tab meme!

[jazzfish]

(not actually a Vancouver update)

From zvi, original to anatsuno

I'm going to list, and tell you briefly about, ALL THE TABS I HAVE OPEN at this moment in time, without editing (except for work-related or privacy-related reasons, if I had them, but I don't. I just mean, if you do it, obviously, feel free to edit the really crucial stuff - just, it's not in the spirit if the game to edit for guilty pleasure reasons and the like).

• Twitter
  
• Dreamwidth reading page
  
• Fuck Yeah, Neil's Dog Cabal! because Mr Neil linked to it and I thought "no way is that real." Silly me.
  
• LJ friendspage
  
• janni's post about the fifteen or so years it took her to write Bones of Faerie
  
• Roundhouse Theatre website so I can remember to buy tickets for The Snow Queen for tomorrow
  
• Google map of downtown Vancouver, zoomed in slightly too far for easy use (I have no idea what I was looking up; probably trying to figure out a bus route)
  
• The Twitter page for Tim The Movie, which on the one hand looks kinda interesting ("a stop motion animation short film tribute to Tim Burton narrated by Christopher Lee") but they got my attention by randomly following me on Twitter, and I've yet to decide whether that's annoying on the level of random email marketing
  
• The DW update window

Comments

[thanate]

wait, I thought you were part of the anti-twitter brigade. When did that change?

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

You probably don't want me to do this one--at least, I don't have the energy to, and no one wants to read it--as I currently have 85 tabs open. :D

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

(Chrome would be easier: My LJ, Gmail, my FB wall, Twitter, and my webcomics list page. [I use Chrome to update my own FB wall, pulling links from my LJ.])

[jazzfish]

...geep.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

I'd encourage you by saying "c'mon, I did it!" but 33 is not at all the same number as 85.

~Sor

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I could summarize as follows:

Window 1:

My LJ Friends page, "interested in regularly reading" filter

Gmail

Facebook

Hotmail

[Many links that will take not-insignificant time to view or read, most waiting to be vetted to be shared on LJ or FB]

[Several links that I've come across recently, some waiting to be vetted to be shared on LJ or FB, some just waiting to be read]

Window 2:

My webpage of the ~60 webcomics I read

[A couple more webcomics I'm planning to check out]

[A couple webcomics I'm in the process of catching up on]

The totally tally has been as high as 125, and recently as low as 50something. :)

[rbandrews]

Reddit/pics and Reddit/2XChromosomes, and an Imgur tab with a picture from r/pics (haven't looked at it yet). A tab with the phone number for Xbox live support (you can't cancel Xbox live unless you actually call them on the phone like it's the 80s). My Livejournal friends page (it's the only one that shows LJ posts, and everyone on Dreamwidth crossposts anyway). And, this comment.

Until a few minutes ago I had about twenty tabs open about a motherboard though. Long story.

[jazzfish]

I find myself oddly curious about the mobo story.

[rbandrews]

Well, ordinarily I'd make a post about it, but that's kinda complicated, so I'll lay it all out here:

I decided to build a Linux machine, sort of as a testbed for trying out different OSes and things. So, I went out on Saturday and spent about $600 (got a check for some freelance work I did) on parts: a motherboard, a chip (Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz), 4 gigs RAM, a 500 gig drive, and a mini-ITX case. Put it all together, and it works pretty well (once I figure out a problem I had with the heat sink).

Only trouble is, I have no OS on there, and since I didn't get an optical drive, I couldn't install one. See, Ubuntu doesn't distribute pre-made USB images any more, just CD images with instructions on how to convert them.

This is the point I was at when I made that comment: I had followed the directions but still couldn't get the machine to boot from USB, so I was going crazy looking up what in the BIOS was keeping it from seeing the USB drive as bootable. See, if you search for pretty much any problem imaginable on a particular motherboard, someone's had that problem on that board, so you'll find confirmation that it can happen and think it's probably happening to you.

Of course, it wasn't happening to me at all, I figured out later: the reason it wouldn't boot from USB is because the image I had burned to that USB stick wasn't bootable. Ubuntu assumes that whatever machine you're preparing the image on is the machine you'll be installing it to, so it was giving me instructions on how to make a USB drive that would boot a Mac. The next issue is, there is no way to make a USB image that will boot a PC, using only a Mac. None. No Ubuntu tool (theirs is only Windows and Ubuntu), no third-party tool (UNetbootin is Windows / Linux only), no Apple tool (Open Firmware will boot from pretty much anything, so the tools they provide for making a boot image don't have to be very complex). If all you have is a Mac, and you want to boot a PC from USB, then, well, tough. You can't.

So, what do? I could go buy a DVD drive, but I couldn't, because slimline drives are really hard to find: nobody in Houston has them and is open on Sunday (actually, only one place has them, and they're an OEM supplier that closes at 5:30 on weekdays, so totally out). I could borrow a drive from someone and just run it without the case, but from who? And then do what next time I do this? The whole point of this machine was to play with lots of different OSes.

Remember, I can't just get any old drive because this computer is the size of a toenail. There was barely any room in the case before I put the parts in; a standard-size optical drive will never fit in there. And to complicate things ever further the board only does SATA.

What I did was go spend $70 on an external USB CD drive. See, even though it won't boot a CD image from a USB stick the thing will perfectly normally boot off a USB CD drive. And now I have a portable DVD drive for watching DVDs on the MacBook Air if I'm on a road trip.

[jazzfish]

*blink* Um. I was kind of wondering what had happened, and now I'm still wondering. I guess I ought to get over my fear of chat eventually.

That sounds like an intensely frustrating way to spend an evening. Congratulations on figuring it out.

[rbandrews]

It's not really that satisfying a story, actually; I just got depressed, figured nobody was interested in what I was writing, and hid it all. At least I didn't delete it.

The nice thing is, I put Windows 7 on there and installed Steam, and found my CDs for some old stuff. So I have Moonbase Commander and Warcraft III and Age of Wonders (the whole trilogy on Steam for $20) and so on. It doesn't run new stuff that well, but it runs anything up to about 2007 just great. Half-Life 2 and Portal seem to work fine.