BunkBlog

This is a great video. You should watch it in HD, and full-screen and ogle at the wondrousness.

As I’m sure Stewart himself will find apalling, there’s a Time online poll (no scientific accuracy to speak of, self-selected population, blah blah blah) which shows more people think Jon Stewart is a trustworthy news source than Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric.

For years now, Stewart has been defending himself from mainstream journalists and pundits, who say he’s not upholding the correct dignity or standards of a journalist. His response is always some variation of, “I’m on Comedy Central and you expect me to be the journalistic role model? We are screwed as a country.” Yet, academic studies have found that the Daily Show, although calling themselves a fake news show, has just as much or more substantive news coverage as the networks. How sad is that?

Caution: extreme geekery ahead.  Do not continue reading unless you know what hda and hdb are, and the joys of logical volume managers.  Cheers.

Way back last weekend, the DVR I built in 2006 decided to be cranky. I had originally built it with a 250 GB IDE drive, then added a 160 GB IDE drive which I’d salvaged from an older WinBox I replaced.  Sometime after that, I put in a 400 GB SATA drive.  That brought me over 800 GB total capacity, which has been enough for the past couple years. I noticed the temperature was increasing on the hard drives a while ago.

I didn’t worry about it, as the machine worked just fine regardless.  Then. last week, I noticed a little hiccup in the video feed while watching the news. As ever, when the tuners have ever had a problem, I rebooted the DVR to reset the tuners. Turns out, the tuners weren’t the problem. As the machine rebooted, it came up with an error which I’ve never seen before, and then halted the boot. Linux boxes don’t tend to halt their boot processes for much beyond catastrophic failure. I spent that night and part of the next day doing the research I needed to, and ran all the appropriate fixes (LVM activation and E2fsck with alternate master record blah blah). Finally, nearly one day after the machine went down, it was back again.

As you can see from the thin white line near the end of this graph, this is the only significant downtime my DVR has suffered in at least the last year.

I looked through the messages log and saw a lot of errors for hdb that imply some hardware failure. Since I bought that hard drive about 6 years ago and it’s been in constant use for over three years (the DVR never sleeps), it’s not surprising I suppose. Now, of course, I have to take care of this. Since I’ve got the machine set up as an LVM drive, I can add a new hard drive and move the data on to it, then remove the old drive. This is complicated by the fact that I have about 100 GB free, and the dying drive is 160 GB. So, I need to add a new drive before I can remove the old drive. That case is kind of crowded. The joys of vgreduce, pvremove and all manner of other exciting commands are in my future.  I’ll probably get a 500 or 750 GB drive, so the DVR will finally crest the 1 terabyte mark. I’ve already got more than a terabyte on my desktop, so it seems only fair that the DVR get to the same level.

The LVM setup is very confused right now anyway.  I’ve got hda1 (4.5 GB) as a standard ext3 boot and root drive. Simple.  MythTV originally required a “live TV” partition, so I had hda3 (15 GB) as the cache and hda4 (212 GB) as additional storage space (the recordings and such). When I added the 160, that became one big hdb1, still simple. The next upgrade of MythTV removed the necessity to separate live TV from recorded shows, and so the hda3 partition became useless. I added it to the LVM pool, which is a bit silly – hda3 and hda4 are both in there, and not just one merged partition. When I bought the 400 GB drive, that got tacked on as sda1. So, my LVM pool is hda3 hda4 hdb1 sda1. When I get done with the next planned upgrade, it will be hda3 hda4 sda1 sdb1.  Maybe I’ll go ahead and merge hda3 and hda4 while I’ve got the thing down anyway. Pretty much any drive I buy today will be large enough for the 217 GB of hda data and the 160 GB of hdb data, and then I’ll have to delete and recreate the hda3 partition so I can add it back to the LVM pool.  In case you want to sympathize with my plight, here’s the full sequence: physically add sdb, partition sdb1 as LVM, pvcreate sdb1, vgextend VG to include sdb1, pvmove all extents from hda3 hda4 and hdb1 to sdb1, vgreduce hda3 etc. to make them no longer active participants in the LVM, repartition hda3 from the old hda3 and hda4, vgextend to include new hda3, turn off machine and physically remove dying hdb.  Then, it’s back and room for more packrat behavior!

More DVR fun… This morning, one of the five fans in the DVR started making the grinding sound that indicates something has brushed against the fan blades. After two years of never opening the case, I finally cracked that bad boy… yuck. After giving every fan and air duct a good vacuuming (sorry Leo), the machine is now five degrees cooler inside.  Guess that worked.

Sadly, I now have 20 minutes of downtime this morning. Linux geeks are all about the uptime.

To complain to Youtube, click here.

Scroll to the very bottom and click on “new issue”

Select “suspended account” from the options and express your opinion.

The mediafire link (to mirror the video) is here.

Came across this Watchmen-inspired animation on Boing Boing this morning.  Just got to watch it when I got home from work (stupid anti-fun filter on-base), and it’s freakin’ awesome.  I love the idea of Ozymandias playing Shaggy, and Rorschach being just a little nutty.  Right.

The woman who is known as the voice of the Enterprise has died, at the age of 76. She’ll always be Nurse Chapel to some, but I’ll remember her as Lwaxana Troi, that saucy lady. Majel Barrett Roddenberry is the only person to have been in every movie, even if only as a disembodied voice.  That voice lives on, in the next Trek film, which is a great tribute to honor a great actress.

What’s that, you say? Photos aren’t good enough for you? Fine, you greedy buggers, how about a quick 9-minute highlight video of our Caribbean trip? That should hold you!
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Ron Moore, you sonofabitch. You evil, twisted, sick muthafracker.

Yeah, Weezer is totally the band of geeks everywhere.

Remember when the MSN Music Store shut down over a year ago? Remember that Microsoft said that songs you “bought” from the MSN Music Store were going to be yours to keep forever? Guess what, sucker? After August, you can’t upgrade your computer without losing your music.

Yet another in a long series of “DRM Hates Customers” stories. You’d think the computer industry ditching copy protection years ago, coupled with the complete meltdown of DRM in music over the past couple years, would make the movie industry wake up and kill their copy protection plans. You’d be wrong. Not that their DRM will hold up either… Oh, yeah – it didn’t! HAH!

It seems I learn of something new every day, and most of the time I’d just as soon never have known. Today’s example: BeastTube, the YouTube for bestiality fans. I thought BMEZine was twisted, but this is seriously messed up. I’m not going there and looking at anything, but just knowing that such a thing exists is enough to make me wonder about our long-term viability as a species.

In case you’re wondering how I came across this specimen, it’s all Joe Rogan‘s fault.

The Foo Fighters have a new video. Since you can’t find music on MTV, here ya go:

So, um…soap star turns rock star, star drives car over cliff…is this a Rick Springfield-meets-James Dean reference? Naturally, the Foos remain unique in their video excursions.

In good news, Heroes is definitely coming back next year (cliffhanger season finale tomorrow!). In stranger news, there will be a show based on the one-liner Geico caveman commercials. If you thought it was hard to stretch a Saturday Night Live character to a movie, imagine stretching a slightly-funny ad to an entire season of television.

CBS is going to add a reality show that has a bunch of kids creating an entire town with no adult supervision, but they are cancelling Jericho and The Class. Go figure. And, I’m annoyed that Fox is killing off The War at Home – there are far too few good comedies on television as it is. Guess they have to make room for more episodes of American Idol.

Looking like the DVR will have plenty of free space this fall.

Anyone using an online dating service should watch this and then really think about how accurate photos might or might not be.

I suppose I should have read the books or even have heard of them, but what the heck, I’ll play along.

It’s apparently a very good week for twisted videos from YouTube.

And I thought the Ricky Skaggs version of “Super Freak” was unusual…

I have no words.

Family Guy quotes of the night:

It’s a scarejew. Protect Jon Stewart, he’s our most important Jew!

It’s an “On the Rag”edy Ann doll. I can still play with her three weeks of the month.

Thank you for tearing up my carpet. All right, we’re going Brazilian!

This is weirder than that rap video by MC Escher.

We’re watching Grey’s Anatomy… That sounds awful.

As expected, the Boy and I watched The Last Mimzy today. The source story is very different from the movie. Spoilers ahead…
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