My iPod is probably officially dead. After a couple of days, the fog has disappeared from the screen, but it won’t power up and the computer can’t recognize it. I don’t see any hope now.
I’m a fucking idiot.
Category: Geekery
That can’t be good
I just dropped my 60Gb Photo iPod in the toilet. Fortunately, after I’d flushed. But now it’s acting funny. I’m hoping that if I leave it alone for a while, it will dry out and be ok. Otherwise, I might be getting that video iPod sooner than I wanted.
How much to advertise on a dead page?
Back in 1998 I did some work to use some experimental sendmail rule sets to block spam, and wrote up a page on how to use them and how to test that they worked. I even gave a talk about it to the local Linux and Sun user groups. It’s all terribly obsolete these days, because sendmail has changed, spam has changed, and the tools available have changed. A few years ago I found a better page, and put a header on my page to tell people they should read this other page instead. But people still kept finding this page, and it was getting more and more obsolete. Last year I wrote another header briefly mentioning what I use now (postfix, rbls, spamassassin, bogofilter). But the page is totally worthless and if it didn’t get dozens of hits a day I’d just take it down.
Today I got an email from somebody who wants to pay me $35 to put an ad on that page. No, he didn’t tell me what the ad would say, no mention of a time scale, just $35 to put an ad for “a site that provides businesses with email hosting”. I have no idea if this person is advertising a spam-friendly or spam-unfriendly email hosting site, and frankly I don’t care. I find the whole idea of putting an ad on a page that shouldn’t even be there just too creepy to consider.
Very strange.
Getting there
After restoring my backup using
ssh ptomblin@192.168.1.1 "cat /media/usbdisk/albook/home.cpio.0" | ditto -xv - .
I’ve had a “fun” afternoon re-downloading and installing applications. Fortunately, the two I was most worried about, Quicken and TurboTax, I had left the .dmg disk image files on my Desktop for just this reason. I only have three gaps left in my Dock – one (Photoshop Elements 2.0) because the sticker with the serial number is mangled so I can’t read it, and the others because they weren’t 100% legal copies and I have no install media. Oh well. There’s a couple of things I decided not to reinstall, like iWork 2005 because that version of Pages sucked rocks. I understand the new version of Pages is better. And they’re up to 4.0 on Elements for Mac (but 5.0 for Windows) so maybe it was time to buy a new version anyway. I’m still debating whether to install fink.
I think when this is over, I’ll have a better system with fewer crap programs left over from days gone by, but it’s still no fun getting there.
Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.
(I should probably stop using this as a title – Firefox actually filled it in after the first couple of letters)
I took my Powerbook into Apple to fix the problem with the DVD drive not ejecting. This is the second time I’ve brought it back – the first time they replaced the drive itself, but told me the frame of the laptop was twisted and they may have to replace some of the case if it happens again. And it happened again.
They gave me the usual spiel about how they can’t guarantee that they won’t wipe your hard drive, so make sure you’ve got a back up. I said “yeah, yeah, yeah” since I have a nightly cron job that backs up my home directory to my Linux server, and besides they worked on it before without killing my hard drive, so why should they wipe it this time?
And of course, they did wipe it. My restore restored the files, but of course now I have to find and re-download all my apps. Hope my iTunes Music Store purchases still work.