Everyday doings of a metropolitan techie: Stob's software diary I have started testing techie podcasts at getting up time, as Brexitless alternatives to radio. Monday morning The ones I have surveyed are: CppCast: the show that proves beyond all doubt that C++ is not a spoken language. Plot: each episode, the two anchors interview an expert guest. Resulting conversation has a curiously …
1. I agree about Leo Laporte
2. The remark about the samdung disk cloning software is incredible. How many of these have they shipped? I don't disbelieve it, I just can't believe they are still in business. Good tip
3. But Kudos must go to you for "special drawer reserved for disappointing surprise presents for the children of people you don't like" - the best thing on el-reg so far in 2019
Ditto. 9 year old Acer, used the samsung software to clone the drive (took a few hours) swapped drives, it worked.
The big problem was then working out what was making the upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 freeze at 81% (turned out to be something to do with AVG) - now have nippy laptop again.
The Samsung software also doesn't clone any partition other than the first, leading to needing to copy one's D partition by Other Means. Which, if you've followed the Approved Process, means mounting the old drive somewhere else, unattached to the original machine (because some drive identifier or other has been illegally copied, meaning you can't stick it in an external thingy and connect it via usb3) and copying it across the network. Or starting again and using Acronis or Paragon or that thing with too many vowels and a single M or anything else that your search engine of choice tells you to use.
but the "among my relatives, back in the old days, the preferred method of acceptance of, say, a slice of delicious chocolate cake was to mumble "I don't mind" in a barely audible monotone. I am still not really comfortable giving an acknowledgement any warmer than this." rings true. When asked if I want a cup of tea (or a beer) I reply, "if you like".
From the horses mouth at the bottom of the piece you will find this enlightening information. Use it wisely and well.
Verity Stob is the pseudonym of a software developer based in London. Since 1988, she has written her "Verity Stob" column for .EXE magazine, Dr. Dobb's Journal and, since 2002, The Register.
I'm from Yorkshire originally, with one parent from North-East Derbyshire. There isn't much overt enthusiasm in most responses in my family as a result. Many years ago, there used to be an advert for something (probably tea) with the catch-line "If a Yorkshireman says 'It'll do', you know there's nowt better" - members of my regarded this as wrong, because no one would ever be so effusive!
Many years later, I still have trouble being as enthusiastic as others think I should be. My wife regularly grumpily says " 'It's alright' is exactly what I was aiming for", when she has produced something wonderful from the kitchen*...
*She enjoys cooking, I don't, hence why she is the kitchen expert - no sexism involved.
"Many years later, I still have trouble being as enthusiastic as others think I should be. My wife regularly grumpily says " 'It's alright' is exactly what I was aiming for", when she has produced something wonderful from the kitchen*..."
My wife was born in Hampshire but grew up in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. When I produce a culinary delight, I know I got it spot on when she says "s'alright".
(She hates cooking, I enjoy it. No sexism involved :-))
One of my former lives I had spent in Swabia. Swabians being known as rather frugal, of the few local phrases I learnt there was this gem: "nix gschwätzt, isch gnuag globt."* Which translates roughly as silence is praise enough.
I quite liked it there...
*Yep, had to look it up again to get it right.
My wife is French and for many years rendered her native "Si tu veux" as "If you want" until I managed to convince her that this was borderline rude in those of us who use Home Counties English. In French it's a genuine literal question. We now have the disambiguating question "French or English?" to be used when clarifying the meaning.
Thoroughly agree with the Verity's report on the quality of the Samsung disk cloning s/w. I stuck a Samsung SSD in my PC a couple of years ago, and, forewarned by on-line comments about the utility's uselessness, installed a copy of Macrium Reflect as back-up. I tried Samsung's s/w first - it spent 45 mins saying "Cloning...", before eventually saying " Oh. Actually it appears I wasn't cloning after all..." (or something like that). Reflect took 75 minutes not saying anything, until finally saying "Finished", leaving a perfectly cloned SSD. Aghast that Samsung haven't fixed such a fundamental bug after 2 years. The Samsung SSD hardware, however, is brilliant.
You young'uns....
Back in the day, you could not clone IDE drives using dd (bit-copying the whole drive) because the IDE firmware kept the bad-block map on an accessable, but unused part of the initial few tracks. If you did, the destination drive ran really slowly until it repaired the map - if it ever did!
Are there, maybe, disks that dd can't clone?
...haven't seen one, and its MUCH faster than Clonezilla and easier to use, too.
Couple of years back I put a 128GB Sandisk SSD in an old Lenovo R61i when its 120GB hard drive died, installed Fedora from a CD. Booted up, pulled in my stuff from a backup. No problem. Still going like a train.
Bootnote: I'd wanted to install another hard drive, but R61i electronics can't handle a disk bigger than 250GB and it was already impossible to buy a replacement HDD that small, hence the 128GB SSD.
I have to disagree about clonezilla vs dd - I've always found it to be faster than dd as it only copies used space and is much easier to use to clone disks of different sizes. It's worth noting that if none of Clonezilla's more sophistacted techniques works, it uses dd as lowest common denominator!
As far as R61i is concerned, I fitted the good lady wife's R61i (type 7650) with a 500Gb spinnning rust disk back in the day, and had no problem getting it recognised. The BIOS (v1.03) is set to use AHCI as its SATA setting - maybe that would help. It is now her reserve machine as she has something newer but it still works well.
I'll second the note re max=250gb being incorrect. I have the T61 which is the Thin/light version of the R61. It has 350gb of spinning rust.
Having said that, SSD is exponentially dominating HDD in the last 2yrs if you use a web browser. Reason: a combination of poor javascript handling (appalling multitasking/threading/ability to handle more than 75million modern lazy webdevs now using js vs html because magic code-generator du-jour means they can get a shinyshiny with some quick mouseclicks), plus Win7+'s poor swappiness. Do NOT "up"grade Firefox when prompted!! Performance has utterly tanked -- often have the machine effectively frozen as various javascript idiocies fight it out. And if you Sleep it or Hibernate it, you then get the OS swappiness failure: budget an extra 10-15mins or more for Win7+ to reshuffle into RAM what it's unexplainably shuffled out. I was locked out for nearly 30mins yesterday, for example.
My SSD machine is coping, my HDD machine is not.
The soon to be gone Ex-Mrs Scorn, who at the time had yet to be upgraded to that title, managed to cable-tie her fingers together because she was bored & started looking in my toolbox. (While I was working on the flat roof of an airport building on the Isles of Scilly), resulting in me having to shin down the drainpipe I was using as a means of accessing the roof.
No euphemisms here.
I still grin at how Joss Whedon managed to sneak the "C "word into The Avengers by using the "Q" word instead.
The only other person that I heard utter an amused snort in the entire movie theatre, was my youngest sons godmother who was visiting us at the time.
Great to see I'm not the only one who likes to caper about room congratulating self on own ingenuity.
"They changed the caption on all the software's acknowledgement buttons from the stolidly neutral "OK" to the inappropriately Tiggerish "GREAT!". It is not GREAT! when I am forced to admit to yet another rout. Nor is it GREAT! that I have completed the challenge to get a Bronze Mystery Box and special badge, or the other ridiculous trinkets now annoyingly added to the game."
I heard every single one of those "GREAT!"s in the voice of Thurl Ravenscroft, AKA Tony the Tiger.
Cool fact: Thurl Ravenscroft was from the US "Midlands": Norfolk, Nebraska.
Think I used Carbon Copy Cloner with the SDD attached to some doodad usb connector.
Used the stuff that came with the conversion kit
Don't remember it as difficult. Just be careful removing and replacing memory modules.
SSD1 for System, /Volumes/Mac HDD1 for Data
Don't remember it as being a major hassle.
Leo Laporte is difficult to listen to. Not because of his voice, but, because of the idiotic recommendations he makes. Can't tell you how many times I've had to fix something because the owner followed Leo's "advice" and f-ed up his PC. When I hear his name announced on the radio, I change the station.
They are "Exactly" like the video casts made by Moss from "The IT Crowd". That episode of the IT Crowd was where satire failed miserably and descended into dreary reality. There is absolutely no way to be satirical about something that in reality is so...whatever the heck it is.
I listen to a lot of podcasts... or rather, I listen to the first two minutes or so of a lot of podcasts (I wrote a podcast app), and it amazes me what people can stretch out to an hour of dull conversation. And there's definitely a textbook out there in the deep pit of hell where marketing people are trained that says "to promote your idiotic product, do a podcast", because there's a hell of a lot of those "this is my BUY MY BOOK podcast about BUY MY BOOK and I'm joined by BUY MY BOOK..."
My personal favourite is the misplaced optimism of the "only one episode ever made" podcast: "Hey, welcome to the VERY FIRST super-duper-cast. Every week we'll be talking about stuff and it'll be AWE-SOME..."
My general rule is that anything that's been broadcast on radio somewhere is good for a listen: editors are truly the most underrated, and most necessary, people in the media.
Cable ties can fail in sunlight too. I used to work on cable laying ships and the management had exprimented with special UV resistent ones, which were not, and expensive original Ty-raps with a 25 year warranty that would not last a year. I suggested using stainless ones (with rubber belts, if necessary) and that sort of fixed it, except for the heavier handed seamen who could get them tight enough to not only cut into an armoured antenna cable, but into the aluminium frame of a buoy too.
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