Keywords: palm, username, userid, restore, backup

I woke up half an hour late this morning. My Palm V, usually a reliable machine, had crashed hard. The LED was solid, the screen frozen, and I could not even get the box to warm reset. I had to do a cold reset, which means that I then had to go and restore from backup. Not too bad a problem: I make backups.

But the backup kept failing. Those programs that I had bought, rather than the GPLd ones, would not run. I tracked it down to the fact that the User-ID for the Palm had not been set-- and there is no way to set it from the Palm itself. You have to do it from a host computer.

The correct command to do this is install-user -p /dev/pilot -u "User Name". I'm just using this as yet another place to note that down.

Tags: computers
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: NPR

The power supply on my router has been dying for a while. The ball bearings on the fan have been making horrible buzzing noises and the time to replace it had come, so this afternoon I opened the case and prepared for surgery: transferring the hard drive and network cards into an older, slightly slower (it's still a P2 and it's fine for routing, nobody cares) PC.

When I opened the case on the old one while it was still running, I found a colony of vicious dust bunnies living within. I pulled out my trusty blower, but before I pulled the trigger I noticed something: the fan on top of the CPU wasn't spinning. A huge dust bunny had wedged itself into the works and was preventing the fan from spinning. A blast from the duster and it started right up. It's too bad I couldn't do that with the power supply, but it was dead.

A similar problem had hit my desktop a couple of weeks ago, and it had resulted in rapid overheat and shutdown. But this old P2 was still chugging along even though neither the power supply fan nor the CPU fan worked. I wasn't asking very much of it, true, but it was still impressive.

I swapped the cards and the disk drive, and the router happily accepted its new memory and CPU constraints. We got back on line in less than twenty minutes.

Tags: computers
Current Mood: geeky

Well, I bought a new hard drive to replace the one that died. It's hard to believe that the smallest hard drive commonly available is 100GB, and 200GB are only a little pricier. I did a pretty good re-install of GameOS and then overwrote the install with whatever was recoverable from the damaged drive.

I only lost a few things: An episode of MST3K, my Half-Life 2 saved games, and sob my BloodRayne saved games. Waaauugh!

Tags: computers
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Abracadabra, Theme 2

My left control button on my laptop wasn't working right, so I tried cleaning it out with a can of air. A small twig or something stuck out from underneath it, so I reached in with a pair of lab tweezers, the kind with a long thin point at the end, and pulled it out. Out with it came a cat hairball a half-centimeter on a side. I started working my way around the keyboard, and sure enough every key was gummed up underneath with a substantial and disgusting volume of cat hair.

It took a while to clean all of the keys but once I had it done I was happy with the results and the keyboard feels springy and responsive again.

I can't pop the keys off as at least one has broken when I tried to do that. Fortunately, it was only the Windows key; I chose it for the experiment because it was expendable. This keyboard is so old that the plastic undersprings have become fragile, and I don't dare stress them too hard.

Off to take the kids to the library and look up books on La Belle Epoque.

Tags: computers, life
Current Mood: nauseated
Current Music: Yoko Kanno, The Way Men Fight