Category: Techno Geek

And…metamusing is back

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It was a bit painful due to a bad decision on my part and a flaky dist-upgrade from Ubuntu, but if you’re reading this you’ve noticed Metamusing is back. The bad decision led to the extended downtime. We got Charter out to install cable on Friday last week while Susan and I were off from work and unpacking. I tried to bring the server back online that night, and when I brought it up it alerted me that there was a new version of Ubuntu out and asked if I wanted to upgrade. Without really thinking I said sure, and let it start its thing (a dist-upgrade can take quite a while), then moved on to other chores in the house. Some hours later I checked back in with the machine and the dist-ugrade had hard locked the machine, or possibly just killed the usb bus, but either way I could no longer interact with the machine, which was sitting there with an alert that had popped up part way through the upgrade warning me that some packages I was running were no longer supported. Tired already and frustrated, I cycled the power.

Bad choice, which I basically knew when I was making it. This rendered the machine unbootable. With so much else on my plate I turned my attention to other tasks and only returned to it last night. Thanks to a pointer from someone at work the repair was relatively painless. Recovery mode ftw 😉

To SSD or not to SSD

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So solid state hard drives (SSD) are starting to descend into almost affordable territory – the popular Intel x25m 80 GB drive can be found for ~$250, which is actually less than I used to pay for drives measured in megabyte capacities back when I started building my own machines. They’re blazing fast at most things compared to conventional drives. The capacities are of course much smaller than regular drives, but folks are following a scheme of installing the OS and the most critical apps onto the SSD and everything else onto a large capacity conventional disc. Supposedly this will lead to a bigger performance increase on the machine than most anything else, including a faster cpu. I’m working on the parts for a new Windows 7-based machine, and stuck on what to do for the disc, cpu, motherboard and video card. The SSD is really the toughest call. I get that it will sleep and restore from sleep virtually instantaneously, which is actually the big draw for me (not that the boot speed and application launching speeds aren’t appealing as well), but the price relative to a conventional disc with 20x more space for 1/2 the price is sticking in my craw. Which way would you go if you were me?

How much is your Steam account worth?

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Steam
Image via Wikipedia

A little friday fun of a different kind, we’ll call it the  ‘scare the spouse with your gaming expenditures’ edition. Steam is the most successful of the PC gaming digital distribution platforms. I’m a big fan and have been using it for years. The folks at ddgamer have put together a little tool to calculate what your account’s worth. Remember when you look at this that the numbers are based on the current value of the software, not what you actually paid. For me this means my account looks like it’s worth a lot more than I actually paid because I so often take advantage of the weekly and holiday sales Steam offers. Caveats aside, here’s my account, which today is worth $1,603.26. Change the username to your own to calculate the value of your account. A side note – folks have actually been selling off their Steam accounts, so if the number makes you feel sheepish and you want to try and recoup some of that money, you can try selling it on Amazon zshops or ebay or whatever. Mind that Valve (owners of Steam) may not approve, it’s probably a violation of their TOS, etc etc.