Audiobook finished

The Truth by Pratchett
Book 2 in the "industrial revolution" story line.
AM gets its first newspaper. The patrician is framed for assault to put him away and replace him with a puppet ruler. The reporter (who's making up journalism as he goes along) investigates and uncovers the plot.

The newspaper just happens, William is an above-ground spy (he writes a letter about happenings in AM and sends it to foreign leaders) but he wanders in to the dwarves' new movable-type print shop on his way to get his letter duplicated by the engravers one day, and becomes fascinated.

Main characters: William de Worde, Sacharissa Cripslock

Foresight

I just saw a report on CNN entitled "Old pumps don't go to $4/gallon."

I remember what a big PITA it was back when gas went over $1/gallon. There were a lot of mechanical pumps that couldn't handle it. Some stations took to setting half the price and putting a sign on there that said "Actual price is twice this amount." Eventually the pump mfgs came out with a gear set that doubled the rate, and those stores with such converted old pumps always charged an even number of cents as a result.

I'm disappointed that the programmers of the newer pumps put such a limit in. This is like the hard drive or "SmartMedia" updates we've had in years past. 16M not enough? Let's redo the hardware so it'll handle 32M. Then next year we'll redo it again to handle 64M. Oh, and these aren't compatible with earlier cameras. Every step involves pain of transition.

My opinion, having watched these half-measures, is that if you've hit a limit and you are fixing the problem, you should push the limit up A LOT. Maxtor finally did this with hard drives. We went through the pain (BIOS upgrades, incompatibility) at ISTR 4GB, then 32GB, then 137GB before Maxtor finally said screw this and came out with BigDrive with a 144 petabyte limit.

I'm just sort of surprised when someone comes out with something like a gas pump with a limit that simple economics would tell you would be exceeded within the device's lifespan.

But then again, I get bugged when I buy a $10 watch and the calendar function only handles the next 10 years.

Temptation

A friend at work reads books by the truckload on is Sony Clie (real fancy Palm). He broke the screen earlier this week, and ran out and bought a Sony eBook reader.

OMG, it's very nice. VERY nice. At $300, it's a bit above my normal "toy" price but I'm telling you, it's real tempting.

MythTV goes titsup

Last night the MythTV box just went bonk. The database is gone, it boots but won't start the frontend, it will run setup but the key configs are so screwed up that I can't navigate the menus. I have no idea what happened, but I have been suspicious of it for a while; for the last few months it's been doing questionable things; mainly it's been recording stuff that I know damn well it's already recorded, saying it hadn't. The kids say it's been deleting stuff, but the ones I've investigated have been proper (the shows were configured to auto-delete when space got low).

I think it's time for a rebuild.

I've got a spare 250G in my personal machine that's currently just got a big ole' TC volume on it. I'm burning the stuff off that onto DVD to clear it (got another 20 DVDs or so to go) and then I can get started on a fresh Myth build. The drive that's in there is still OK so I haven't lost any video files, I'll mount them in the media area and we'll plow through those in the next few days.