Remote administration woes

I’m remote-adminning a mchine which has lived in a dusty environment all of its life. The problem which raises its face is that when I want to update the machine to a current distribution of Linux (it’s given up on updates, specifically including the virus-&-spam-scanner-manager for email), the process of calculating the differences is so compute-intensive that the (dusty, so not well-ventialated) machine enters “throttled clock mode” & if I don’t suspend it after a minote or two, for a good handful of minutes at a time, the machine overheats & shuts itself down.

This is a simple machine, with only a power & network cable, & two hard drives. The one next to it — a workstation — has three hard drives & a DVD burner, and has a pile of chargers and adaptors (and a wifi ADSL router) clipped to the lid, plus an external (USB2) hard drive. I’ve vacuumed out the workstation, & should have done the server as well.

I feel a bit less singled-out now that somebody’s told me about their son’s new XP machine, which randomly restarts itself with between 5 minutes to an hour between goes.

Ah, the wonders of modern technology...

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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