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pseydtonneToday I built a Windows XP Pro SP2 machine from scratch, got it updated to SP3 with the latest patches, installed a bunch of free software and copied 78 gig of files onto it.
None of this is impressive. I once wiped a laptop and made it into a dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows XP within one hour. I didn't run any of the Windows updates but the dual-boot worked as did all drivers both sides. That's my record and I will remain proud of it -- especially since the laptop belonged to a random grad student and he was wicked happy to be on his way and learn some stuff.
The big thing about today was getting all of the configuration done within one day and not having to skip anything else about the day. I went to the supermarket in the morning, my therapist in the afternoon, and H-Mart out in Burlington in the afternoon. I listened to techno, a bunch of NPR, on and on. I had a nice phone conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dimers (who is important for my sanity), then grabbed a slice of pizza and watched some women's curling. My roomie and I had plenty of time to talk shit about the Python scripting language and the fate of broadcast television.
I didn't even mention the pretzel roll! My roomie ordered food-grade lye to make proper Bavarian pretzels. The proper part wasn't the bread: he just used the take & bake rolls from Trader Joe's. It turns out pretzels are supposed to be made much like bagels, but soaked in lye highly diluted in water instead of salt. Wow, were they good! I realized today that I had never had a real pretzel before this and I never want to go back to the baking-soda version.
Too bad the effort is kinda scary, although not particularly time-consuming. Lye fizzes invisibly, so you need to wear long gloves and eye protection. Lye is ridiculously caustic and alkali, which anyone that has seen Fight Club knows. In the days of communal ovens, lye came from scraping the soot from the chimney and boiling it. Thus it was everywhere in the scary old days and safely almost nowhere now. However you can have it delivered by UPS.
As a public service, I must tell anyone thinking about trying a five-second or ten-seconds dunk of bread rolls in lye water: get some citric acid (the powder they put on sour chew candy to make it sour) and have it on hand in case of accidents. Vinegar will also work, but it'll also carry the lye down your arm or body as it stops the burn. Citric acid will absorb as it saves your skin, it's available at most co-op stores and a bag of it can occupy six year olds that are begging to turn into tweakers.
Through all of this, I had time to test the hard drive with a deep formatting, diagnose and fix a sound driver problem, get all the little things set up while moving the big things around, and even found an HDTV card to try later.
Man, WinMerge doesn't seem to scale well. Sure, 78 gigabytes of mostly music versus what I hope are 78 identical gig are a lot. To be fair, the computer is about five years old and it's dealing with two IDE drives on the same cable. Nevertheless, it's looking like it'll take an hour to compare these two items -- as long as it took to copy the files.
While I was moving files, I found something I'd written from August of 2005. I was explaining why a certain folder existed: to consolidate redundant MP3 files. Everything was still true, with only a couple of things fixed since then. I am still trying to come up with a single repository of music and other files that is easy to navigate, has neither redundancies nor bad copies and is easy to replicate identically. I have all of the parts, but I'm still missing some software to look for duplicates. It looks like I'll be writing some of it.
I just need to put some boxes away and then I can go to bed. Today's mission accomplished -- next month's mission can begin early.
None of this is impressive. I once wiped a laptop and made it into a dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows XP within one hour. I didn't run any of the Windows updates but the dual-boot worked as did all drivers both sides. That's my record and I will remain proud of it -- especially since the laptop belonged to a random grad student and he was wicked happy to be on his way and learn some stuff.
The big thing about today was getting all of the configuration done within one day and not having to skip anything else about the day. I went to the supermarket in the morning, my therapist in the afternoon, and H-Mart out in Burlington in the afternoon. I listened to techno, a bunch of NPR, on and on. I had a nice phone conversation with
dimers (who is important for my sanity), then grabbed a slice of pizza and watched some women's curling. My roomie and I had plenty of time to talk shit about the Python scripting language and the fate of broadcast television.I didn't even mention the pretzel roll! My roomie ordered food-grade lye to make proper Bavarian pretzels. The proper part wasn't the bread: he just used the take & bake rolls from Trader Joe's. It turns out pretzels are supposed to be made much like bagels, but soaked in lye highly diluted in water instead of salt. Wow, were they good! I realized today that I had never had a real pretzel before this and I never want to go back to the baking-soda version.
Too bad the effort is kinda scary, although not particularly time-consuming. Lye fizzes invisibly, so you need to wear long gloves and eye protection. Lye is ridiculously caustic and alkali, which anyone that has seen Fight Club knows. In the days of communal ovens, lye came from scraping the soot from the chimney and boiling it. Thus it was everywhere in the scary old days and safely almost nowhere now. However you can have it delivered by UPS.
As a public service, I must tell anyone thinking about trying a five-second or ten-seconds dunk of bread rolls in lye water: get some citric acid (the powder they put on sour chew candy to make it sour) and have it on hand in case of accidents. Vinegar will also work, but it'll also carry the lye down your arm or body as it stops the burn. Citric acid will absorb as it saves your skin, it's available at most co-op stores and a bag of it can occupy six year olds that are begging to turn into tweakers.
Through all of this, I had time to test the hard drive with a deep formatting, diagnose and fix a sound driver problem, get all the little things set up while moving the big things around, and even found an HDTV card to try later.
Man, WinMerge doesn't seem to scale well. Sure, 78 gigabytes of mostly music versus what I hope are 78 identical gig are a lot. To be fair, the computer is about five years old and it's dealing with two IDE drives on the same cable. Nevertheless, it's looking like it'll take an hour to compare these two items -- as long as it took to copy the files.
While I was moving files, I found something I'd written from August of 2005. I was explaining why a certain folder existed: to consolidate redundant MP3 files. Everything was still true, with only a couple of things fixed since then. I am still trying to come up with a single repository of music and other files that is easy to navigate, has neither redundancies nor bad copies and is easy to replicate identically. I have all of the parts, but I'm still missing some software to look for duplicates. It looks like I'll be writing some of it.
I just need to put some boxes away and then I can go to bed. Today's mission accomplished -- next month's mission can begin early.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 05:10 pm (UTC)I am not familiar with winMerge. Last time I tried to eliminate redundancies in my music, I used Media Monkey, which was ok but not great.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-21 10:05 pm (UTC)Reading 78G twice off the same cable being equal in time to reading 78G and writing 78G on the same cable doesn't sound surprising to me.
Given the existence of mix cd's in my music repo, no dupes would require links, either sym or hard, and those don't tend to be very portable... then there's the same-cd-source-different-rip issue...
Ever get done with that double floppy drive?