Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, in a post series pointlessly documenting every train I took.

A1 from Bardwell Park to Central.

Cleanliness: New and shiny!

Getting this error in Red Hat's Palimpsest (Disk Utility)? Use gdisk to define partitions first, then you'll have no problems :).

The problem

Starting with their larger capacity, multi-terabyte/tebibyte drives, Seagate and Western Digital have moved from a 512 byte sector size to 4 kb. The benefits and tradeoffs of this new low level format is beyond the scope of this post; suffice to say it wrecks havoc with certain drive formatting tools!

If you attempt to format one of these newer drives in Palimpsest, you may receive an error similar to this:

The partition is misaligned by 3072 bytes. This may result in very poor performance. Repartitioning is suggested.

Technically the drive is completely usable in this state, but you'll pay a hefty performance penalty.

The solution

At the time of writing this post, both GParted and Palimpsest have trouble with these drives, but gdisk can handle them. Gdisk is a command line based disk editor that works on GUID GPT drives.

I shouldn't need to tell you to back up your data and quadruple check you're performing operations on the right drive. Please be careful!

1. Install from your package manager (no, really?)

2. Launch gdisk as root with the device path of your new drive; you can find that out from Palimpsest’s “Device” label. It’ll look something like this:

   # gdisk /dev/sd[x]

3. Type n for new partition, and accept the defaults, assuming you want a partition that takes the entire drive.

4. Type “w” to write the changes.

Now you can format the drive with any tool you wish!

A statement from the new centre-right government in Queensland:

The Queensland Government has decided not to proceed with the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards in 2012 which will save Queensland taxpayers $244,475, not including the cost of resourcing the Awards.

And only a few days later from Singapore:

SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will donate $350,000 towards three new awards. The awards support community bonding, social service, and the arts.

Clearly there are more issues at play here, but fascinating timing nonetheless!

Quote from a 3/5 star PC Magazine review of the Samsung display I picked up back in 2007:

While I’m pleased that the digital port is HDCP compliant, I think a monitor in this price range should offer something more in the way of multimedia connectivity, such as an HDMI port or a card reader.

A monitor losing points because it doesn't have a card reader? No wonder my toaster only got 3/5 stars.

Sorry I couldn't resist, I've always wanted one of these.

I’ve been so thorougly soaked with assignments and work over the last week or so, I’ve barely had time to eat let alone blog! To break the silence on this glorious Saturday evening, I thought I’d share this ridiculously amazing rendition of Avalon by one of my all time favourite jazz/swing musicians John Pizzarelli!

By all accounts that guitar should have CAUGHT FIRE! Jazz and big band forever :’D

Was intrigued by this graphic from the Windows Live login screen. Arguably all three phones are displaying the same information for each message, and (barring the names) even the text is a similar size. Yet iOS and Android manage six to seven full previews, and WP only does four.

I'm not arguing message counts and more efficient layouts automatically correlate with increased productivity or usability, but it'd certainly cut down on time spent scrolling!

Celebrating in class and style, clearly! :D

(Pending a better photo when she can provide me one!)

Ruben Singlish also crap

Before we go any further, I'll admit I was rather excited to celebrate my fabulous sister's 23rd birthday today, because it meant I could finally wish her a Happy Twenty Tree. For those not clued into Singaporean speech, "three is "tree". You see? Hey, I made a rhyme. Of course I did, I did it on purpose, geez. Or did I? Why are you asking me?

We did breakfast at a great little place in Newtown, before heading off to a tattoo parlour of all places. Without shedding a single tear (incredible!), she had a small "XXIII" inked onto her wrist; 23 for her birthday, because our beautiful mum was born on the 23rd of August, and because she died on the 23rd of December. I'm personally as White and Nerdy as they come and wouldn't get tattoos, but I appreciated the significance :).

Elke's wonderful friend Samme then proceeded to fulfill a dream Elke has had since she was an early teen: a formal lunch at a McDonalds! Dressed in ties, jackets, collared shirts, formal dresses and hats, some of her closest friends sat around us at the formica table in the McDonalds near UTS. We ate burgers and drank Coke off formal plates with cutlery, table cloths, placemats and champagne glasses, then an adorable cake in the shape of shaggy white dog for desert!

If all is going to plan for Elke now, she should be on a cruise in Sydney Harbour with some of her work friends… while I sit back at home frantically coding homework no less! ;D

Hope she had a great day. She well and truely deserves it; she's the best sibling a brother could ask for. Happy Birthday Elke :)

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, in a post series pointlessly documenting every train I took.

S78 from Bardwell Park to Central

Cleanliness: Surprisingly good!

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, in a post series pointlessly documenting every train I took.

T109 from Bardwell Park to Central

Cleanliness: Refurbished and squishy, but lots of uninspired tagging.

Lots of people were getting on board with #adayinthelifeApril2 on Twitter today, so I took the opportunity to reboot my Trains Ruben Taketh blog, and snap the above photo.

At some point I'll upload more train photos from around the world, for now it's just a terrible site where I take photos of Sydney trains I've been on. As exciting as it sounds!