Plantagenet Penguinista

It turns out that the cheapest replacement mobo I could buy new was a dual Pentium 1600 with a semi-decent Via video chipset . The end result is that (despite not having a proper driver for the chipset yet) this ex-cranky-old-junker is now new from stem to stern (well, bar the screen) & cranks along quite nicely, running the Matrix3D screen-saver smoothly & flawlessly & responding to things like web pages instantly. Dear old grandma Mardie’s email toolkit now includes 41 GUI games — including, it happens, some old favourites which have the James-&amp-Jane nephews salivating about future visits — & this is without the plethora of Commander Keens etc which DosBox has effectively made available. When a driver floats into existence for the Via 3371 chipset (I think that amounts to a Chrome9 P4M900 ) this little box will hum along quite nicely with full-blast OpenGL etc. For those who are wondering, this is like the March of Progress, only a little bit later/more rushe

Well... that’s what some hedonists are calling my visit to Perth, WA. However, an average of more than one medical appointment per weekday well & truly digs (doctors, please pardon this allegory) a grave for that idea... Aaaanyway, the medics so far have been saying generally benevolent things about my health (not “all fixed” so much as “good progress”) which is, on the whole, good. A few in particular have been saying pleasant things about the practical aspects of said progress, along the lines of “above average” & “recovering well” which lines up with earlier medics wanting my case declared “miraculous”. Computer people have been saying nice things also, as well as unique social groups, & a handful of random strangers that I run into on trains & buses, so who knows? Miraculous or not, I may yet have a future. (-: Perth has also been something of a reformation, in that I get to meet people from years back, bump into a few excellent friends, & pick up the threads o

Recently found a new Ubuntu toy: Automatix . This is vaguely akin to the PLF (Penguin Liberation Front) repositories under Mandriva, except that it’s a little more willing to step outside of the boundaries for items like codecs, Opera browser, TrueType fonts, etc. Altogether this makes it quite handy for that handful of little annoyances (inconveniences) which are typical of a new setup. Welcome though this is, it still doesn’t magic away the handicap of a 500MHz Celeron pushing an ancient video chipset through SD-RAM, so this beastie is going to transform itself into a twin-CPU Athlon driving a GeForce chipset through DDR. The difference between that & the absolutely cheapest CPU/mobo/video combination I can buy new is about $17 — definitely not worth the messing around.

Mum-in-law switched from Telstra ADSL to AmNet & in the process saves $20 a month & gets double her quota (via WAIX) for free. Oh, yes, & gets her data about 6 times faster. Oh, yes, & gets a free static IP address, too. Telstra were reluctant to release the line, telling us first that it would take “2 days” & then “21 days” (!) & then AmNet tried the line & suddenly it was freed (where about 10 minutes earlier it was not) so I suspect that someone in Telstra pushed a button. Anyway... Hurrah! “Installed by Friday.” AmNet shipped me the modem early so I could put port-forwarding rules & the like in, so I switched it on again this morning to test the link... & — bwanaaa! — it came on line, more than a day early! This was posted through it. Conflagrations, AmCom, well done. (-:

It seems that standard-looking PCI cards won’t always work. The RTL-8139-D-based Ethernet card in this machine worked fine during the installation but sort-of doesn’t exist now. An lspci shows it, but no modules will talk to it. There is an obscure little kernel option which made it all spring back into life: pci=assign-busses This is probably related to the cranky old Acer hardware again, but it did get the cruddy old RealTek chipset to perform once more.

Trying out my second Ubuntu installation, & I choose Mum-in-law’s “new” machine to do it on. Opening the case on this antique Acer Aspire revealed an immediate problem: no hard disk. Careful inspection showed another issue: no RAM. This is in addition to no keyboard, no mouse, & no power cables. It did have a CD drive (but the data cable was unplugged) & a CD burner, & a moderately nice screen (ATI MicroScan), so I trotted down to PLE , & started buying parts. Keyboard? PS/2 for $8.00. Mouse? PS/2 for $12.50. Hard disk? 160GB Western Digital for $69.00. Power cables? $5.00 apiece. Bolts? A handful from their repair techs. So far, so good. RAM? SD-RAM, it turns out. Oops. Happily, the wise men at Navada had a 256MB stick they were willing to part with for only $60. Navada Greenwood need an award for simply having useful chunks of hardware lying about. (-: Hokay... burn the CD, plug it in... boots up, looks good, splat. So much for the CD drive. Hit the eject button

In short, because eating “Cauliflower can cut the chances of developing the [Prostate] cancer by 52 per cent, while broccoli can reduce the risk by as much as 45 per cent” Besides this, there are far less tasty things to eat... Now I’m waiting for some kind researcher to explain just how beneficial ginger can be to your health. (-:

English is a crazy language, in some ways. We were driving from Burnie up the hill into Upper Burnie this afternoon, when Master 7 proudly informed us that we were leaving “Downer Burnie”. Given that Sir’s formal name is Alexander & remembering the name of an Aussie politician, we found this highly amusing. In other random news, we discovered that Domino’s Pizza exists in Tasmania, even Burnie. Still out of luck with Sizzlers, though. In still other random news, I discovered that plugging a USB mouse into a Windows 98SE box can inspire it to suicide. Now I have to find a Win98SE CD & a perfectly functional CD drive to be able to resurrect the games computer. It’ll probably be much easier to just convince WINE to run the offending games. This just after I’d done something I’d never counted myself brave enough to do: run an email client through a ’Doze box. The wonders of XMing blended with KMail .

Quoth the poster: Greenpeace activists have started construction on a replica of Noah’s Ark, “Spung!” goes my brain. 8,200 feet above sea level, in one of the most dramatic ever pleas to world leaders to take far-reaching and urgent action to avoid catastrophic global warming. Many people believe that Mount Ararat is the place where Noah’s Ark landed after the floods. OK... can anyone else spot the contrasts? (-: Noah’s ark... was an artefact was very large & quite rigid those bathtub toys don’t even start to expose a historical story It would have to last about a year was pretty much the antithesis of naturalism was driven by a religious bloke for religeous reasons almost certainly didn’t land at a spot we’d call “Mt Ararat” GreenPeace, OTOH... are into natural things are building a small one have reasoning driven by naturalism are driven by — in essence — materialists don’t seem to have a special lifespan for their project Bit of a head-scratcher, that. Some considerable differen