Entries from April 2007 ↓

If your a New Zealander and have any interest in supplements/vitamins then please check this out.

The NZ government is trying introduce regulations that will require supplements to go through an expensive approval process and result in:

• Prices for New Zealand Vitamins and Supplements will increase between 30% and 100%
• Approximately 60% of your favourite New Zealand product range will be forced from the market due to the new regulatory costs
• Effective doses will be reduced, meaning many supplements will simply become ineffective. It will eventually be illegal to sell any supplement above the RDI (recommended daily intake).

Plus, this seems a little too convenient in the way it purports the whole bill to be about consumer safety, and ignores that even in comparison to highly regulated pharmaceutical drugs they are ridiculously safe.

Guess I’ll have to go somewhere else to be a transhumanist (they’ve already restricted Modafinil ).

Leave my freedoms alone damn you government!

(Thanks tatjna for bring it to my attention)

If your a New Zealander and have any interest in supplements/vitamins then please check this out. The NZ government is trying introduce regulations that will require supplements to go through an expensive approval process and result in: Prices for New Zealand Vitamins and Supplements will increase between 30% and 100% Approximately 60% of your favourite New Zealand product range will be forced from the market due to the new regulatory costs Effective doses will be reduced, meaning many supplements will simply become ineffective. It will eventually be illegal to sell any supplement above the RDI (recommended daily intake). Plus, this seems a little too convenient in the way it purports the whole bill to be about consumer safety, and ignores that even in comparison to highly regulated pharmaceutical drugs they are ridiculously safe. Guess I'll have to go somewhere else to be a transhumanist (they've already restricted Modafinil :( ). Leave my freedoms alone damn you government! (Thanks tatjna for bring it to my attention)

I just recently have been watching the 10th season of Southpark – which I’m finding pretty entertaining after not originally being drawn to the show. The last episode I watched was “Make Love, Not Warcraft” which, as you might guess, is a episode about World of Warcraft. It’s pretty damn funny, and awesome that Blizzard collaborated with them on it.

I just recently have been watching the 10th season of Southpark - which I'm finding pretty entertaining after not originally being drawn to the show. The last episode I watched was "Make Love, Not Warcraft" which, as you might guess, is a episode about World of Warcraft. It's pretty damn funny, and awesome that Blizzard collaborated with them on it.

So I needed a 300G hard drive to store results from my research, and I asked for an external one so that I could take the results home with me if I wanted to work at home. ITS got me one (after trying to convince to get an internal one, claiming they are more of a risk for data loss) but they got a really crappy no name brand USB enclosure. It generally works okay, but if I start doing heavy amounts of data transfer it dies. And then I can’t actually access the hard drive properly until I turn it on and off again (IT crowd anyone?).

After I switch it back on and try and mount it I get:

How does one fix this? Well…

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So I needed a 300G hard drive to store results from my research, and I asked for an external one so that I could take the results home with me if I wanted to work at home. ITS got me one (after trying to convince to get an internal one, claiming they are more of a risk for data loss) but they got a really crappy no name brand USB enclosure. It generally works okay, but if I start doing heavy amounts of data transfer it dies. And then I can't actually access the hard drive properly until I turn it on and off again (IT crowd anyone?). After I switch it back on and try and mount it I get: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb1, missing codepage or other error How does one fix this? Well... After a bit of google-fu one can fix this by first finding the backup superblocks: # dumpe2fs /dev/sdb1 | grep Backup dumpe2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006) Backup superblock at 32768, Group descriptors at 32769-32787 Backup superblock at 98304, Group descriptors at 98305-98323 Backup superblock at 163840, Group descriptors at 163841-163859 Backup superblock at 229376, Group descriptors at 229377-229395 Backup superblock at 294912, Group descriptors at 294913-294931 Backup superblock at 819200, Group descriptors at 819201-819219 Backup superblock at 884736, Group descriptors at 884737-884755 Backup superblock at 1605632, Group descriptors at 1605633-1605651 Backup superblock at 2654208, Group descriptors at 2654209-2654227 Backup superblock at 4096000, Group descriptors at 4096001-4096019 Backup superblock at 7962624, Group descriptors at 7962625-7962643 Backup superblock at 11239424, Group descriptors at 11239425-11239443 Backup superblock at 20480000, Group descriptors at 20480001-20480019 Backup superblock at 23887872, Group descriptors at 23887873-23887891 Backup superblock at 71663616, Group descriptors at 71663617-71663635 Select a backup superblock, and then run fsck with it: # e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/sdb1 You might have a bunch of things to fix, but it should get your hard drive back in a usable state. I'm going to go bitch at ITS and get them to either install the HDD internally or get a decent enclosure. I know it isn't linux because it did the same thing while I was transferring some of my mp3 collection on to it (not something I should be doing with a school HDD but hey).

After spending the last year or so in KDE land, I’ve decided to come back to Gnome and see how I feel.

It’s refreshingly simpler – the other bonus is that it’s the default Ubuntu desktop, so seems to be integrated much better.

GEdit is can be made to look similar to Kate (I wanted to learn VIM, but I don’t have time and I’m probably too lazy) which is nice for me.

I’m going to miss amarok. Although not as much as I thought anymore. People always said amarok was one of those killer apps that are for showing off linux. Well, I recently searched for a replacement for winamp in windows and came across mediamonkey (winamp just wasn’t keeping up with the 220 gigs of music on my server). Mediamonkey is the best damn player/library manager I’ve seen. The only thing I miss is being able to auto view artist’s wikipedia page within amarok, but that’s easily solved with a plugin or script.

Anybody know something that rocks and integrates well with Gnome? It needs to have lots of library management tools and allow libraries to be browsed by directory (using a backend database and without actually searching the directory so that offline drives can be in a collection).

Also, hopefully Feisty Fawn is seriously improved before release, as it isn’t in a state for an general home user to make use of. Either that or I’m doing everything wrong because I’m used to the command line.

After spending the last year or so in KDE land, I've decided to come back to Gnome and see how I feel. It's refreshingly simpler - the other bonus is that it's the default Ubuntu desktop, so seems to be integrated much better. GEdit is can be made to look similar to Kate (I wanted to learn VIM, but I don't have time and I'm probably too lazy) which is nice for me. I'm going to miss amarok. Although not as much as I thought anymore. People always said amarok was one of those killer apps that are for showing off linux. Well, I recently searched for a replacement for winamp in windows and came across mediamonkey (winamp just wasn't keeping up with the 220 gigs of music on my server). Mediamonkey is the best damn player/library manager I've seen. The only thing I miss is being able to auto view artist's wikipedia page within amarok, but that's easily solved with a plugin or script. Anybody know something that rocks and integrates well with Gnome? It needs to have lots of library management tools and allow libraries to be browsed by directory (using a backend database and without actually searching the directory so that offline drives can be in a collection). Also, hopefully Feisty Fawn is seriously improved before release, as it isn't in a state for an general home user to make use of. Either that or I'm doing everything wrong because I'm used to the command line.