Bad: The 40GB drive (the one that came from the old computer) in the desktop died. It was the drive storing my home directory.
Good: I was able to back up my home directory before it expired.
Inconvenient: Fedora needs to be reinstalled, all the miscellaneous packages I use reloaded and my home directory restored.
Bleh.
Hardware snafus
Well, my desktop at work booted up this morning, but I suspect not all is well. One of the hard drives is making an annoying high pitched whining sound, which wasn’t happening before I left. A check of the system log shows it’s been rebooting almost daily since I left for some odd reason that’s not indicated in the log file. Backing up my home directory now onto what is hopefully the good drive and not the whining one. Hopefully the whole 11GB of my home directory can be backed up before another shutdown occurs.
Still not sure what caused yesterday’s meltdown, but I suspect something’s overheating in the case.
Desktop fry-age
Smoked, and not in a tasty BBQ sort of way either.
Not sure what happened, but while I was sitting at my desk at work catching up on some reading, all the fans on my desktop computer suddenly spun up and the thing started sounding like it was ready to take off.
This was followed very closely by the unmistakable odour of fried electrical components.
Naturally this all happened just before I was ready to leave for the day, so I haven’t had an opportunity to do any diagnostic work yet. That will have to wait until the morning. Hopefully the data on the hard drives is still intact. There’s a lot of data I’d hate to lose. Scrounging enough parts to figure out what’s wrong or to build another desktop could be challenging.
Seduced to the Mac side
I’ve been staying with friends here in Edmonton, and they have a very nice iMac. Like Jared, I’m feeling the pull back to Apple after using it for a while.
I’m certainly no stranger to Apple since the very first computer I laid tiny little fingers on was an Apple ][+ and my first computer was an Apple ][e, My all time favourite computing platform was the NeXT, but it’s been PCs since then.
After seeing Apple’s new iMacs, I was starting to get tempted to get one to replace the aging Dell I have at home. Now I’m more tempted.
Trip prep
Getting ready for my trip back home, there were a few of things I needed so a short gadget shopping spree was in order.
You can never have enough USB ports on your computer or laptop anymore, so one of these USB squid hubs solves the problem perfectly.
Perfect for attaching things like:
and
for getting images off this
Of course I need something to carry all this crapmy gadgets in, so I got one of these
Time to start getting things organized and ready for packing.