I’ve had it for ages now, but only used it for the first time yesterday: the Anti-Bohrstaub-Aufsatz für Staubsauger ! Very handy stuff, even sucks itself to the wall, and no drilling dust at all to be found! Recommended, and cheap. Thanks to my darling wife for the present 😉

For a long while one of my servers “crashed” weekly. Every saturday at 3am the load would just spiral up and everything would become unresponsive (still working but slow) – everything was waiting on disk I/O. I kept putting off checking why this happened, and just rebooted the machine manually every saturday (lazy lazy). After a while I found out it was at 3am, so it had to be a cron job. I then noticed that one of my other servers also had a high load at 3am, but less high and it recovered.

Today I did some thinking and checking, and to blame was.. me! I had configured smartmontools to do a weekly long selfcheck at 3am on all 4 disks in the software RAID5 at the same time. This apparently took so much speed away from the disks that the machine didn’t cope.. Woopsie.

Note: hobby environment of course, real production I would have spent more time figuring it out 🙂

RIP 3DRealms – you won’t be forgotten 🙁

WTF WTF WTF.

Thanks to the Scarlet Drama Show Of The Month apparently TV Vlaanderen DVB-S users suffered lack of access to their (TVV) channels for hours on end. Great redundant infrastructure in top quality datacenter guys…

But more into my own zone, WTF is Telenet doing again… Apparently it’s being talked about on the TIK and Userbase forums already, but there seem to have been some changes put into place. Firstly, Telenet cut off FTA on the former In.DI network, leaving everyone not using their decoder out in the cold. I’d suggest swapping to TVV but the statement above does not inspire much confidence.

Then, apparently they now scramble more channels then before on the regular Telenet network as well. Suddenly my DVB-C PCI card in my Myth box became even more useless than before as the channels I was able to view (eg ARD) are now encrypted. Apparently only Arte and TVE are FTA now. I read that since monday (which was NOT 20 april, Telenet guys) the VRT channels are FTA including Radio stations and HD channels.

Unfortunately I can’t verify this as my card can’t pick up the transponder they’re on 🙁 I have VRT over DVB-T, but that’s not all the channels that are available on DVB-C so I’ll have to look into what’s happening here with the tuning. In any case, I’m deeply sad about this whole thing.

Dear Telenet, Just give me the godsdamn boxkey or FTA all the channels that I can get over analog connection and I’ll forget you suck donkeyballs.