The cost of a faulty power supply
When a power supply makes strange noises, it's a sign. It's most definitely a sign you shouldn't ignore, especially if you own a 5 year old Antec. I chose to ignore it and had to live with the consequences.
One morning, I turned on my home theatre PC to watch something, and there was the most disgusting noise coming from the power supply. Seconds later, smoke was billowing from the rear and I knew I was screwed.
Parts salvageable include the optical drive and expansion cards. Everything else appears to be dead and a nasty smell is coming from the motherboard. A good chance to upgrade, I suppose so I went and bought $200 of parts. The shopping list:
- Intel Pentium G620
- ASRock H61DEL motherboard
- 4GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 memory
- LG 12x Combo BD drive
Hopefully this setup has enough grunt to play the latest Hi10p h.264 content everybody is going on about.
RIP Dennis Ritchie
One of the fathers of Unix and the C programming language has sadly passed away today. Farewell to a man who has influenced computing in an unbelievable manner. dmr, you are one of the greatest computer scientists of all time.
Multi-volume, incremental backups using GNU tar
As I can never seem to remember the commands used for creating a multi-volume tarball with incremental backups, I'm posting this here to remind myself.
The following command creates an archive that spans multiple disks, and creates a .snar snapshot file for incremental backups.
gtar -M -L length[suffix] -g /path/to/snapshot.snar -cvf /path/to/destination.tar /path/to/directory
It would be wise to specify a length that is smaller than the destination as we don't want to fill up the destination backup device to the last byte. The snapshot file can be stored anywhere, as long as it can be accessed when the next incremental backup is performed. For example:
gtar -M -L 1385770M -g /pool0/tapes/home.snar -cvf /media/backup/home.1.part01.tar /home
Will begin creating an archive of the home directory on your backup media with the name home.1.part01.tar. Once the volume size has reached 1385770 megabytes (roughly the size of a 1.5TB disk), tar will prompt you for the next file. Swap media and specify the name of the next volume by entering:
n /new/path/to/home.1.part02.tar
And continue the backup. Happy backups, and remember that "doing nothing", while a valid backup solution - will not guarantee the safety of your data.
UPDATE: due to a lack of functionality on the part of GNU tar, the prompt does not allow you to enter a new path into the prompt. Thus when specifying "n newtarname.tar", it will proceed to create the new volume in the present working directory. A bit silly, but the problem can be avoided by starting tar inside the directory where you want to create tarballs. For example, cd into /media/backup and run tar there. When the media is full, unmount the media, mount the new one and then you may continue.
Game of the week: Rewrite
As part of my new commitment to regular blogging, I have decided to begin documenting games, CDs and whatever else I might have in my personal collection. Anything goes - and I don't think I'll be committing myself to a weekly post. The frequency may vary wildly depending on my diligence.
Without further ado, I introduce my latest acquisition: Key's Rewrite. Rewrite is their latest adventure game and was some 4 years in the making.
Profile
Revamped home page
I've been putting it for years but I have finally replaced the clunky HTML 4.0 page with something a little more 21st century. I've selected a blog engine named Typo.
I've been exploring alternatives to PHP based solutions for a while due to my disdain for the language and managed to settle with something based on Ruby on Rails. Admittedly, the installation of RoR on FreeBSD was a little more than painless. Eventually I ended up using rvm to install Ruby + Rails and everything appears to be perky. Here is a simple but well-working guide: https://gist.github.com/746963
I'll be using this home page to mainly explore Ruby development. I've never been a big blogger so I can't promise frequent updates. An "Old site" link appears in the sidebar to remind everyone of the previous mediocrity :)
