Useful Consumer Review

Ugly OS

This year, I’m finally actually really (this time) learn to read French.  So I needed a dictionary by the couch, so I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is the tablet with the longest battery life, allegedly.  (Apart from the tablets from The Company That Shall Not Be Mentioned.)

The most immediately striking thing about Android is how butt-ugly it is.  Excuse me.  I didn’t mean to slander butts.  It’s not just ugly.  It’s ugly-fugly.  I mean, look at those colour combinations.  Just look at it.

And scrolling in the browser is quite choppy and not smooth and nice, like those other tablets that I’m not mentioning.

And that concludes this consumer review.  This stuff is easy!

December 12th, 2011

Dear Diary,

since the beginning of time, Man has yearned to have their news spools on solid state disks instead of those pesky spinning ones.

The load on the Gmane news server frequently tips over the 16 point (which means that access is denied) purely from people and bots hammering the web and news interfaces too hard.

SSDs have been too expensive until now, and they still are, really.  But today I’ve decided to take the plunge!

I’m giddy with excitement as I order five 512GB Samsung 830s.  They’re supposed to have lots of them there IOPS-es!  Like sixty thousand of them!  I’m not quite sure what that means, but surely it has to be enough.

But what to put them in?  I rummaged through the discarded servers that somebody (i.e. me) had schlepped out from the server room.  I found this nice 2U Dual Core P4 Xeon machine with room for six SATA disks.

But OH NOES!  It only supports SATA 1.5Gbps, while the disks are 6Gbps.  That’s a lot fewer of them bps-es than I want.  So I order a new motherboard that has SATA 3.0 and a new CPU.  I can’t wait to get this going!

(Read the next excerpt from my secret diary!)

Tube on the Tube

Puny Weakling Laptop

I’ve wanted to be able to display YouTube stuff on my TV for a long time.  If somebody mentions a link on IRC, it would be nice to display that on the big screen instead of my minuscule sofa laptop.  (Which isn’t powerful enough to show most YouTube videos, anyway. Poor Sony Vaio P.)

I’d hate to have to run a web browser on the TV machine, though, so I didn’t think this would be practical. 

I wanted a standalone Flash player of some kind that would work under Linux, and that I could control without having to click around on the screen.  Like an animal!

But then, after an exhaustive Google search, I found youtube-dl.  It’s a great Python script that ferrets out the Flash file from a YouTube (and similar) page, and then saves the video file to disk.

So I scripted up something for my movie viewer, and added some keystrokes to the Emacs irc client, and now I can just click on a link on the sofa laptop to tell the TV to play the video.

It starts downloading the file, and then starts mplayer on the file as soon as the file is a few KiB long, so I can start watching pretty much immediately.

It’s a quantum leap. I mean, the smallest leap possible.

Inscrutability. We haz it.

Gnomic

I’ve got a form to fill out about fire readiness in the apartment.  Which is OK.  But the questions are kinda inscrutable.

I’m supposed to tick either “OK” or “Divergence” (or something.  It’s a kinda odd word choice in Norwegian, too).

So it starts out fine.  “Is there at least one functioning smoke detector (etc)?”  Ok.

“Is the smoke detector more than 10 years ok?”  It isn’t, so that’s…   Ok?  Is that a divergence?  Should it be? No?

“Is the smoke detector on a serial connector or does a fire alarm system exist?”  Er…  er…  Ok?  No?  Not ok?  No?  OK?

“Is there a house fire hose in the living unit?”  No, there isn’t, but I’ve got a fire extinguisher.  Is that “OK” or “Divergence”? 

“Is there a visible access to the chimney’s accessible sides in your living unit?”  …  “OK”?  I mean, I can see the fireplace, but I can’t see the chimney.  I think.  Is that OK?  Is that a divergence?

HELP!