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RISC-V and Qemu

RISC-V is the latest RISC architecture that’s become popular. It is the 5th RISC architecture from the University of California Berkeley. It seems to be a competitor to ARM due to not having license fees or restrictions on alterations to the architecture (something you have to pay extra for when using ARM). RISC-V seems the […]

Monopoly the Game

The Smithsonian Mag has an informative article about the history of the game Monopoly [1]. The main point about Monopoly teaching about the problems of inequality is one I was already aware of, but there are some aspects of the history that I learned from the article.

Here’s an article about using modified version of […]

Planet Linux Australia

Linux Australia have decided to cease running the Planet installation on planet.linux.org.au. I believe that blogging is still useful and a web page with a feed of Australian Linux blogs is a useful service. So I have started running a new Planet Linux Australia on https://planet.luv.asn.au/. There has been discussion about getting some sort of […]

Weather and Boinc

I just wrote a Perl script to look at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology pages to find the current temperature in an area and then adjust BOINC settings accordingly. The Perl script (in this post after the break, which shouldn’t be in the RSS feed) takes the URL of a Bureau of Meteorology observation point […]

MPV vs Mplayer

After writing my post about VDPAU in Debian [1] I received two great comments from anonymous people. One pointed out that I should be using VA-API (also known as VAAPI) on my Intel based Thinkpad and gave a reference to an Arch Linux Wiki page, as usual Arch Linux Wiki is awesome and I learnt […]

SMART and SSDs

The Hetzner server that hosts my blog among other things has 2*256G SSDs for the root filesystem. The smartctl and smartd programs report both SSDs as in FAILING_NOW state for the Wear_Leveling_Count attribute. I don’t have a lot of faith in SMART. I run it because it would be stupid not to consider data about […]

Testing VDPAU in Debian

VDPAU is the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix [1]. I noticed an error with mplayer “Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_i965.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory“, Googling that turned up Debian Bug #869815 [2] which suggested installing the packages vdpau-va-driver and libvdpau-va-gl1 and setting the environment variable “VDPAU_DRIVER=va_gl” […]

Thinkpad Storage Problem

For a while I’ve had a problem with my Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 1 [1] where storage pauses for 30 seconds, it’s become more common recently and unfortunately everything seems to depend on storage (ideally a web browser playing a video from the Internet could keep doing so with no disk access, but that’s not […]

Phone Plan Comparison 2020

It’s been over 6 years since my last post comparing 3G data plans in Australia.

I’m currently using Aldi Mobile [1]. They have a $15 package which gives 3G of data and unlimited calls and SMS in Australia for 30 days, and a $25 package that gives 20G of data and unlimited international calls to […]

Electromagnetic Space Launch

The G-Force Wikipedia page says that humans can survive 20G horizontally “eyes in” for up to 10 seconds and 10G for 1 minute.

An accelerator of 14G for 10 seconds (well below the level that’s unsafe) gives a speed of mach 4 and an acceleration distance of just under 7km. Launching a 100 metric ton […]