Today was hot, it appeared to have peaked around 91F, matching the record set in this area 19 years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced 90F degree weather in April before, this is the second day of it and it looks to be lasting through Tuesday. My apartment is retrofitted for A/C, which means there is a big window unit in my living room wall that at full power cuts the temperature in here down to the low 80s. Low 80s indoors is still a bit warm for me, but mostly tolerable for the hopefully infrequent 90+ days. Mostly. My stomach is on the queasy side this evening and I think the cherry Rita’s waterice was my dinner.
The A/C in my car has stopped working. This is something I was anticipating and starting to budget for since the diagnosis a couple months back that my A/C compressor was dying, I had just hoped it would wait a few more months, sigh!
I mentioned in my last post that I brought my “test server” with me to the Trenton Computer Festival. It occurred to me that I never posted about this! The new test server is a $159.99 Refurbished HP DC5100 Combo (specs here if that site goes away). I maxed out the RAM for about $50 and am considering swapping out the hard drive for something bigger than 40G. I installed Debian Lenny with a Xen dom0 kernel and have deployed a few VMs on it. It’s been a great little machine, and during the TCF I just ran OpenSuse off of a LIveCD. As for the other machines on my network… I’ve mostly retired my old test server, the P3 1U, and I will probably be shutting down the sparc Ultra10 once I get the services it runs offloaded to a VM. Retiring the sparc makes me sad, but at this point the novelty and actual usefulness of it no longer outweighs the power and heat concerns.
There are a couple software notes that I’ve been meaning to blog about in some form too…
First: VLC! I’ve been a VLC user for quite some time, but always defaulted to mplayer on slower machines due to some perceived notion that it would run better (maybe because it lacks GUI controls?). Well, I was wrong. On my old Inspiron (650mhz P3, 256M RAM) that is connected to my TV I have to run mplayer with an 8K cache to get movies not to be too choppy, and even this isn’t enough for larger files. So one day when I was trying to play something and it didn’t work, frustrated I tossed on VLC and not only did it work, but I didn’t have to set any caches or change any video options, the movie ran almost flawlessly! So it’s VLC on the old laptop now, sorry mplayer.
Second: Thunderbird. I have a pleia2 gmail account which I don’t often access via the web interface and at work we have some clients using Thunderbird on Ubuntu. Hmm, maybe I should be checking the gmail account with Thunderbird so I can learn how to use it and have the added benefit of actually checking my gmail account? I configured this about a year ago with POP w/o deleting stuff from the server, before they offered IMAP. I don’t like POP, and having everything organized locally on Thunderbird caused a crazy mess when I logged in via the web interface. I kept saying I’d switch to IMAP and get the mess under control and finally did that last week. Annoyingly though, Thunderbird’s default settings for IMAP only have it poll the Inbox during it’s scheduled email checks, folders that had stuff automatically sent to them server-side were not polled. I found a fix for this in the Thunderbird FAQ:
Check all IMAP folders for new mail
Thunderbird can download mail from all accounts when you start the program. Just open the Config Editor, search for the preference mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new, and change its value to true.
Hooray!
Tuesday, Apr 28th, 2009 at 5:17
during hot months, I used masking tape to seal a cheezy plastic barrier in a entraceway of a room to reduce the size of the area that was cooled by the AC, thus allow it to reach the 70s. 80s is too hot for comfort :(