A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[Pickled Onion]

My Time Machine backups are failing. I've tried all the usual suggestions, it's looking like I'm going to have to trash it and start with a fresh one. A worrying prospect, of course I have copies of everything important but nowhere convenient to temporarily store a full restore image while I delete the 3 years of backup and re-image. It's a TB so is going to take some time...

USB drives are cheap and capacious these days. I'm not sure why the TM is failing, is it the drive itself? I had one that got inexplicably corrupted, all the old data was there but it just wouldn't write to it any more. Rather than faff around (Google had a million suggestions for fixing it, but life is too short), I just backed up to a new drive and then once I was sure I had everything, deleted the corrupted TM and replaced it with the new one (I don't, tbh, need several years of incremental backups and everything important is copied to my NAS anyway). That drive is still running several months later, so it wasn't a hardware issue.

It's an apple time capsule so capacious but not cheap. I ignored it for a while then it took matters into its own hands, informed me what it was going to do, then deleted itself and created a new backup. And yes, it took the length of 600 km Audax to complete.

Bizarrely, the same week iTunes has told me it can't backup my phone and I must delete the old backup and create a new one.

[woollypigs]

Me phone screen cracked and made the phone unusable. So why not try the find and nuke phone option that google/android do. I just about lifted my finger from the down push on the mouse, when the phone restarted and did its deleting. This is freaking awesome and scary at the same time. I know that this information - hey phone how are you, I would like you to reboot and reset please thanks -  had to leave my laptop/home fly around a few servers and then return back to home/phone. 2-3 sec would still be fast and wicked but at the speed of less of a mouse click!!!

New phone ordered and when it arrives all I have to do is to login and a short wait later I got everything back. This freaking awesome and scary at the same time.

Yes I sold my soul to the big G back in 2004

[simonp]

When you launch 560 jobs to the compute farm and one of the servers has a wobbly and decides that all jobs submitted will fail with permission denied when trying to redirect stdout to the results area, and your phone spends 10 minutes beeping with one email per failed job.

Also those at home wonder why your iPad sat on the kitchen worktop is beeping like mad.

[Chris S]

Note to self. Don't create a mount to an external drive in your local $HOME when that local $HOME is in view of rsnapshot, especially when the mounted drive contains 150Gb of audio files. And definitely don't then try and backup the backup with rsync and wonder why it's taking three days to copy! 

[Afasoas]

Would this help:

Code: [Select]

  -x, --one-file-system       don't cross filesystem boundaries

Adding that to the rsync command should exclude mount points.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Windows 10 provides an on-screen keyboard. (settings/ease of access/keyboard)

Useful if you want to use a telly as a monitor and only your mouse is wireless. 

[simonp]

Modifying xxxx_model.c

Notice some code. What idiot wrote this?

git blame xxxx_model.c

Oh. 

Well it was 2009. Obviously I wouldn't write that code now.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Talking of idiocy:

NHS send-to-all email causes turmoil

This was due to an NHS Mail user setting up an email distribution list which, because of a bug in the supplier's system, inadvertently included everyone on the NHS Mail list.

Obviously none of us have ever done anything like that ...

[Kim]

This was due to an NHS Mail user setting up an email distribution list which, because of a bug in the supplier's system, inadvertently included everyone on the NHS Mail list.

Obviously none of us have ever done anything like that ...

That's not idiocy, that's epic configuration fail.

Idiocy is what perpetuates the problem beyond the original message, causing the inevitable spiral of reply-all doom.

By all accounts, the systems seem to have coped surprisingly well, in as much as it was able to happen in the first place.

[simonp]

Seen that several times since our takeover. We are roughly 1/50 the size of the NHS though.

reply-all with please remove me from the list is popular.

[Vince]

Followed by many reply-all messages asking people not to reply to all.

[woollypigs]

Someone on an IRC channel I idle, said today - "We've discovered on a conference call that if you start shouting Alexa commands, someone probably has an Echo within listening range."

Now that is fun, if only I knew Alexa commands and did conference calls, hours of fun

[tiermat]

The two Dell laptops I ordered arrived today.

The QHD screens on the XPSs really are very nice, aren't they?

[spesh]

Did you switch your 787 off, then on again, today?

SUMMARY: We are adopting a new airworthiness directive (AD) for all The Boeing Company Model 787 airplanes. This AD requires a repetitive maintenance task for electrical power deactivation on Model 787 airplanes. This AD was prompted by the determination that a Model 787 airplane that has been powered continuously for 248 days can lose all alternating current (AC) electrical power due to the generator control units (GCUs) simultaneously going into failsafe mode. This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2015-10066.pdf

[Gattopardo]

Would you use a bios, that has had a whitelist removed, that was obtained from the internet?

[Chris S]

"Server is running in a degraded state".

 

Mutter Mutter... Merry Christmas...

#techdeath

[TheLurker]

Oh bugger.  Lester Haines has died.  There's an obit. over on The Register.

[Tim Hall]

Oh bugger.  Lester Haines has died.  There's an obit. over on The Register.

Dated 10th June 2016...

[TheLurker]

Oh bugger.  Lester Haines has died.  There's an obit. over on The Register.

Dated 10th June 2016...

I missed it when it was first published.  Don't know how.

[Bledlow]

Deskunder computer has become erratic of late. Freezing at apparently random but shortening intervals. Checked for nasties in several ways, & was told by one bit of software that I had a couple of corrupt file index entries, clearing of which seemed to solve the problem - but it was temporary. After being good for a little while, it rapidly got worse than ever, to the point of being unusable. Inter-freeze time in minutes, not hours.

New deskunder will be collected tomorrow, & I've been working on Mrs B's slow old (even older than the old deskunder) laptop. But I switched on the old deskunder/floortop to copy as much as possible from it* before the next freeze, & the bloody thing's worked perfectly!


*Got most saved in backups, last one able to complete being since the temporary fix, so it's just a matter of capturing recent changes.

[SteveC]

I've moved my backup disk so that it is now attached to the new computer I'm actually using as opposed to the one which is currently switched off and on the other side of the room.
Started Time Machine. The disk doesn't have enough space. That'll be because it has the back up for the old machine on.
I'll just delete that (remembering to empty the trash as well).

Code: [Select]

Preparing to empty the Trash...
Items to delete: 3,916,537
...and counting. It's been running for hours. A reformat would have been quicker and made more sense. Oh well.

[SteveC]

4.3 million now...

[SteveC]

Ended up over five million!

[David Martin]

Be careful what you wish for, and what your AI is listening to on the broadcast media.. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/07/tv_anchor_says_alexa_buy_me_a_dollhouse_and_she_does/

Will 'dollshousing' become a term along the lines of the streisand effect..?

[Feanor]

Bah.

I need to set up webmail access onto my IMAP mail system.
I planned to use Roundcube, and install it on my Asterisk box, which is a convenient Linux box which is not too busy.

I configure the Virtual Host in Apache, and point it to the Roundcube Document Root.
This all works fine, and I now have both the Asterisk admin console and the Webmail on the same box.

However, after that, the initial web-based setup of roundcube fails due to a version dependency of php on the box.
The Asterix box has been up for a long time, and I'm not prepared to fsck around with the php version on it for fear of breaking other things, and things snowballing out of hand.

So I'll put the webmail on a different machine.