Two of my unstressed WD20EARX disks have just crapped themselves almost simultaneously after 21846 hours of operation (or 2.493 years), with just 49 power cycles and disk temperatures never above 45 degrees C. Both disks were manufactured in June 2011, but WD's warranty period for consumer gear is only two years.

The culprit? WD's damn idle3 timer which I wasn't quite aware of until a few days ago; hdparm only says 'power management not supported' and I trusted that to mean 'no spindown'.

That timer contraption parks the disk after just 8 seconds of idleness. Guess what: both of mine shipped with the default setting, 8 seconds, and racked up a load cycle count around 2377000. (That WD disk series is rated for a minimum of 300000 load cycles, certainly not 3 million).

Seagate: see data run! run, data, RUN!

Well, the competition isn't much more reliable. There are four ST2000DM001-9YN164 in my colo'd systems at the other end of the world (climate-controlled datacenter, stable power, no nasties whatsoever).

One of the damn disks is going tilt very, very quickly. After just a measly two years. See az not happy. Run, Seagate, RUN! >:-(

Power_On_Hours 17774
Power_Cycle_Count 24
Power-Off_Retract_Count 17
Load_Cycle_Count 131
Airflow_Temperature_Cel 25 (Min/Max 23/32)
Temperature_Celsius 25

And the damning:

Current_Pending_Sector 88
Offline_Uncorrectable 88

And it's deteriorating pretty quickly, about 16 new duds every day or two. Fortunately it's all RAID-1 and the replacement is already ordered.

The British Isles have a reputation for being a culinary wasteland (pickled eggs, offal pie, absolutely dead mashed vegetables combined with meat red enough to hop of your plate, etc. pp.), but I guess this here might be an example of colonial one-upmanship:

This Australian wooster sauce boastfully claims that it's made from 50% recycled plastic. I'm not quite sure whether I want to know about its other "premium quality ingredients".

...at least when the mail has finally brought you a toy like this one:

That's a UDI R/C 839 quadcopter, which cost me a measly AU$35 (shipped). Really tiny, lots of fun to fly, very much worth it.

I find it very interesting how Stiegl is increasingly present in the Australian beer market; a few years ago you'd find it only in very very very special beer pubs, but that's changing. In December I had a few here on the Gold Coast, at the Bier Cafe in Broadbeach. (On tap, not bottled.)

And now even Aldi has it - except that for silly hysterical raisins most of Oz still requires totally separate bottle shops, and in QLD Aldi's booze branch is mail-order-only for that reason.

With the also ridiculously high alco taxes factored in, the lovely Stiegl costs about 50% more than the decent local brews; $7.6/litre vs $5/litre. No surprise that lots of Australians do home-brew; even I do it every now and then.

While I intensely dislike the City of Salzburg (it's the anus mundi as far as I'm concerned), I wholeheartedly endorse the products and/or sevices of the Brauerei Stiegl :-)

Not much to be said about him, except that he's pretty good but very dead, and the book, except that it's slightly weird but very good.

...but the local weather sucked nevertheless: still 86% humidity at 2100.

Today is also the day on which I gave in (to a recommendation by a friend) and spent $249 on a Rowenta DH4120 dehumidifier (on special/clearance at Hardly Normal, RRP $590 or so). It's now been running since 1730 and I just emptied out 4l of water, and the relative humidity inside is now 68%, not qute perfect yet but not as dripping wet as earlier.

We'll see how the thing does over the next few days, especially whether it's big enough to handle the 200m^3 of my place.

-- karl kraus, wobei es sich fragt, ob der kraus über die (erlogene!) gschicht mit dem verschlampten hitler-brief gelacht oder gewettert hätte.

(see here if DSW is not a term you're familiar with...)

"clearly we can't have that! so, up the pain!" must be mozilla's official line. point in case: firefox 31. (inflicted upon us as a security update from debian's marginally bearable ff24.)

by and large humans are pretty lemming-like and flock to the "oh, shiny!" but when it comes to FF 31 the natural reaction is more like "booh, shitty".

the ui layout is plain stupid. the options and choices are gone. it's less usable than all the older versions of FF. it's a memory hog. it manages to both waste more screen real estate and show less useful information simultaneously, which is quite a feat.

An editor is a tool for saving programmer-bukkake to disk. -- Anthony de Boer

oi! mozilla team: less wanking. please.

(unfortunately there are no real workable alternatives: midori isn't flexible or solid enough yet, and with chromium the stoopid never goes below 11.)

fortunately there are lots of other people who also hate the default setup and have spent some time cooking up useful extensions for getting FF back into a workable state:

• the classic theme restorer does most of the necessary heavy lifting.
• status-4-evar restores a useful status bar.

source: andrew bath's site

source: the ever-topical and refreshingly nasty First Dog on the Moon

So the local *unspeakable* *elided* with the big ambitions, glib tongues, short memories and minimal brains have decided to play the "nasty evil terrorist" sock puppet once again - very likely because

• it's convenient for justifying all kinds of absolute abuse,

• the sheep will nod their heads and be suitably subdued by your fear mongering propaganda,

• and you never have to substantiate any of your divine inspirations - because you can always just handwave some soopersekrid rule that says you're not allowed to say anything about those "threats" - but hey, they're "imminent! honest, trust me". bwuahahaha...

As we all know pretty well there's a ridiculously low risk of the evil bad torrorists (who are obviously "everywhere" according to the *unspeakable*s) terminating you, yes you!; much lower than the risk of you getting mushed by traffic & croaking, or slipping in your bathtub & croaking or...gazillions of other causes.

As a matter of fact i'm quite sure that you're much more likely to be killed by your own government (or one of its allies and sundry henchmen) than by the nasty oh-so-ubiquitous terrorists.

Refuse to be terrorized! (and please do enjoy your noodles)

(dear english readers, sorry but that's all quite utterly untranslatable.)

wenn ich mir die letzten 40 jahre globale realpolitik anschauen würde dann wär mein resume 'mehr verlogene scheisse als die "seriösen" politiker kann so eine krach-rosa bettina auch nicht anrichten, und da wärs zuschaun wenigstens lustig.'

They are pretty cheap to buy, nowadays, but I prefer making my own if possible - that has the added benefit that I get to understand how it works (or why not).

The intertubes have linked to that diagram for ages, but that one doesn't work. The diode needs to be installed blocking the MAX's TTL output connection, not the input.

This is because the Yaesu radios use the Dallas 1-wire "bus" system, which works by holding the line level high when idle, and to transmit either of the two parties pulls the bus low (for different amounts of time to signal 0/1).

With the diagram as shown above the MAX's pull-up output overpowers the Yaesu's minimal current sink when it tries to pull low, so its transmissions go nowhere.

With the diode blocking against the TX pin, the Yaesu can pull the signal low to send and the MAX TX pin level is isolated. Transmitting to the Yaesu works because when the MAX pulls low, current flows across the diode and the Yaesu sees the low level. Slightly weird, but it works.

Here's the trivially simple Yaesu programming cable that I whipped up:

one FTDI breakout board (I have lots of MAX232s around, but dealing with the extra 5V power supply is less appealing than just using a cheapy usb-to-rs232 module), one diode and one dismantled 4-pin/TRRS plug.

CHIRP works fine with that cable and both my VX-5R and VX-7R.

"Gold Coast Show Day" - das ist ungefähr so weltbewegend als wie ein Kirtag in der Provinz irgendwo hinter St. Blöden.

Mehr weltbewegend find ich das Feiertags-Faktum an sich; etwa so unglaublich als wie wenn in Wien alle frei hätten und alles zu wäre, weil's in Sopron den "Tag des Kukuruz" zelebrieren.

I find the new 'good & cheap' cookbook by Leanne Brown pretty cool and very inspirational - and it's free :-)

Cooking for just myself isn't my idea of fun, but a number of the eminently practical ideas from Leanne's book I've already used successfully.

I'm lucky in that I don't belong to the prime audience for her book, however; for me the appeal lies in her simple, straightforward, low-to-no-frills and fast-ish cooking projects.

I just finished rebuilding an Ikea Jansjö lamp into a portable camping lantern. It's not quite Luxo, Jr. but it'll do.

The Jansjö has a very long flexible neck, and to me that's the most essential aspect: it lets me have light on the table surface without having anything to suspend a lantern from. All the other common camping lanterns suck in that regard as they need to be suspended - or they produce lots of glare and no light on the table.

The Jansjö has one 3.5W white LED and needs 4V. I threw away the transformer and the concrete weight for the base, then glued the base to a plastic cylinder that once held 25 dvds - that has just the right diameter and has space for one adjustable LM2596-based step-down converter, and one set of repurposed laptop lithium cells (four in series).

Very simple, same XT60 plugs as all my other rechargable stuff, and packs up reasonably small.

There are very good technical reasons for why SMTP has an envelope that is separate from the mail headers. DMARC ignores those completely and insists that the envelope matches the mail body and headers.

Net result: DMARC completely breaks mail forwarding and mailing lists. The fun part for anybody running mailing lists (like me) is that there are no alternatives - to appease the DMARC cretins you'd have to violate real mail standards or make your lists broken by disabling useful features of proven efficiency (like VERP) and exposing all your subscribers to bounces and other crap.

In the physical world DMARC would be like prohibiting blank envelopes and requiring that all letters must have the full letter head printed on the front of the envelope.

"this letter contains a new credit card - please steal me!"

Clearly only cretins would think that's a good idea. The list of cretins who insist that DMARC being a great idea includes yahoo, aol and hotmail.

I hope yahoo's dumb move does serve to 'improve protection' - by prompting people to go to somebody more sensible for their mail hosting.

bundjalung n.p. was pretty nice, if busy and very windy. we had a good time nevertheless :-)

...für sonst nix gut aber immerhin brauchbar als Anlaß für Feiertage.

Bissl ein Kontrast: In Ö feiert man jeden noch so mickrigen Heiligen - hier in AU hauptsächlich die Scheinheiligen.

Start with this:

Minus all this:

Plus this:

Gives this:

It's somewhat obvious that I have spent a bit of money at subaXtreme, isn't it.

Weird coincidence: just a few days before the coffi^Wpallet arrived a total bimbo bumped into my car: I was waiting behind her in a right-turn lane, she committed to turning, successfully crossed the two lanes of oncoming traffic - and then suddenly decided, for no good reason whatsoever, to reverse back across those lanes...all the way into my bumper - thunk.

I guess the new bar will be pretty good not just for the silly roos but also for brainless suburban bimbos.

It's pretty obvious that 15.875mm is more than 11.1125mm. It's certainly not immediately obvious that 5/8" is more than 7/16".

(and by immediate I mean "at a glance, without mental effort".)

A few weeks ago I was wearing my Nirvana shirt (x-eyed smiley on the front, "flower sniffin, kitty pettin, baby kissin, corporate rock whores" on the back) and waited in the queue at the supermarket.

A woman behind me asked me what kind of company I work for: she had read the t-shirt text and thought it might involve gardening or rock walls...

nachdem jetzt langsam österreich nimmer andauernd mit The Sound of Music (falsch)verbunden wird, werdens wohl beim thema österreich jetzt für die nächsten 50 jahre mit dem komischen würschtl daherkommen. wunderbar.

my father wanted to know what kind of car i drive; apparently the soobies aren't exactly common in austria? - at least that was his excuse for not associating my answer ("2006 forester") with anything. well, here you are:

the elevator billboards in the office building lobby have not shown the correct weather screen a single time during our four months there. mind you, the stock tickers are current down to the milli-cent, but the weather? "feels like undefined".

i on the other hand feel reasonably good about work, what i do and who i do it with. sure, the last five months have been pretty busy and occasionally quite stressful but that comes with working in a small startup.

it's nice to be able to make a difference; the downside is of course that you do make a difference, whether you want it (e.g. having a stroke of genius) or not (e.g. having a bad day slogging through hard-to-grok undocumented complex tangles).

but i'm not complaining, except that i'm often too tired come saturday morning to even consider going flying - and that, combined with the vagarities of the wind & weather isn't ideal...

"Sie, mein Herr, sind ein Scheißschweizer."

too bad that the bastards in power will likely not give a damn...

more specifically: this V. Nuland person, diplomatic underling now known best for spindoctoring and being a nekulturny pissant needs to have more European High Culture :-)