While the hob is still laying outside in pieces, I am at least back up and running with my PC. Most importantly, with all my data still intact, just where I left it. So what had happened? I’m still guessing as to the exact cause of the failure, but the problem was a blank partition table on the disk, and a corrupted MBR. Under a hexdump, the ascii in the boot loader looked really wrong, and more like a snippet of my Xorg start up log than lilo, but the real killer was the fact that where the partition table should have been was just a lot of zeros, meaning I couldn’t mount any of the partitions to rerun lilo to fix the bootloader. ... Read more

Since moving to a server/client network architecture at home, I’m finding the electricity bills are going nowhere but up! There are many reasons to have made the move to this sort of network architecture, and I’m still not quite there (web development is done on my main box), but it’s so nice not to lose access to media when I turn my machine off for whatever reason. Anyway, power saving … ... Read more