While I was messing around in the office, Yvonne came in and
said “the dogs are out the front”.
OK, good to know. But then she said “I'll get in the car and go and look for them”. Huh?
Ah, “outside” meant “out on the road”. How did that happen? Off with her in the car, where
the Swifts and a neighbour from down Progress Road were out discussing the matter. They
said that the dogs had gone down Progress Road, and sure enough, we soon found Elena. And Larissa? Yvonne had seen her further down the
road, so off to the end without finding her, though we found a sheep that looked
surprisingly similar.
Then a phone call from Graeme Swift: she had been caught in a fence, Graham had freed her,
and all was well—no injuries.
But how did it happen? The pedestrian gate was open. Graeme, always the cautious one, suggested a padlock on the gate, like he has. I'm more inclined to look for alternative, less
extreme solutions. But for the moment the dogs aren't allowed out in front of the house
when we're not there.
Spent much of the day moving monitors around. It shouldn't have been difficult, but there
were constraints:
Remove junk accumulated round the old monitors.
No computer to be powered down.
Remove mess from behind the monitors.
Find cables of appropriate length and type to connect to the monitors.
In the process, I found a lot of old documentation, including appointment cards dating back
as far as June 2017. And I managed not to disconnect any cables. Sadly, the power
connector to eureka was loose, so I did have to reboot it—exactly at a time where it
had no monitor connected. But I got things done faster than expected, by midday. Here
before and after:
Clearly not the image quality. Clearly not the aging person between keyboard and chair.
Also not the location, nor the displays. Not even the keyboards, which I had to change
before the last photo. But there is one constant: the monitors are mounted on SPARCstation pizzaboxes. I had long
since stopped using them as computers, but they did very well at propping up the monitors,
and they have been doing it for round 30 years.
The new monitors have their own stands, no SPARCstation needed. And while changing over, it
became clear how much space they had taken up. I now have more space for appointment cards
and things under the monitors. And things look tider from behind too. Here before and
after:
Into Sebastopol today for a haircut. Originally I had planned a whole lot of things, but somehow they
either sorted themselves out, or became unimportant. So a long drive just for that.
The good news about connecting up my new monitor was that it worked out of the box. Of
course, it was connected to a running output (hydra:0.2) configured for 1920x1080,
but it picked that up and ran with it.
That was the good news. I wasn't expecting the reconfiguration to be easy, and my
expectations were met. Although I had an output on the rightmost monitor (to
become hydra:0.3, but currently hydra:0.0), the server and Nvidia software didn't want to know about
it, thus the blue screen on that monitor:
OK, run nvidia-settings. I've been there before, and it wasn't quite as painful.
But once again I couldn't get it to position the screens correctly, and it also wouldn't
save the configuration file where I wanted it to. Finally I saved it, but it was broken.
Despite “finding” the new monitor (“LG Electronics LG ULTRAFINE”), it included the old name
in the configuration file. It knew about the refresh rates, though. Here an excerpt from
the Monitor sections:
=== root@hydra (/dev/pts/32) /usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel 120 -> nvidia-settings === root@hydra (/dev/pts/32) /usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel 121 -> nvidia-settings nvidia-settings: Fatal IO error 22 (Invalid argument) on X server hydra.lemis.com:0.0.
The first invocation worked, but when I did it the second time, some time later, it had
apparently changed something in the server, and I could no longer start the program. It
also apparently reset the mouse bindings and the keyboard map. It wasn't the server itself,
which has been running for well over a month:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
root 2307 0.0 0.1 25948804 226184 v0 S 15Jun24 4710:04.67 /usr/local/libexec/Xorg :0 -config xorg-0.conf -logverbose 6 -listen tcp -auth /home/grog
So: frob the configuration file manually and check as server 4.
One of the things that has surprised me over the years is how many different kinds of
Chinese noodles there are. I've been playing around with a number of them, but it has recently occurred
to me that I knew almost none of them in my childhood. They're Chinese, and not Malaysian.
One typical kind of noodle that I do know are these:
And it seems that the noodle dishes made with them are different, too: “mah mee”, now known
as mee goreng. I have a
recipe somewhere, but today I just tried it out. The result:
More rearranging in the office today. The monitors for hydra have been in the
correct positions since yesterday, though I still need to complete the X configuration. But for the moment things work.
Next, eureka. Three monitors which barely fit in the space left over. But that
problem “solved” itself: the old Matrix monitor didn't power up properly. My latest guess
is that there are issues with the power connector, and disconnecting and reconnecting it was
the last straw. So: goodbye Matrix, you have served me well for well over 10 years. I paid a surprisingly low price for it at the time, only round
$300, and I wasn't expecting it to last long. In fact, it has lasted longer than any other
monitor I have had, and the display is still clear and unfaded. A pity with the power.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
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I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
