Computers ⁽¹²⁸⁾

Brian Bilbrey February 23, 2014

Yardwork ... errrr, Spring almost upon us.

I withstood the temptation to wash cars this weekend, which was difficult, because the weather was glorious. About 60° F both days. We did open up the house both days and get some fresh air in, which was very nice indeed. But the highs are dropping back down into the 30's, with chances of snow a couple of days this upcoming week. So I'll just wait. Soon it'll be time for washing of cars and yardwork ... but not just yet. Today, I was going to cut my hair and bathe the dog this afternoon (shopping and work this morning),…

Brian Bilbrey February 11, 2014

Really, Valve?

You folks at Valve crack me up. I'm waiting for Half Life 3. I'm waiting for Portal 3. I'm waiting for Obduction (oh, wait, I'm getting that through the Kickstarter) ... and y'all ask me if I approve of greenlighting Krita for sale on Steam? [[ Krita is drawing and image manipulation software, and it's pretty damn cool ]] But I already have Krita on my Linux install. Oh ... buying the free (as in GPL, eh) software just supports the development. Why did I have to dig for that information, Krita-people? Or was it Valve that made that information…

Brian Bilbrey January 7, 2014

Pro Puppet, Second Edition, Grumble.

Well. I'm now plowing through Pro Puppet, Second Edition, in a continuing effort to be useful in integrating configuration management into my environments at work and here at home. But the publisher website doesn't have features promised by the book, the publisher website doesn't seem to accept and post the errata I've discovered, and now the Puppet Labs blog post about the book has marked my comment on their post as "Spam". Um, really? Here's the comment I tried to post to the blog: Hint 2 - ALWAYS say what file the code snippet goes into. Very frustrating. Hint 3…

Brian Bilbrey December 10, 2013

Secure Erase a Crucial M4 SSD

Secure Erase a Crucial M4 SSD The next suggestion was to throw away half of the broken chips at home, and the other half at work. But I *know* someone will suggest eating the refuse, then "depositing" the processed output in multiple lavatories along the eastern seaboard. Me, I think that's a bit over the top.

Brian Bilbrey December 4, 2013

Dead Drive

Dead Intel 320 Series SSD This SSD wouldn't keep recognizing its own existence for long enough to even run the SMART tools against it. I ordered a Samsung 840 Pro yesterday, it arrived this morning. I've installed (k)Ubuntu on it, updating now. In a bit I'll strip the chips off that board, and crush them - that's the only way to securely destroy data on an SSD. Today: More house cleaning. Ciao!