I was playing around with some random things today when I noticed that morimoto, the apartment’s file server, was apparently down.. I went out to inspect the situation and noticed the machine was whirr-free. I jumped to the conclusion that the power supply had died, so I opened up the case and took a whiff…. Sure thing, it was 0xDEADDEAD… So I ripped it out and drove down to Micro Center to pick up a replacement… I also took the opportunity to return that damn keyboard I bought when trying to debug the KVM problem… I still haven’t gotten that replacement KVM yet… Fuckers… Anyway, I slammed the new power supply into morimoto and everything is hunky-dory… I even think this one might be a bit quieter than the previous one.
In addition, I made the decision tonight to eliminate floppies from my life… I haven’t used a floppy in ages, but I had this box of them kicking around… Most were driver disks or boot disks for various operating systems, but a few had the potential for useful data, so I tossed all the driver/boot disks and set aside the others… I started with 30 disks, 2 of which actually had stuff worth salvaging on it. One was the cover art that James and I did for his Catharsis album.. The other was my old PGP keys which I have retired (not revoked), but keep around in case anyone has the my old public key floating around… I copied the data off them and burned them to a CD… It was kind of a waste to put 2 megs of data on a CD, but it will be nice to rip the floppy drive out of this beast and throw all those damn disks in the trash (which has already happened, actually). I figure that the disks, both of which were from the early 90s, were probably about to reach their EOL anyway, so it was probably a good thing I took care of this chore now.. Now I have another 10 years or so before I have to worry about my media degrading. :)
floppies suck! i’ve had it with zip disks, too. what crappy media. screw you, Iomega. network and iPod all the way…
I’ve been using my Intel snapshot cam a lot more recently (until the lens decided to fuck itself and require focusing again, but anyway) and unfortunately, there are no Mac drivers for it, so i need to boot up my pc for it. The other problem is that I can;t get my laptop to be a router for the network on the pc, so i basically have no other way to get files off of the PC than via burning CDs. I’ve been using them like disposable one-use floppies.
Suck down the images off the camera, burn the entire directory to cd, drop the cd into the mac, done.
It’s wasteful, since I haven’t figured out how to do multisession cd-rs on that thing, but hey, it works. hehe.
I suppose I could borrow the USB floppy drive from work, but eh… that’s too much work.
My cat is going insane right now.
Why not keep a few CD-RW’s floating around?
my cd-r burner doesn’t handle RW’s.
It’s an old SCSI 4x.
I have not used a floppy at home for a about a year now, and use them at work only because I’ve never figured out how to get my test machine to boot from CD, so every time I need to “format c:” I need to find a floppy.
What I do use every so often is one of those USB flash drives. It’s cheap, big, and fast and is convientient for shuffling files around when its difficult or impossible to set up a network connection. Also, everything I deal with supports it out of the box; Win98SE and up and OS 9 and OS X all have support build in.