I got home tonight and noticed that the hard drive light on my main system was looking… weird. like it was blinking at but at an odd duty cycle so that is looked dim.
I powered up the monitor and instead of the screen saver it simply said ‘PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT’. There goes my evening.
I tried a number of different boot configurations but nothing worked. It would power up, ask if I wanted to boot into XPpro or 2000 and then prompt me with the usual apologies about not shutting down correctly and would you like to boot into safe mode. Most of the computer I see at this point won’t even boot into safe mode, mine was no different.
I set it to not reboot on an error in hope that I’d spot something useful. I was rewarded by a nice BSOD stating that the boot drive was unmountable. Well what the hell had I been working off from so far?
Time for the recovery CD. It would have been nice to have had this happen to a system with a CD drive in it but that went away long ago in order to hold more hard drives.
Good thing my Debian Linux box is sitting on a shelf not doing anything. After a bit of surgery I had a working CD drive on my XP box and was ready to get back to work. I booted off the CD and went int orecivery mode, a little touch and go there too. I had to boot twice because the first time the install script blew up on line 5400 (!). I thought that my CD drive was screwed up or heaven forbid, my XP CD was damaged! I don’t think that Microsoft will replace one if you send it back. I suspect that having their customers pay $200 for media makes them smile quite a bit.
Anyway, I think I got off lucky because it just took a CHKDSK and a FIXBOOT to solve the problem.
Sounds like its about time that I get rid of some of my older smaller drives, I need to free up some space and do some migration soon.
4G Prototypes Burn Up the ‘Net
It’s a good thing that the phone technology from Japan won’t reach the US for some time. I mean, what would people do with all that bandwidth? Just get into trouble no doubt. This should give the lawyers at the RIAA nightmares about all the P2P that will be going on via cell phones.
In experiments, prototype phones were used to view 32 high definition video streams, while travelling in an automobile at 20 kilometres per hour. Officials from NTT DoCoMo say the phones could receive data at 100 megabits per second on the move and at up to a gigabit per second while static. At this rate, an entire DVD could be downloaded within a minute. DoCoMo’s current 3G (third generation) phone network offers download speeds of 384 kilobits per second and upload speeds of 129 kilobits per second.
[via gadgets.fosfor.se ]
4G prototypes reach blistering speeds
Hayabusa – Asteroid Sample and Return Mission
Now this is the kind of thing that I like to see in the news.
Here is some current information on the mission:
Hayabusa completes journey to asteroid Itokawa by ion engine propulsion
For more background…
…Scientists hope to gain an even better understanding of the physical properties and chemical make-up of the asteroid using Hayabusa’s instruments to locate potential locations for sample retrieval, scheduled to get underway in November.
When landing sites are chosen, the Hayabusa spacecraft can make up to three passes to attempt to capture a total of one gram of surface samples, or about two one-thousandths of a pound.
The approaches will heavily lean on the autonomous navigation system aboard the probe, which must operate correctly with little input from engineers 200 million miles away on Earth and cope with the extremely weak gravity field of Itokawa. A target marker will be released on the surface as the spacecraft closes in.
During each opportunity, a 16-inch funnel will first make contact with the asteroid, followed by the firing of a small metal projectile into the surface at well over 600 feet per second. Rocks and dust kicked up by the impact will be gathered by the funnel and fed into the sample collection capsule to be returned to Earth.
“It breaks the surface and ejecta climbing up through a funnel-like device are collected by a sample catcher,” Jun Kawaguchi explained.
On the first pass, it is planned for Hayabusa to deploy a tiny rover called MINERVA to move across the asteroid for up to two days by leaping from place to place in Itokawa’s near-microgravity environment. The 1.3-pound rover will take stereo images using three cameras, and six thermometers will gather temperature measurements. …
Homes or Playhouses?
I’m all for small homes but this is taking it a little too far. The homes created by this company are range in sizes from 100 to 500 square feet and are to be used as a home (a cramped one) or a guest house in the backyard. A few even sport wheels and can be turned into a fifth-wheel.
The Coso Artifact
As always, make sure you don’t check your brain at the door when you read this stuff.
In February of 1961, three amateur gem collectors dug a mechanical gizmo encased in fossil-encrusted rock out of a mountainside in the Southern California desert. They didn’t know what it was, and began showing it to friends and associates. Within a few years this thingummy, which became known as the Coso artifact, had assumed an almost mythic importance. It consisted of a cylinder of what seemed to be porcelain with a 2-millimeter shaft of bright metal in its center, enclosed by a hexagonal sheath composed of copper and another substance they couldn’t identify.
[ via Unexplained Mysteries ]
Archaeology from the dark side
If you still want to read more about the Coso artifact and want photos (and an explanation of what it actually is) , try here.
.18mm Pens
I have got to get a set of these. My wife uses the 0.3mm pens when she writes letters and I occasionally borrow them fro myself. Its great, you can write as small as you like and still read it. The 0.18mm pens will be amazing, and yes I’m going to try and write on some rice (I’ll post photos once I do that)
It’s the UniBall Signo Bit 0.18mm pen from Mitsubishi.
There’s a pen war on Japan, in case you didn’t know, to produce the pen with the finest point.
Pilot came out with one having a ball diameter of 0.3mm in 1994.
Now comes this new player with a point twice the width of a human hair.
The pen required the invention of a special friction-reducing ink.
Mitsubishi has sold 4 million of the pens, which come in eight colors, for $1.75 apiece in Japan.
They cost $25 for a set of all eight colors…
World’s Finest-Writing Ball Point Pen – ‘The tip is so small you can write words on a grain of rice’