Monopoly the GameMonopoly 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[...]
Planet Linux AustraliaPlanet 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[...]
Weather and BoincWeather 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[...]
MPV vs MplayerMPV 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)[...]
SMART and SSDsSMART 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[...]
Testing VDPAU in DebianTesting 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[...]
Thinkpad Storage ProblemThinkpad 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[...]
Phone Plan Comparison 2020Phone 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[...]
Electromagnetic Space LaunchElectromagnetic 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[...]
Links December 2020Links December 2020
Business Insider has an informative article about the way that Google users can get locked out with no apparent reason and no recourse [1]. Something to share with clients when[...]