Concern

My dual AMD Linux box seems to have finally died. I had rescued it not too long ago with an Ubuntu install, but this morning it disappeared from the network, nothing could be seen on the display, and rebooting it failed (the BIOS won’t even get to the point of spinning the floppy drive). This machine has had a recent history of hardware flakiness (like, it can’t power up the disks fully when starting up cold: you have to start it up so the disks start spinning, then switch off the power, then switch it back on again while the disks still have momentum).

I’ve had this computer for nearly five years, and it’s serviced me well. This was the first PC I built myself, cobbled together from parts laying around, with a new motherboard, CPUs, and memory. It’s gone through a few hard drives in the meantime.

So, the answer to this problem is likely “spend some money.” I was curious as to what the lazyweb thought was a good way to put together a Linux server system today. I’d like to run Ubuntu, mostly because I don’t want to waste time dealing with anything more complicated. The primary use for this system would be Linux development and testing.

My ideas:

1. Buy a new Core Duo Mac Mini, and use that as my new Mac desktop. My current (G4 PPC) Mac Mini would live again as a Linux server. That’s nice, because I could use a more powerful Macintosh, but I’m not sure what special kind of pain in the ass it will be to install Linux on this. The cost would be around $800, I guess (I’ll never buy a Macintosh with less than 1GB of RAM, ever).
2. Buy a simple Dell (dude, you’re etc. etc.) and put Linux on it. This means an additional $600, and I’ll still be stuck with my current, slow Mac Mini.
3. Buy some other system besides Dell. Bonus points if there is no resident copy of Windoze, because I don’t want Microsoft to get a dime from me, even by proxy, if I can help it.

I don’t want to build a system from scratch. The most work I’m willing to do is plug it in, temporarily hook up a keyboard and display, and install Ubuntu. From then on it’s all SSH.

This host has been accessing this web site continuously; it declares its user-agent as “*WAPT 4.0*”. Its referring URL is always “jargon.tuxedo.org/”. No ports on the host seem open, but the netblock is owned by “zjnetcom.com”.

Anyone have any idea what this is? ESR isn’t referrer-log spamming, is he?

This host does appear in other sites’ public logs.

Car ownership continues. The continuing saga:

The miles-per-gallon meter is fun. I always have it selected in the display, and it (I think) calculates the miles per gallon you are getting for the current trip. It’s fun to explore different gears and speeds, trying to get that number as high as I can. My personal best (which has me in sixth (!) gear at around 2500 RPM at 65-70 MPH, and fifth or fourth at 55-60 going up the hill, and in fifth and pretty much coasting down the hill) is 35 MPG.

Cars are OMG dirty! I cleaned the wheels off today, which already had a light coat of fine, greasy black dirt. I really want to take care of this car, so I’m going to try to keep a tight regimen of detailing. I’m not sure how often I should get the car washed and waxed, though. The Intarweb tells many a story, from every two weeks, to monthly, to 1-2 week washings and bi-yearly waxings. What, dear lazyweb, is a good washing scheme? Remember that I’ll need to go to a professional to get it done, so high cost and frequency are both negatives.

I ordered some heavy-duty rubber floor mats, which arrived yesterday. They say “Jetta” on the driver and front passenger ones. If they said “GLI” instead, that would kind of rock, but they don’t seem to be available. Volkswagen floor mats are neat because there are clips on the floor, near where the seats meet the carpet, that hold the mats in place. Anyone who has had a car that had floor mats of any kind knows, this is brilliant.

Does anyone else use SSHKeychain on OS X? Does the preferences window stop working for you all of a sudden, too? See, twice now it’s gotten itself into some kind of state where you can’t edit your tunnels with the “preferences” window, and the text fields will randomly change to different values.

Nice that this looks like it’s abandonware now, too. Yay open source!

Does anyone else who uses OS X occasionally see type on the screen “double up” so it looks like a crummy boldface? Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

This is from the Google Toolbar for Firefox. I think this mostly happens in Firefox, but I have no proof that it only happens in Firefox. The text is supposed to look like this:

This happens in other places in the window from time-to-time, so I doubt it’s Google’s fault.