I scanned 21 more issues of the Comics Buyer’s Guide

I got them cheap on ebay, and they’re from around 1999-2001. These issues are almost tabloid size, so I had to scan them manually. Like an animal.

Where you can learn exciting news, like —

Is DC finally going to publish the final issues of Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run!? Nah, never gonna happen.

These issues are, of course, on kwakk.info now (if you want to search them), and also on archive.org if you want to read them.

If you have issues of CBG that’s not on kwakk.info yet, you can send them to me.

Mystery Song Finally Identified!

I’ve been trying to find out what this song is for years (I have it on a mix tape), but nobody’s been able to identify it. But over the last year or so, I’ve been listening to (most of) my albums chronologically, and I’ve now reached 1995.

Yesterday, Annie Williams’ Ruby EP started playing, and what do you know:

Yes! IT”S THE MYSTERY SONG!!!

This EP is the only thing I have by Annie Williams, so perhaps I should get some more stuff by her… The producer is Mark van Hoen, which makes sense — he records under the name Locust, and I’ve got several albums by Locust, so that’s probably why I bought this EP in the first place?

Web Server Outages Today

Due to the unprecedented PHP vulnerability today, I took the blogs down until Debian pushed a fix, as advised. (And also Quimby.)

They pushed a fix now, so things should be back to normalish. Except that the web server on Gmane is still down — I need to do further upgrades on that machine, so it’ll remain down for the time being. I.e., you can’t sign up any new mailing lists or Gwene RSS feeds, but that should be back up within a few days. (The news server itself and other services are up — it’s just the web part that’s down.)

Jittery Web Design

I get a lot of packages, so I sit staring at the Fedex tracking page a lot. They recently redesigned it (to become more “mobile first”, I guess — just a couple decades too late), and I’m just fascinated.

I mean, it’s just a minor thing, and it doesn’t matter HANG ON: We’re on the Internet, right? OK, SO THIS IS LITERALLY THE WORST THING EVER LITERALLY. *phew* I was almost reasonable there for a second.

But let’s go through what the page does:

  • First we get a white web page.
  • Then the page shows just the header and the footer.
  • Then it expands to show “Tracking ID” and a spinner, and this moves the footer down.
  • Then it replaces the entire page with the tracking results.
  • Half a second later, it blanks to white and then redisplays exactly the same thing it already shows.
  • Finally, two seconds later, it blanks very briefly, redisplays, and adds a button on the bottom saying “Ask Fedex”.

That’s just kinda amazing, I think. It doesn’t transfer a lot of data, at least:

Just 6.8MB, which is practically nothing these days.

Welcome to my Ted Talk.

BIOS Batteries Still Exist

Above you see the nice li’l machine that has a nice SAS card that I’m using for my /dvd RAID (that, confusingly enough, has more ripped blurays than ripped DVDs now).

Here’s the major, incredibly important problem:

If there’s been a power outage (for instance, because I’ve had an electrician in to do something), the machine refuses to boot because the BIOS doesn’t know what date it is. I’m sure that’s really important! Oh my god! What would we do with a machine where the BIOS doesn’t know what the date is! The humanity!

So I have to attach a keyboard and press F1 and then everything works, so (this is going to come as a shock to you all) it turns out that the machine works perfectly well without a BIOS that knows what the time is.

I know! Who would have thought!

After much googling, it turns out that this mainboard has a BIOS battery that’s glued to the audio headers (bottom right there). It’s a “wrapped CR2032”.

And today I got this in the mail:

Whoho! Time to become a computer repair guy again!

So rip out the old one — which was fastened with some sticky tape.

Oh, the new one has one, too, so I guess that’s standard.

But jamming my fingers down there while being able to see what I’m doing is hard…

Perhaps I can use these pliers (that the electrician (yes, her again) forgot here and I forgot to call them to give them back (they’re coming again this Thursday so perhaps I can return them to them then))…

… nnnno. And now I’ve bent the headers! I think! My eyes are too weak for this stuff!!

I forgot! I’ve got a workbench now! And I got this lamp for the workbench last week! I’ve never used it before! Is it gonna be helpful!?

Yes!

Behold the embiggening! It’s amazing! I can see everything! And it’s so bright!

So using that, I was able to unbend the bent headers and then use my fingers to get the li’l plug down there, and now…

… it doesn’t complain any more but just reboots unattended!

That was totally worth it.

Thanks, BIOS makers of the world. A lot.