get dressed and get the bin in, considering I’m currently entirely naked except for my glasses and socks.

And on that note….

I double-click, without even looking at the file extension. Turned out that this multi-part RAR file had its first part as an executable. Bohh. You know that feeling when your heart sinks into your chest, and you know that it really is, all over? That was the feeling I got. It was the first time I had the feeling, and it was ultimately justified. Within seconds, I began to get cryptic error messages to do with programs such as Spotify, which wasn’t even running at the time. All I could do was hope and pray that this was a fluke.

Of course, it wasn’t. Beastbits was done for. My “wise” decision of not installing anything security-wise collapsed around my head, as a search on google for the error message redirected me through a series of “spam” search engines. It was all over.

I didn’t bother even looking into fixing it. I considered a reformat. This, as proved in earlier episodes of the blog simply wasn’t practical. Even less practical was the thought of restoring from one of my ancient backups.

So, I bit the bullet, and wiped the entire drive. Not just the 50Gb Windows partition, but the 180Gb “shite waiting to be put onto DVD” parition.Thankfully, and amazingly, I’d already written everything that was on there to DVD, so there was only roughly 2Gb of stuff which I lost, none of it important.

Therefore, I am once again back using Linux. I will probably continue to use afore-mentioned operating system until I manage to get a good enough image of my C drive back up and running, or I scrap Beastbits altogether, and get a whole new machine…