Fettled any computer stuff today?

[Pickled Onion]

Having written a load of backup scripts and various other cron jobs for the central server raspberry pi, it's a good time to create some clones. Why does it take so long to copy a 16 GB card?

Reading is not too bad:
15931539456 bytes transferred in 1632.556495 secs (9758645 bytes/sec)

But writing the new ones is taking forever:
12722733056 bytes transferred in 5091.772678 secs (2498684 bytes/sec)

Normal for flash memory.

That was bearable, if tedious, the second one is running at 1/10th of the speed. This one is kingston, never used in anger and the status is:

2760536064 bytes transferred in 13193.062733 secs (209241 bytes/sec)

Not sure what's going on. I reformatted and restarted and the speed is the same. It's touch and go whether it will be finished by the time I have to set off for work tomorrow.

For the benefit of anyone who works at Northumbria Uni, that equates to ~3.5 hours for ~2.7 Gigs out of 15 anna bit, leaving ~15-20 hours to go, to within an order of magnitude.

[Dibdib]

Defettled the b0rked SuperDrive out of my iMac and refettled an unused SSD into the empty space. I got to use fancy Torx drivers and secret-squirrel suction cups. And it still works. It was great. Now I'm just waiting while macOS reinstalls on the SSD, then I'll have a ninja-fast computer! 

Ooh, where did you get your secret-squirrel suction cups from? I'm going to be needing some to replace a Thinderbolt display glass that has cracked

I bought a couple of these (Nozama link) - cheap and cheerful but did the job fine!

[Pickled Onion]

That was bearable, if tedious, the second one is running at 1/10th of the speed. This one is kingston, never used in anger and the status is:

2760536064 bytes transferred in 13193.062733 secs (209241 bytes/sec)

Not sure what's going on. I reformatted and restarted and the speed is the same. It's touch and go whether it will be finished by the time I have to set off for work tomorrow.

Nope. Had reached 13.7 GB by 06:00, so had to unplug it & go to work.

[Jaded]

Defettled the b0rked SuperDrive out of my iMac and refettled an unused SSD into the empty space. I got to use fancy Torx drivers and secret-squirrel suction cups. And it still works. It was great. Now I'm just waiting while macOS reinstalls on the SSD, then I'll have a ninja-fast computer! 

Ooh, where did you get your secret-squirrel suction cups from? I'm going to be needing some to replace a Thinderbolt display glass that has cracked

I bought a couple of these (Nozama link) - cheap and cheerful but did the job fine!

Thanks!

[Jaded]

I was fettling well...

...until the new glass broke.    and 

[Dibdib]

I was fettling well...

...until the new glass broke.    and 

Oh no! Oops!

[Gattopardo]

My old imac 10.6.7? has decided to be slow to start and locking up when using firefox, firefox version is no longer supported, so can't update flash which I suspect is the the problem.  Suspect I need to do something so that it can run newer software.

[Jurek]

My old imac 10.6.7? has decided to be slow to start and locking up when using firefox, firefox version is no longer supported, so can't update flash which I suspect is the the problem.  Suspect I need to do something so that it can run newer software.

10.6.8 is the last version that'll run Power PC based software.
If you update from that, AFAIK you'll no longer be able to run your old software using the Intel processor.
It is how I ended up running 2 iMacs side by side - one to run the old stuff, one to run the new - I'm not in a strong position to upgrade all of the software I have on the old machine - it worked out cheaper to buy another iMac.

ETA - Stuff gets transferred between the two using Dropbox.

[Dibdib]

I'm not sure if it'd solve your problems but if you're still on a powerpc-based imac there's an open source team who are maintaining a powerpc-specific fork of Firefox with up-to-date security and other patches:

http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

[Gattopardo]

My old imac 10.6.7? has decided to be slow to start and locking up when using firefox, firefox version is no longer supported, so can't update flash which I suspect is the the problem.  Suspect I need to do something so that it can run newer software.

10.6.8 is the last version that'll run Power PC based software.
If you update from that, AFAIK you'll no longer be able to run your old software using the Intel processor.
It is how I ended up running 2 iMacs side by side - one to run the old stuff, one to run the new - I'm not in a strong position to upgrade all of the software I have on the old machine - it worked out cheaper to buy another iMac.

Ah rosetta thing isn't it.  At the mo I don't think it runs any power pc software.  Mainly use it for Microsoft office, and the internet.

Also recently given a macbook 4.1 so both are a a similar level of os.

[David Martin]

I have the weighing birdfeeder working now. It stores key events (and a few weights either side) in a MongoDB database (instead of every weight read, that has reduced by 100fold the space requirements). It triggers a photo from the webcam when it detects a weight anomaly, which saves about 3000 pictures a day.

Wrote a simple Flask web interface to allow viewing and triggering of the webcam, and annotation of the pictures into a MongoDB table.
Running on two Raspberry Pi model B on my home network.

[Kim]

I replaced the jet engine fans in the UPS with some nice quiet ones.  This was annoying because it meant powering everything down, extracting the UPS and then removing a zillion screws to get the cover off, before arsing about crimping non-standard connectors to the fans to suit those on the PCB.

It was even more annoying when this promptly invoked a fan failure alarm.

Interestingly, these are two-wire fans, so it's not sensing them by the traditional tachometer method.  I tried experimenting with a shunt resistor to bring the load of the quiet fans up to that of the originals, and blowing extra air over the board with one of the originals powered from elsewhere, but neither seemed to help.

So I gave up and installed some medium-loud fans that I had previously removed from a server, on the basis they were still an improvement.  This worked long enough for me to decide all was well, reassemble the ups, return it to the rack, boot everything back up and go to the shops in search of milk.

When I got back it was screaming about fan failure.

So I've had to re-fit the originals.   

Not sure what to try next.  I guess it's sensing the fan RPM via ripple on the supply or something clever, which means I need to try to find a broadly similar spec fan that's less loud.  Joy.


ETA: Googling for the fan's model number brought up endless purveyors of cheap Chinese fans, and this: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/how-to-silence-an-unneeded-fan-but-one-that-must-keep-running.2485051/

Have now gone for the fit-quiet-fans-and-perform-a-buzzerectomy option.  It's permanently in alarm, but that doesn't seem to interfere with anything.  Seems to be running about 5C hotter, which will do.

[Mr Larrington]

Bunged a Creative Sound Blaster Z into Bruiser McHuge so now I can have 5.1 noises without the graphics card thinking there's a second monitor and working itself half utterly to DETH sending video output to a screen that doesn't exist.

I hope it was just concidence that the Logitech game controller software decided to "upgrade" itself again.

[Dibdib]

Fettled the contents of my dead-tree-based filing cabinet¹ into two piles: 99% "useless crap I'll never need again" and 1% "actually useful stuff".

Then, as this is Ctrl-Alt-Del, I fettled the little 1% pile into a nice folder full of OCR'd-and-searchable PDFs nicely organised backed up to Dropbox. Then half of it could join the pile of crap ready for tomorrow's fettling burninating in the incinerator bin.

I still need to figure out how I'm going to organise all these PDFs. It's manageable for now but as it grows with time I'd like a more elegant solution, and hopefully one which doesn't require a £50/year Evernote Premium subscription.

¹ And, more accurately, the completely un-filed box of paperwork on top of it

[Afasoas]

So I'm developing a website .. which is fine.
I have a jenkins build and a hosting environment - each commit to the git repo results in a build and within a couple of minutes of committing I can see the end result. Which is cool.

But I'd rather test changes without committing them. It would make my commit history a lot neater and shorten the feedback cycle. I've already tried hosting the site on my desktop. The website uses a CMS which likes PHP 5.6. Ubuntu 16.04 (on which Mint 18 is based) no longer includes PHP5 in it's repositories. So that's a no go.

I could add a dodgy PPA/third party repository to my sources.list. Or, I could build a VM. And to save a bit of time, I could use Vagrant to provision that VM.
And guess what? Once again I'm screwed over by Canonical. Dependency management is awful. And package maintenance is awful. Two hours later, I've fathomed the dependencies, applied manual patches and I have Vagrant working with libvirt.

That's the final straw. The Next free weekend I get, the desktop is getting migrated!

[Phil W]

Given it is PHP what does the build do? Bundling of files is not  recommended with http/2 multiplexing and connection reuse I wondered what else your build might be doing.

[Jaded]

Create a server environment using MAMP?

[Phil W]

As for testing automate it.  Something like netbeans can run your PHP unit tests for you. It can also push your changes to a test server without committing which may or may not be the same server as where you're developing your website.

[Jaded]

I was fettling well...

...until the new glass broke.    and 

Oh no! Oops!

With the help of two others, got the new glass in!

One of the helpers had the task of keeping the cats out. There is one cat hair behind the glass, but the other helper had the great idea of trying the monitor out to see if I could see the cat hair, before risking another broken glass.

[David Martin]

Ressurected the old webcam to watch the birdfeeder from the other side. Many of the landings were on the wrong side of the feeder. The webcam (an old but good Phillips toucam 740K) has been sat in a little hut on the wall for about ten years. The USB lead was a bit rusty but connected fine and it sprang back into life. The years had not been kind and some moisture had got into the lens rendering it rather misty so I removed it and sat it in a pot of dry rice  ont he radiator for a couple of hours. This sorted it.

Then fettled the Pi to grab that picture as well as the front one, log them both in the database and display them on the web browser. So I should be able to identify a few more birds on the feeder.

[Canardly]

Low level format on HDD I am getting rid of. It took a very long time and I could have, of course, just drilled a hole through the middle. mmm. Bit puzzled why Win 10 keeps spinning it up every now and then.

[Kim]

Bit puzzled why Win 10 keeps spinning it up every now and then.

Probably needs the Windows equivalent of noatime.  Or there's some indexing thinger running in the background sending copies of all your files to Microsoft, of course.

[Phil W]

Low level format on HDD I am getting rid of. It took a very long time and I could have, of course, just drilled a hole through the middle. mmm. Bit puzzled why Win 10 keeps spinning it up every now and then.

In its death throws as you drill a hole through it?

[Jaded]

Did it sing "Daisy, Daisy" to you?

[Gattopardo]

Looking at ssd's for an older gaming laptop and waiting for the my memory £25 120gb to appear again.