Rosio Pavoris a blog

So my dad had dinner with his cousin on Tuesday, and they talked about computers at one point. It turns out said cousin’s father (my great-uncle Joseph, the brother of my late grandmother) had similar issues, and so they brought over their machine, with the message that if I could just retrieve (some of) their data, I could have it.
Who says having to play tech support to your entire family is necessarily a bad thing?

Turns out the HD was fine, but the motherboard is fried, and as it turns out, the motherboard is the only remaining usable part left in my dad’s computer after I scavenged it for parts.
The machine’s exactly ten years old (333 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, 56 kbps modem, &c.) and running Windows 95, but with some extra RAM (and maybe an ethernet card) it should be a neat toy. And unlike my grandfather’s iMac, it’s an x86 processor, so I should be able to install Plan 9, which I’ve been meaning to play around with forever (I know there’s a PowerPC port, but it has some issues).
Now I just need to find a blank CD-ROM, because obviously it doesn’t have a DVD drive.

Not bad for half an hour of work, at least (fully twenty-five minutes of which were spent just trying to get the case open; Packard Bell is twattery).

I need a hobby.

(Also this.)

My grandfather (not the dead one) came over for lunch for Easter, which was fun. He complained about foreign people and the fact people treat the elderly as if they’re children, but not about homosecksuals or socialists this time.

My mom invited him because my dad had invited my uncle over for lunch on Monday. He usually lives in Roeselare, so we don’t see a lot of him, but with the inheritance and everything he needed to go through some stuff with us.
We spent most of the afternoon looking through boxes upon boxes of ancient pictures.

There were a lot of pictures of the grandchildren, but most were actually from the ’50s and earlier. It turns out my grandmother was actually really hot when she was my age, which is something no grandchild should ever be confronted with.
And there was a batch of even older pictures, which is interesting. Most of those are over a century old and maybe some of the earliest examples of film photography (cities were prettier before overpopulation and the invention of the car), and there are a few odd framed ones I suspect of actually being daguerreotypes.
We went to order my dad’s new computer today, and we ordered a scanner while we were at it, so I’ll probably share a few of them soon. I hope I’ll be able to scan them without damaging them; they’ll probably be donated to some museum afterwards.

The rest of the afternoon was spent looking at the furniture in my grandparents’ apartment (the measuring of which my dad gave me 100 € for, which I spent on an external 120 GB HD today), guesstimating the values of various paintings (including a particularly ugly one by Pierre Paulus, who also designed the Walloon flag), and talking about family scandals.
Good times were had by all.

My uncle also invited me along to Montreal for a few weeks in the near future (we have family there which needs to be visited, apparently). I declined for obvious reasons.

Apparently my mom managed to hose my parents’ computer’s hard drive on Wednesday, and apparently passing all of my computer-related classes finally convinced them I know something about them, so I was charged with recovering their data, if possible.
The problem was that it would boot, but then halfway into loading Windows it would make a grinding noise and error out.

The first thing I tried was just to boot the Lunix from a live CD, but apparently the DVD drive had been broken for five or six years, and the CD-ROM drive they added below it (rather than replace the DVD drive, for whatever reason) wasn’t recognised by the BIOS at all.
So I tried a bootable USB stick, as the BIOS purported to support booting from USB devices, but apparently it was full of lies.
Since there was a separate option for booting from “USB CD-ROM”, I even brought down my eleven-year-old external CD-R drive, but no dice.

By then my dad managed to find a Windows 95 rescue floppy, which got me into DOS, but then I realised I don’t actually know a whole lot about DOS, and if there’s a way to manually mount drives it fails to, I couldn’t figure it out in under five minutes.
It did, however, confirm the floppy drive worked, so I proceeded to make a Damn Small Linux boot floppy (after spending twenty minutes looking for a floppy that wasn’t either full of what my dad considered to be important data or degraded beyond usability), which also failed in interesting ways.
By then it was midnight and I had a headache, so I gave up.

The next day, my dad decided he was going to buy a new computer regardless of what happened to the old one, so I just took out the hard drive and mounted it in my own deskop. I didn’t originally want to do that because I’d never fucked around with hardware before, but it was actually pretty straightforward (though I had to guess at the jumper settings; the drive was old enough that the company that made it had been bought out by a company which was subsequently bought out by Maxtor, which, as you know, was bought out by Seagate in early 2006; documentation was rather hard to find).
Nearly all of their data was still intact, so I made back-ups and proceeded to scavenge the rest of the computer for usable parts.

Slim pickings, though. It was seven or eight years old, though other than the HD and the DVD drive, it was in remarkably good condition.

I did get a new PSU out of it; my old one had been moderately broken for ages, and profoundly broken since last August (it refused to boot without considerable prodding for five to ten minutes, making noises like crap cars starting on cold mornings, which was actually rather funny; this is also why I got a laptop). It’s only 300 Watt compared to my old one’s 350, but that’s still rather more than my desktop actually uses.
I also added their RAM to my own, bringing the total to 768 MB (from 512; I’m not sure who decided that would be a proportionate amount of RAM for a 3.2 GHz CPU). The HD is legitimately shot, or I’d have kept that as well. Too noisy anyway.

What I really needed, though, is a new video card, but interestingly, there was none in my parents’ computer, even though they did pay for one, and they were given a box and manuals and everything.
My dad went to the store we got it today to see about prices for a new one and confronted them about this, and they told him the motherboard didn’t support video cards, and anyway the on-board graphics controller was more powerful than the dedicated €500 card they were supposed to get. When asked why they still charged for the card and gave us the box and manuals, they changed the subject.

Forgetting to plug in a card I can sort of understand. Lying about it when you’re confronted with it, though, just smells like fraud, especially considering the exact same thing apparently happened to my sister’s boyfriend (who did notice fairly quickly; as for why my parents didn’t notice until eight years later: presumably you have parents who own a computer; they could forget the monitor and it’d still be weeks before they’d complain).

As such, I am now also charged with finding a new computer-selling place. Since the options are fairly limited in Tienen itself, I’ll probably just ask around in Leuven.
Which will have to happen tomorrow, since Easter vacation starts next week. Wooh.

In unrelated news, there’s something considerably entertaining about randomly finding pictures of people you used to sort of know on websites dedicated to archiving pictures of camwhores. Themightytango is prettier with no clothes on.

In equally unrelated news, I am not a meme.

Nearly all cultures have historically used numeral systems in base-10 (that is, the decimal system) or some multiple thereof (Mayans used base-20, Babylonians base-60), supposedly because a human hand has ten fingers.¹ If that’s the case, the ancients suffered from a severe lack of imagination.
If you count on your fingers in base-1 (that is, the normal way), you can count to ten. However, there is a way you can get up to 1023 using just both of your hands.

How? Use binary, of course.

It’s actually really easy once you get used to it. If your finger is up, that bit is set. If it’s down, it’s not.
For example, the following are the numbers 0, 24, 17, and 31 (only one hand is shown, because it’s easier; 31 is the highest you can go on one hand, obviously).²

Counting on your fingers in binary is a skill well worth picking up, especially if you intend to use computers more often than never, but also just because.
You can even count with negative numbers, if you use two’s complement or similar.

It might be harder to expand this to also use your toes, but every toe you add doubles your range of numbers (you can count up to 2ⁿ – 1, where n is the number of digits; including 0, that means you can represent 2ⁿ numbers), so you probably wouldn’t need all of them. If you’re counting up to 1,048,575 (or 2,097,151 if you’re a guy, hurr), you’re better off grabbing a calculator anyway.

¹ The Native American Yuki tribe actually used a base-4 system, because they counted the spaces between the fingers of one hand, which is interesting. Some Nigerian tribes use a duodecimal system (that is, base-12), because they are mutants.
(Actually, base-12 exists in a lot of places, mostly in the Imperial system of measurement (twelve rods to a hogshead, and all), and in various forms in time-keeping (twelve zodiac signs, twelve hours on the clock).)

² These hand pictures are actually repurposed from a chart detailing some variety of sign language.

This video may just make up for the past seven years of bullshit.

(Via Bruce Schneier.)

There’s something profoundly frightening about the type of person who takes a story about all life on Earth (except for a violent drunk and his dysfunctional family and the handful of critters they take with them on their boat) drowning in a catastrophical global flood brought on by a spiteful god, and tells it to his children as a happy story about happy animals and a loving God and his promise of a pretty, pretty rainbow to a happy Noah and his happy, happy family.

Or who tells stories about their god turning rivers to blood, inflicting disease on livestock and unhealable boils on people, bringing plagues of frogs, lice, flies, and locusts, bringing down a rain of fire, and killing all of a nation’s first-born, while maintaining that said god is “Love and Mercy”.

Or who takes the message that all unbelievers should be shunned and hated and will burn in Hell for all eternity, and by the way so will believers unless they’re really, really good, but that’s impossible since we’re all filthy, sinful wastes of flesh, and calls it Good News.

But no, religion is not a mental illness, and suggesting it is is hyperbole and we’re all big meanies for doing it.

(Based on this comment, which also makes a good point with regards to abstinence-only education. And if you think Christianity is the only religion this applies to, or this is the worst of it, you’re deluding yourself.)