So far with my new smartphone I have: texted my sister, accidentally called my friend, been sent a picture of a cat, set the picture of the cat as my wallpaper, downloaded two apps and wishlisted a bunch more, taken a photo of some candy, transferred my contacts, uploaded an icon for myself, listened to the radio, and played 333 games of Flow.

***
Anyway! So, my fellow Librarians people, if you were one of the Librarians, which Librarian would you be?

I ask this because about 10 minutes before tonight's episode, an old family friend called my mom out of the blue to say he and his wife had been watching it and Cassandra reminds them of me.

Which.

I personally think I am less the sylphlike math genius who hallucinates, and more the dude who decided to waste all his potential living at home with his mom and posting about obscure facts on the internet.

I also think that ( minor spoilers for tonight's episode )

Anyway not a bad way to end it if that is the end, I may even write fic for it, who knows!

So it's been a WEIRD week. First we closed my workplace for most of a week because the heat was broken (the head had been broken. the heat will be broken. but they finally decided that we couldn't keep going with the terrible space heaters in a building that size. So they closed us for four days while they... sourced some better space heaters rather than fixing the boiler, apparently.)

Anyway, that meant I had an unexpected day off and then spent several days working in a completely different building with a different group of staff than usual, and then spent today back in the regular building doing five days' worth of accumulated stuff. So that was fun.

Then on my unexpected day off I decided to finally wipe & reinstall Windows on this laptop. It was doing a thing where whenever certain programs tried to open the save as/open file dialog, it crashed the program, and the best we could tell was that there was something screwy somewhere in Windows. LET ME TELL YOU how fun it is to attempt digital art when you can't Save As without crashing the program. Anyway it had been doing the thing on and off and then it started doing the thing every time, so I finally go annoyed enough to fix it. Theoretically I probably could have tracked down the specific file with the error but I figured just reinstalling from the restore partition would be simpler, since it had gotten pretty crufty anyway.

BOY WAS I WRONG. I spent Wednesday afternoon to Friday evening just running Windows Update and then restarting over and over again. And then I tried to reinstall all my programs. Here is the list of programs I consider essential: The ones that have stars are ones that required some kind of substantial messing around before they would consent to working properly:

( List of essential programs, all but one freeware )

So all in all could have been even more frustrating but I am glad to be DONE. (And we are setting restore points this time, yes precious.) Hopefully I can get back to more normal sort of computer use now that that's done, and finish up the DW posts I'm obligated to while I'm at it. I'd still like to organize my own files better but like that'll ever be finished, and I'd like to set up torrenting again but it's been so long I bet everything's changed, so I moved that to a secondary list.

Or, you know, they will have to close work again and we'll have another snowstorm and I'll spend three days curled up in blankets. I'd be okay with that too.

(I'm still ticking stuff off my massive to-do list from three weeks ago. Maybe I will actually finish it someday...)

Having finally imported my LJ into my DW, I have set about the task of trying to organize my tags into something ... usable.

This is best described as hellish, although the improvements made to DW's tag management system are making it, at least, bearable (in that the headaches are caused by the nature of tagging itself, rather than the implementation of it.)

I am also learning interesting things about myself in the process. For example, I had a separate 'science' tag and 'science!' tag, because I think we can all agree that "SCIENCE!" has a different meaning than science. However, when I actually looked at my tag uses, I realized that having two separate tags was redundant. Because it's all SCIENCE! :P

Also, things that I have decided, on balance, require fandom: tags of their own include sodapop, sports, springtime, and squid.


In other news, I am giving in and getting myself an Etsy account. If I have to. I guess. Anybody want to be my referrer? (Does being a referrer get you anything?)

(Also, linkedin is creepy. jsyk.)


I spent most of yesterday and the night before, with some very welcome help, attempting to fix all the computer hardware. As result, instead of using a power cord with a socket made of electrical tape that burnt through every three days and stopped working if you looked at it wrong, I now have a power cord that causes my computer to completely shut down without warning if you look at it wrong. I'm not sure which is preferable really, though I suppose the new way is less of a fire hazard.

(Other things that did not actually get fixed: my newest mp3 player (which seems to have firmware issues, and no way to actually alter or access the firmware); my external media drive (which I was able to confirm does still have the data on, but still cannot get to function as a drive, and have nothing to copy the data onto); my sound system (which used to sound tinny in the speakers but fine with headphones, and now sounds tinny with headphones too.)

On the upside, my monitor is no longer floating around loose in the case with scary rattly noises, and my CD/DVD-RW drive works again! And that means I can run a linux liveCD! And oh, linux, how I miss you! And oh, linux, how I do not miss trying to find the necessary drivers to make my peripherals work!

I think the next large-ticket item I am buying is a brand-new terabyte external drive. Perhaps with my election judge money. Any recommendations?

1. I am now declaring myself Officially Caught Up after those sixteen days I was offline for Pennsic! *whew*

2. I have started working on tidying up my last few loose ends on LJ. I finally imported my old LJ entries, and I'm planning tonight/tomorrow to reshuffle my filters and friends there and make one last sticky post. This seems like an apropos time, yeah?

But! As part of this, I decided to try to fix my ancient and deeply crufty and broken custom style by just switching over to one of the S2 site styles, since I never plan on having a paid account there.

( Help me figure out a new lj layout to use? )

(And yes, the next step is fix my DW layout. And tags.)

3. I have posted fic ! And you can't see it!

Specifically, my let's-be-realistic goal for kink_bingo was to get one square filled by the points deadline. And I did! Just barely, but I posted James May/Oz Clarke Vampire AU RPS to topgearslash just before the deadline, thus filling my "bites/bruises" square, and crossposted to topgearslash the next day. Alas they're both locked communities, so unless you decide to join, you can't see my story until I decide to update my AO3 account.

And while I was glazed with victory from that, I started posting a story at the new Top Gear Anon Porn meme, but I'm so not brave enough to say which one. (you can probably guess, though. It's in my style: unfinished WIP. :P )

Back from con.txt! I survived! Okay, I came home on Sunday, fell in to bed at about 6 PM, and slept though until Monday morning, but still, I survived!

...and now there are two years to wait until the next one. ):

I went to sixteen panels (and modded or co-modded six of them); still managed to go out to an excellent lunch with starlady and an excellent dinner with zana16, erinptah, and nakedbee; taught my self to fold dirty origami at the dance, then some stitch'n'bitchery downstairs with synecdochic, sarah, and some of the other usual suspects; then there was the vid show, the Dr. Who viewing party, and the late-night trivia quiz; cosplayed, dropped off and took some stuff at the swap table, sold something at the art auction; got a lead on Dr. Who slash 'zines from a dealer, stayed for Dead Duck, and even did a little bit of freeform socializing.

I think I used up all my extroversion points for about two months. There's a reason I've spent all my free time the past two days basically lying on my bed watching UK Parliament.

Also, my laptop didn't *technically* completely die! I had to stop using the heavy-duty replacement power cord (which now emits sparks and smoke, and never quite fit the socket) and go back to using the original power cord (which atm transfers current only through creative placement of electrical tape and bulldog clips) but at least the cooling fan motor didn't actually burn out like I thought it had! I mean, unless I'm wrong about that and the whole thing's going to melt into my lap as soon as I post this - I'm not sure how I'd tell, given ambient temperature around here.

( A few more details under the cut, through Friday )

Anyway. That's Friday. I think I'll stop here - there's a werewolf book I pulled off the swap table that's calling to me. And precious sleep, of course.

arglflgul.

Does anybody know of a way to download The Bugle podcast without installing iTunes? I refuse to install iTunes *just* so I can get the Bugle - partly because I don't really have the system resources for it, partly because I viscerally hate the thing, partly because the iTunes store needs to *not* crash my browser every time I go there, thanks. But the Times website has finally put it under pay-only lock (and now it turns out that the Times was several episodes behind what itunes has anyway.)

I recently acquired an ipod and was forced to install itunes just long enough to flip the bit that lets you use your ipod as an external drive (though it still doesn't work right) and I really, really don't want to have to put it back on. :/ Dear Apple: if I can buy an $8 mp3 player that has all the capability and more of my iPod shuffle and can, oh, use software that doesn't try to malignantly take over my computer, surely you can design one that does the same for eight times the price.

I suppose I can just wait for the new season of the Now Show to start for my Andy Zaltzman fix, because oh look, BBC Radio Four streams internationally! -- but I can't wait until after the World Cup for my next Andy Zaltzman fix!1!! D:

Why yes, whinging about the evil of Apple does count as working on my copyright primer for con-txt, shut up.

Anyway. Since I'm asking for help about the Bugle already, I shall just make the post I've been playing with for a few weeks now, about Fake News (and "Real" News and Politics) fandom around the world and around the web.

The goal here is to get a guide to 'canon' sources and fandom sites for that somewhat-expanded RPF fandom that is, really, one of my most abiding loves. (My earliest datable memory involves Reagan giving a campaign speech. I would have been two.) I'm reasonably competent on the American ones (though my attention there is ... sporadic, and I might have missed something) and on the British ones (though, not being British, I've probably missed something.) I have a vague idea of where to start for Australia and Canada. I've no clue whatsover beyond that, and if there's anyone on my reading list who does know of other awesome fake news sources - English language or not - I would *love* the contribution!

This is meant to be video, audio, and text sources that I think everyone into current events from a fandom perspective ought to be at least minimally familiar with. (either because they're fundamental to the current fandom community, or because they're so awesome everybody should know about them.)

Here's what I've got so far. What have I missed? What should I cut?

( Too Awesome To Be Bounded By One Country )

( The United States of A )

( The UK )

( Places that are neither the US nor the UK )

What else should be on those lists? Help. Especially from people not living in the US.

Okay, so, the *weirdest* thing about being on the Linux computer - and at the same time, the thing that made me finally feel like it was a home computer, and not just a substitute - was remembering that the solitaire Seahaven Towers is almost, but not quite, the same as freecell. A computer isn't a home until you've wasted time playing card solitaire there. (Well, really, a *home* isn't home until then, either. Solitaire: a family tradition, a treasured ritual, a foundation of a lifestyle. I used to know about twenty-five ways to play, many learned at my grandmother's knee. At the moment I'd be lucky to remember five. But I still have a u40% win rate at four-color spider!)

Back when I first put Linux on that box, it was my freshman year of college. It was the other time in my life when I was trying to keep a webcomic consistently updated. And I made a tradition, every night, to play enough games of solitaire to make it through one play of "A Kiss Is A Terrible Thing To Waste" - I did that again last night and it was like being eight years back in time. I wrote an SF story back in high school about a future historian who is on a Mission to discover the origin of the famous Solter Protocols that underly all computer architecture and repeat themselves on system after system (I forget how it ended though....)

Anyway, now that I've got the linux box more-or-less working the way I want it to, the laptop is getting power again (yay for being friends with mad scientists!) and I've had a soldering lesson, so if it does it again, I can maybe fix it myself yay! And I'll probably abandon the desktop for weeks at a time again. :P

One thing this whole saga reminded me of is why I always used to keep my bookmarks online instead of in the browser: because if you have to switch computers, it's nice to have them there. Back at school, my bookmarks list was on my webspace, and the home page that came up whenever I opened a new tab or window; Opera has a "speed dial" function that works pretty much like that, so I didn't bother resurrecting it when I got a new webspace, but, alas, the Opera fuction requires that I be on my usual version of Opera.

So I'm going to do what I've been meaning to do for awhile, and make posts here in which I share with ya'll the list of links I visit fairly frequently. (But first I'll have to get caught up. And then decide for good which of the provisionally discarded links go on the trash heap for good. Difficult!)

Okay, here's how this evening's gone so far:

"Screw Ubuntu, I'll just install Puppy to the hard drive." Boot into Puppy livecd. Click "Puppy universal installer" on the main menu. Spend ten minutes doing exactly what it says on the screen. Reboot. "OMG, it *worked*! ...that was it???"¹

Alas, that was the easy part. Now I get to spend an indefinite amount of time getting all of these things working (or figuring out how I got them to work last time):

-sound This fixed real easy - I was hoping it was just my BIOS's wonky battery resetting itself again, and it was! (yes, I have to go into bios settings every time I restart and manually remind it that it has sound. Don't ask.)
-printer
-scanner
-tablet
-CDR
-Opera - I just grabbed this, history files and all, from the liveCD session, and it's working fine.
-moonlight
-OpenOffice
-a fully-functioning media library organizer - Songbird is in the process of winning my heart.
-set clock
-ftp to my webspace
-games - woot seahaven!
-local network filesharing - woo samba!
-automatically boot to linux on hard drive instead of having to tell grub every time

...that's actually a fairly short list. And I know sound/printer/Opera/OpenOffice/clock/filesharing are doable fairly simply, 'cause I had them running on the liveCD. (I just have to remember how, and hope the resources are still there six months later. But if I have to I can just steal the files right off the liveCD save session, I think.)

And then importing all my bookmarks and settings.

First, however, I declare a break to actually do something fun! Probably finishing "The Wounded Sky".

¹slight exaggeration - I did have to edit one line in a grub file, but that's just 'cause I've gotten in the habit of playing with BIOS settings every time I reboot. And it was really simple to figure out what was wrong.

I'm sure at some point, there will be interesting content here again. For now, I'm still deep in the Brokenness of the Computers.

Here, I wrote this up to post to linux4all, but then I was like, no, stupid, go to bed, and figure out the easy way tomorrow, they will just tell you that you are being stupid if you ask. But before I go to bed, for posterity, this is what I spent way too much time today messing with:

( The Mystery of how to install a new OS when you can't burn a CD or boot from anything other than CD! )

Like my new icon? ;D

So, uh... Hi all! My laptop is broked. (I would say "b0rked", but that implies something far more sophisticated. And "broken" implies something far less stupid.)

This is not a disaster - for those of you who only found me since Dreamwidth, I break my laptop on a fairly regular basis; in the ~3 years I've had this one, it's had a switch break off the chassis, started to rattle ominously when shaken, needed an entire reformat and reinstall after a virus infection, had the lcd screen start to just sort of wander around inside the case, needed three power cord repairs, then a new power cord and a new battery, and then had the entire power socket break out of the chassis and need to be disassembled and pulled free.

On the upside, it reminds me to back up my data! ^_^ So nothing is lost, and I know exactly what's wrong - the much-battered socket has had a wire break, and I just need to either solder the wire back on, or replace it with a socket cannibalized from another laptop - alas, it broke off right at the socket, so it is beyond the help of tape and splicing. (Unless I want to go the "whack it with a hammer and then tape the wires it directly to the plug" route. Which is what I was doing from the other end before I got my new power cord.) And the computer itself is perfectly fine - I just don't have any way to recharge it once this last battery charge dies. And ibowieh3, the person I usually exploit for hardware assistance and solder, left on a weeklong business trip yesterday.

For now, I'm on the backup computer, which is the eight-year-old desktop with three hard drives and two OSs, neither of which boot so I'm running it on a Puppy Linux livecd, which works fine for most stuff. But it's too damn slow to do much graphics stuff (and I never quite got my scanner and tablet working with it), and considering I'm doing finishing on a three-day-a-week webcomic, this is probably not sustainable. What I'm probably going to do is bite the bullet and finally install Ubuntu on the hard drive that's currently got a kernel panicky Red Hat 7, since I've heard Ubuntu is a) easy and b) good at memory management. (For the record, this is what happened the last time I tried to install Linux.) Best case, it's all up and running better than ever. ...worst case, it's back to the livecd and I have a newly-formatted empty hard drive.

Well, I mean, worst case is I catch the computer on fire, but that's probably not a *very* high chance.

I had forgotten how I react to coding. This is how I react to coding: I went from knowing nothing about anything but basic html to dreaming about Core2 last night. In about six hours. (Of course, for some reason I also dreamed that treewishes was secretly Terry Brooks, so that may not be diagnostic.) I am not *good* at coding, because what I enjoy is crashing through reinventing the wheel and doing things the wrong way by trial-and-error and example without actually reading the directions or re-using old solutions; but I do find it hard to *stop*.

Anyway, after hours of pounding away, I now have a DW style that is a vague approximation of the ugly, crufty, half-broken S1 style I use in various hacked-together forms on LJ and JF. Only on LJ and JF it is high-contrast black, and my DW version is very, very pink, mostly to thumb my nose all all the anti-Tropo Red people. :P (The One Pig With Horns is just a placeholder image, though, promise, stellar_dust.)

The important thing, though, is that it has custom friendlist colors!!! I am just synesthetic enough that seeing my flist people without their proper color screws with my head. So, style with custom colors! (If anyone wants to use this style, which is a variant on LJ's Punquin Elegant, or the Generator port I made, I can give you the core2-compileable source, and if you'd like me to port another basic LJ style over instead, let me know and I'll try it; the code is really, really ugly though (I mean, even in the original S2 version before I mucked with them it was ugly, and I could tell this without even previously knowing anything about S2. Here's how ugly: I had to look at the Core2 test style in order to figure out how to add comments.)

( Herein I talk about styles coding such that anybody who actually knows about it will laugh at the stupid, because I have forgotten how to talk about programming, and anybody who doesn't will be bored to death. )

Anyway, more important question (And test of polls!)

I'm a grown-up and I pay for my own groceries, and that means that if I want to mix up a bowl of powdered sugar and peanut butter 'till it's the consistency of mud brick, and then eat it with a spoon, I can, right?

(..hey, there's *no* candy in this house, and my roommates won't let me bake. Except what I just mixed up. Granted I could have walked down the street and bought some candy, but a) broke and b) I went from Cake Wrecks to mazapan the other day, and it that time of month, so I'm allowed to cave to random cravings.)

----

Anyway, if someone was, completely hypothetically, thinking about finally installing an IM program, what program would you hypothetically suggest? Bearing in mind that this hypothetical person last tried to install Trillian, and gave up due to FAIL, and that the last time she bothered with IM, she hypothetically had AIM, ICQ, and Y!M accounts, because this was way back when you needed different accounts and programs and they wouldn't talk to each other.

... by which I mean, I'm currently running Puppy Linux 4.0 from a boot cd over my ancient Red Hat install, which means I can still access all my old files, but I can do stuff like watch youtube videos! get files off my camera! put mp3s on my mp3 player! edit things in googledocs! Use my Wacom tablet!

I'm even kinda confident that I'll get xsane to do stuff before too much longer! Go me. Go puppy!

(Puppy is a tiny version of linux that is designed to be booted off of a CD and then run entirely in RAM, so you can use it without having to do anything to your current computer setup - use it as your primary OS, since it can save session files on an HD partition without interfering with your installed OS at all, in any way.

...and OMG, it is *so painless* compared to my old linux install. It's like magic!

Not that it's *entirely* painless, given I spent all day trying to get it running right and working with my hardware and files. One could also argue whether it was worth spending the time messing with Puppy as opposed to just backing up and installing a whole new OS. But the benefit of doing it this way is that a) I knew that whatever happened, I'd still have at least one mostly-working computer, and b) I now have a working Puppy boot disk that I can use in any computer that reads CDs. I'm tempted to burn another one to put in my in-case-of-apocalypse go-bag...)

Now I have a headache and am entirely sick of messing with computer and don't feel like catching up on all the computer stuff I couldn't do before. I go to sit in bed with eyes closed for awhile.

So, with lack of laptop, and possibly more relevantly, lack of any way to play pirate online video, I have been reading more actual printed books this week. And catching up on my LT reviews, which I was several months behind on.

I have been learning a lot!
For example: When one is pondering writing Miles Vorkosigan kidfic, do *not* read Gordon Korman novels.

Also, when one is pondering writing S4 Dr. Who crackfic, do not do NOT read books of old Charles Addams cartoons....

Well, crap.

My laptop will no longer charge.

I think I know what's wrong and how to fix it, but of course it waited until all my hardware-helpful people were off at Pennsic to finally stop working for good. And the fix involves soldering, at which I am fail. (And I probably also need a new charger and battery pack - the battery pack, charger, and socket all decided to start being fail within a month of each other. BAH.)

So I am going to be on my ancient, creaky, linux-running desktop with no USB drivers for at least the next two weeks or so. I may attempt to cannibalize my mom's old box with the fried motherboard and turn the desktop into a much peppier machine that dual-boots Windows XP and Linux off of two hard drives, but I should probably wait on that until the laptop is fixed, so I don't break them *both* at the same time. So I will be doing very little fancy computery stuff for the immediate future, alas.

At least I did finally back up all my non-pirate-media files onto CD right before the laptop failed, so I don't think I lost access to any writing or art or anything (except the playlists I was working on.) But still.

I think it's stellar_dust's fault. She cursed me.

When isitdownforeveryoneorjustme.com fails you, the place to turn is twitter search.

Every single person on there asking if wikipedia is down is in my area. And presumably (from several of their reports) on verizon FIOS.

Meanwhile, everyone on a blog or message board asking about it just gets pointed to isitdownforeveryone. Note to world: there are possibilities intermediate between "everyone" and "just me".

$#%^% you, verizon. May all your camels come down with rickets and tie their legs in knots. May you all be diagnosed with embarrassing degenerative diseases the night before your company health plan goes under.

BAH.

You do know what CAPTCHA programs are for, right? They give Humanity an *economic imperative* to develop ever more sophisticated Turing-test-passing AI systems.

The first true artificial intelligences on Earth will be spambots.

Yay! I spent the afternoon elbow-deep in the bowels of this computer and when I was done it wasn't any broker than when I started! (It wasn't any fixed-er, either, but you take your victories when you can...)

Also it's now officially too stupid to run LJ. Thank you, JF, for not being full of cruft, and still runnable by a thirteen-year-old computer.

I went on the old computer this afternoon to try to transfer over my holiday music files and I *totally fail* at Linux.

I don't remember the right way to shut down, ('shutdown now' doesn't work), which possibly explains why it doesn't start up right and I have to do a hard power cycle on startup every time; I don't remember any of the passwords except root; I switched over to KDE right before I stopped using it, which I don't know anything about, and now I can't remember how to switch back to Gnome; I tried to get samba set up to fileshare through the windows network, and failed so totally that after an hour and a half I'm beginning to doubt I even *have* samba at all; in the process I think I broke filesharing on *this* computer; then I decided to just archive and send it to gmail instead and it took me two tries to remember what the archiver was, and then when I tried to use tar it spat gibberish all over my konsole window and beeped at me incessantly; so I shut down and it took me three tries to shut down at all.

I can't decided whether that makes tonight a good night or a bad night to do those ruby tutorials that otw_news recommended.

Today I am updating from Seshat, the desktop I had in college that is still running Linux Red Hat 7.3. Mom's new computer was bought yesterday, so we decided to take today to look at all crap in the computer room, set up the stuff that we want to have working, and get rid of all the rest of it. So my old desktop actually has a desk to sit on now! And a monitor of its own!\o/

Now to finish sorting through the junk. And then figure out how to put security on the wireless router. And get networking, filesharing, and printer sharing working right on all four functional computers, one of which is running Win95, one of which is running XP, one of which is running Vista, and one of which is running six-year-old Linux.

It should be great fun!

And then I will go get the broken computer and see what I can salvage from it. It would be nice if I could set this box up to dual-boot off its hard drive, but I've never done that before, so also fun!

(and OTW put up its official Ruby stuff which I need to download and look at soonest, too.)

Also, this computer has 5,000 mp3s on it that I haven't had regular access to in years. Just what I needed!