The Mono

It's a good thing that I found a program that will let me burn CDs in Ubuntu... and that it's not related to cdrecord.

cdrecord won't work with Debian-based distros these days, you see. There's a Debian fork of it called cdrkit, with a component called "wodim"... I did finally find a package for that. It conflicts with the package for cdrecord. That was actually kind of expected; all I needed to do was uninstall cdrecord first. But I didn't. Why?

Because apt-get, when asked to uninstall cdrecord, wants to uninstall three other packages that are "no longer needed". The list: cdrecord, k3b, nautilus-cd-burner, ubuntu-desktop.

ubuntu-desktop? Christ. I don't know how essential it actually is, but it seems pretty damned important to me, and I'm not going to remove any package that firmly suggests you not uninstall it if you want your system to continue to function. Not to mention the fact that it can get along just fine without cdrecord. (As can the other two, given a replacement burning program.)

Both Synaptic and apt-get insist on bundling these four together, with no obvious means of separating them. Sigh.

On the plus side, Gnomebaker created a perfectly sound mp3 CD with very little hassle. I can finally burn CDs again!

Three weeks to the day, and finally the sweet, sweet water bandwidth is flowing.

( Here be details... )

A few cable changes later, we're back on at our accustomed speed and reliability level. The weasel has started up his bittorrent again, and I don't have to log back into lily and my IM accounts every half-hour as the connection goes stale. All in all, things are returning to normal. The torture is (for the moment) over!

I thought I'd repost my brother's request for suggestions for Bay Area DSL providers.

Both he and this household are looking for a decent shop that (preferably) runs through Covad's wires, since we're sick of SBC. The other criteria are in his post.

If you have DSL, how happy are you with your people? Good or bad, all info welcome.

I think my laptop is starting to die, very slowly.

Hesseth was bought almost four years ago... I usually expect better life from things that cost more than a thousand dollars, but I guess this is to be expected of modern laptops. It was never the fastest or the best, and more can be gotten for less money now, but... sigh. It's definitely been what I wanted in a laptop, in terms of the features.

Still, the video cable is acting up a little even since the repairs, and in the middle of running a battery power cycle (to find out how much charge the battery still holds, mostly) just now, the whole system chirped strangely once, then twice, then went dark. I plugged it in and brought it back up (thank you, ext3 filesystem) to find 80% battery listed by my intelligent battery monitor. I think something shorted. Normally that wouldn't concern me hugely except the sound seems to have gotten really, really soft now... Sigh.

I have no idea where I'm going to get the money, but I guess I should start shopping. I hear tell that Fry's has had Compaqs in the $800 range lately, and since Cq got bought by HP they've basically been repackaging the older HP models... I have no issue with that, seeing how well my older HP model has served me, even with hard use. I know my priorities in a system, and may post them later so that I can ask for suggestions.

I had hoped any summer job would go to paying down my considerable debt. I may really have to consider taking time off school, now, if I have to work long enough to replace some vital stuff... my car stereo deck is getting flaky as well (the laser alignment isn't good, and it's spontaneously rebooted a few times) and I consider that almost as vital as my laptop. I also need a scythe for the yard, and some clothes I can't justify asking my parents to pay for, like dancing shoes. I've been building up things I need for the last n years, always saying "when I get money"... it may be time to make that sooner rather than later.

Hang in there, Hesseth. I need to find a successor. And a job.

Things are getting better in all sorts of ways. At this moment, I am typing on my laptop, as I have been all along... the difference is that it is no longer shackled to the 60-pound Trinitron. Its native LCD lives again!

( The gory techie details )

So now I just need to get the huge monitor off my desk and things will be back to normal. I can take my computer with me again! Yay!

My laptop screen just died. I have to be at work in less than an hour and my screen is dead, dead, dead.

I tried restarting the machine and got blurs, flickers, and what might have been text. I identified the grub screen, barely... when it got to opening X, it started to try to draw the whole graphical background and did a beautiful "sunrise" effect where white came down from the top and washed away all other color in the screen. It's blank white now, the panel isn't able to do anything else.

F@#%!@.

It's a laptop, too. Dammit.

Maybe next week I can try cracking it to see what's wrong with the cables. Next week. Argh.