Friday 22 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

Do you remember these?

To you it may be just a quant old memory. But for me, it is a harsh reality. You see, we have data archived on these puppies, which means we have to have at least one computer that can still read them. *sigh*

Thus it is that I found myself today decommissioning a dust-encrusted (no, seriously) AMD K6-II 500 MHz PC with 128 MB RAM, and having to actually open it up, reach in through the layers of dust and remove the internal ZIP-100 drive so I can transfer it to another PC. Oh joy…

(You might be surprised to know that Windoze XP instantly recognises and is able to operate the drive. It doesn’t know what it is, but it can talk to it. Go figure…)

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Wednesday 20 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

So, I bought two Netgear ProSafe FVS114 firewalls. Over the weekend I set one up in London. Today I got home and set one up in MK exactly the same way. (Well, actually in mirror image, obviously.) And you know what? Once I configured my ISP’s router to let IPsec IKE messages through to my firewall, I had a working VPN tunnel going, and I was able to access VNC on my grandparents’ PC. Yay for technology!

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Wednesday 20 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, see what the hell you make of this…

I arrive home somewhat late. It’s dark, and the temperature is a few degrees above freezing. I walk down our driveway. Mum’s car is there. The front door is wide open, and a pile of shopping bags are sitting on the doorstep. Inside, the house is in total darkness. There are no sounds of life. I call out, but nobody answers me. I look back at the shopping on the doorstep. In one of the bags is two portions of chips, still hot. A quick check confirms that my mum’s car still has a warm engine. (Remember, it’s cold outside.)

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Wednesday 20 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

…you start doing actual work because you’re so bored with sitting around doing nothing. (!)

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Tuesday 19 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

Here’s one for you: Plastic plants quickly end up coated in a thick layer of dust. However, real living plants never have any dust on them. Why?

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Tuesday 19 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

So, as you can see, I’m still in London. I’ve got to be at work tomorrow, so I really hope we’re going home sometime reasonably early today…

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Friday 15 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

“So, how did you spend your Friday night?”

“Well, actually I encoded almost 1 GB of Ogg Vorbis files. Given that the compression ratio is nearly 1:10, that’s roughly 1,000 minutes of play time…”

“Er… dude…”

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Friday 15 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so, this weekend I’m going to waste a vast amount of time rebuilding my grandparent’s PC.

Some time ago, we donated them my mum’s old PC. It’s a 700 MHz AMD of some kind, and I’ve upgraded the RAM to something like 600 MB. (I forget what it was originally. Not much! It came with Windoze 98.) I’ve also replaced the HD in hopes of speeding it up. But it was still as slow as a dead horse. So I bought my mum a new PC. And a little later, the old one got given to my grandparents.

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