I hear you calling Sack of pants

[hirez]

Things that are rather poor:

Amarok.
Non-CFI-unix wireless network support in KDE.
Come to think of it, PC music players are generally a bit rubbish.
I mean, by trying to make the sodding things look like a cheap and nasty 'hifi' unit, you've made a bugger of the desktop metaphor and have as good as admitted that your favourite UI toolkit's not up to the job.

The entire electrical system expiring on the 9000 with only mildly unfortunate timing last night. I spent several minutes grovelling through the fuse-panel (handily located in a cupboard just above the glove compartment, and there's a legend on the cupboard lid.) before reasoning that a complete failure was probably battery related. Which indeed it was. A good job there was a pair of pliers to hand in order to tighten up the loose positive terminal. Also a bloody good job it didn't work its way loose while on the move. That sort of thing tends to terminate alternators with extreme prejudice and moderate expense.

There still seems to be a very minor coolant leak, though. At least it's outwards, rather than inwards.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

Yuh. I use Amarok because putting stuff on the playlist annoys me less than with VLC. That's about it.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I suspect that on an only moderately package-damaged system (Beardian & spawn, f'rinstance) it's only a minor nightmare for installation and management.

On F-BSD it's that Byte editor's favourite, a disturbed looking pig on stilts, driving a motorized skateboard. (I don't recall which particular Second System Effected code they were talking about at the time. OS/2 probably. It might have been an elephant on the skateboard, too.)

I keep meaning to have a crack at 'fixing' KWireless, but the hoop-jumping required makes my brain hurt.

[reddragdiva]

BSD ... that's a kind of leengux, isn't it? Must be non-standard, or KDE would Just Work. Yeah.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. From a brief squint at the configure script (Well, I say 'script'. I mean 'nine mile long impenetrable ugly shell jibber-jabber') it appears that CFI-weenix has three slightly different and incompatible versions of wireless support.

Implementations where wireless is Just Another Interface must confuse the poor thing. And no /proc filesystem. Ioctls are hard.

[tails-redux.livejournal.com]

I hear you calling Sack of pants
Was it so loud the words travelled through time from about ten years ago at a popular dive in Islington through to your desk in the current day ... must have been the space-time continuum shattering twist that me and my co-conspirator were engaging in.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I was told the story not long after the time, and I laughed my stupid head off.

Then there was that time you persuaded me to join you in doing the Twist to some industrial band or other at Dingwalls. I was convinced they were going to leap off the stage and wallop the pair of us.

[tails-redux.livejournal.com]

Think that one may have been in a week where I was hitching to a different club/gig up and down the country for a week. Were Cleggy and Zoe DJ-ing in some crazy back-to-back double act style that night?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I wish I remembered. A lot of that time is a bit of a blur(gh).

[tails-redux.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Had a visitor a week or two back that said, "dig out some photos from back in t'day". I think either Pat or yourself took the picture. Been a long time since I wore a rubber skating skirt.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Thought you meant an HP9000 then :-)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The last time one of those expired, it was a fan-tray going short. A mushroom-cloud of black smoke, a loud bang and an entire power rail tripped out.

[spride.livejournal.com]

The (Mk II, GTi) Glof that I had 03-06 developed the interesting habit of going open-circuit while under way. Luckily, the highest speed it ever did this at was 30mph, and never with anything behind me, so the sudden stall was corrected by stamping clutchwards and ignition frobbage. I mothballed it, lacking the money and/or skills to fettle it, until budleysalterton took it away.

[It turned out to be a short on the alternator lead, which he fixed, and then went and got it killed on the M25. This is irony].