Category: Rant

Time to find out if my iPod AppleCare is valid

I got my iPod a year and four months ago. This one was a replacement for a replacement for a replacement, the whole sorry story of which can be read here. However, when I got the one that this is a replacement for, I got AppleCare. But that one died in a matter of a few days, and they fixed it by sending another one with a different serial number. So the serial number isn’t the same as the one on the AppleCare registration.

And here’s why suddenly I care about this: Most of the time when I listen to my iPod, it’s plugged into the wall charger (and I have a very long headset cord so I can leave it there while I roll my chair around in my cube, but every now and then I disconnect it from the wall and wear it downstairs to the lab). But this Friday, I took it with me in the car. It had been plugged in right up to that point, and so it was fully charged, but I only got three hours of it before it died. This is really bad. Apple claims a 10 hour battery life for a new iPod, and I know I’ve seen at least 8 hours in the past. Apple also says that if your iPod’s battery life is less than half the advertised value, and it’s still under AppleCare, then you get a free battery replacement.

So either I find out whether I wasted my money on the AppleCare, or I say to hell with it, it’s not broken, just live with it.

Two strikes, and you’re out

Back on 11 January 2005, I had a bit of a problem with my primary drive, which I “fixed” two days later with the manufacturer’s drive utilities. At the time, everybody yelled “get a new drive, it’s going to fail any second now”. I didn’t, because part of the fun of running your own computer is keeping everything going on a shoe string when you can. The other part of the fun is buying nifty toys when you want to, which is the stage I’m in now. And the reason I’m in that stage is that this morning I got another email from “smartd”:

From root@xcski.com Thu Aug 11 02:31:23 2005
To: root@xcski.com
Subject: SMART error (CurrentPendingSector) detected on host: allhats.xcski.com
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 02:31:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: root@xcski.com (root)
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.5 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00 autolearn=ham
version=3.0.4

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: allhats.xcski.com
DNS domain: xcski.com
NIS domain: (none)

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/hda, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

For details see host’s SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.

I looked in /var/log/messages, and it had been reporting this every half an hour since 02:31 this morning. After a bit of googling, I found that a “pending” error means that there is a block that the hard disk wants to remap somewhere else, but can’t because it can’t read the block. It will remap it automatically when it can read it, or when it needs to write to it. I also found The Bad Block HowTo, which told me how to find out which file it is that’s giving the problem. Turns out it’s a bogofilter database that I don’t use any more. So I can remove it, secure in the knowledge that the hard drive will remap that block when it tries to reuse the now empty block.

But this means that the drive is getting worse, so I think it’s probably time to replace it. The drive is 80Gb, and surprisingly enough, I don’t think I need any more space than that. /home is only 52% full, /usr is 45% full, and the rest of the partitions are down below 25%. I’m not even sure you can still get drives that small. The problem I’ve found is that bigger drives run hotter, and don’t last as long. Oh well, it’s off to the web I go.

Boxing days

I feel like my life for the last few weeks revolved around packing boxes, and for the next few months or years it’s going to revolve around unpacking boxes.

Tuesday was moving day. I guess the movers did an adequate job, except it seems that they were hampered by the fact that the guy who was supposed to pack us up the day before did about 1/4 of what he was supposed to do and buggered off at 11:30am when we had stepped out to do other stuff. But over all I’m not impressed with how much work we had to do before, during and after. I thought paying movers meant that muscular young men would do all the work while Vicki and I could sit around sipping our mai tais saying “oh, put that in that room, and be sure not to scratch it.” The reality was a lot sweatier, and a lot less satisfactory in terms of collatoral damage to furniture, door frames, plaster, etc.

For the last two days, I’ve been stuggling to get my office set up. It’s the most complicated, because of course I have to keep downtime on my server (this very server that hosts this blog) up and running as much as possible. Plus I’m trying (and not succeeding very well) to avoid having a rats nest of wires like I kept having at the old place, and also I’m trying to set aside an area for bill paying and other important papers, and another area for aviation stuff (charts and passenger headsets etc) so I can find it all when I want to plan a trip or leave for one. I’m slightly hampered in this by the fact that I can’t find one of my desks, one I took apart and now I can’t find where the movers put the bits.

Two days of work, and all I have to show for it are four empty boxes and a bunch of full shelves. Only about 6 billion more boxes to empty.

Another problem hampering this whole process is the fact that in many ways this house seems more cramped than the old house. This isn’t totally crazy, because this house is bigger, but most of that bigger-ness is in the living room, the dining room and the master bed room , and the hallways. The biggest problem is that we don’t have an equivalent to the finished basement in the old house. That was one large room that acted as library, computer room and entertainment center, and sometimes a bird room. In this house, we’ve got separate bird room, library, office/computer room, and the TV/TiVo/DVD/Stereo are going into the living room.

Oh well, back to the boxes.

Ok, I’m a bastard.

Recently, I noticed that a significant percentage of my web site traffic was for a single image of Blobby the Blue Lobster, all with referrer strings indicating a particular web board. Sure enough, I went there and found that one functional illiterate was using this picture as his avatar in his conversations with a bunch of other functional illiterates.

If you don’t believe me about the functional illiteracy, here is word for word one of his posts to that forum:

OMFG that was so fucking funny i cant belive that people belive that shit haah…john malm wow im so happy hes gone again after reading this.

But i msut say between reading all of that and the XMF interview the romm is freaking spinning ive read alot today including a bunch of video games ahah well tt you all alter

Anyway, I don’t like picture leeches much, and I especially don’t like illiterate ones. So I put the following in my /etc/http/conf/http.conf:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.echoingthesound.org/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*blobby.*\.jpg http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/pork.gif [R,L]

Which directed every request for his avatar to a much smaller picture. But he didn't get the message, even after I wrote to him telling him he should check his avatar. So I took more drastic measures, and yesterday I changed the redirect to an even smaller picture that makes it more explicit.

Today I see on that web board a post from him saying

Ok so i look at my avatar and some guy must have hacked it and it said "I'm a PIcture LEech I suck" and someone ahd contacked me before adn tlaked somethign about my icon that i needed ot refresh it or somethign but it made no sence to me so whats up?>

Amazingly enough, he's changed his avatar, but he's still leeching - the image he's using is on somebody else's site.