I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

Follow up to this. Good news on the speaker front! Apparently the kind of speakers my old speakers were is called "2.1 channel" because of the two small speakers and the one on-the-floor speaker which provides bass (which is why my temporary speakers sound so tinny). Anyway, Logitech have three different versions of these 2.1 speakers, and they are available from both JB HiFi and Officeworks at about the same price. So, yay, I can actually replace my old speakers (I was taking their quality for granted, but every time I turn on my music now, I do a double-take because it sounds so odd and thin.)

So I was on my computer, as one is, and I started playing music, as one does, and there was nothing.

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P.S. I tried posting this by email, but it seems that my ISP is declaring me "unauthorised" to send email via their mail server.

    550 Relay Denied - Unauthorized

The strange thing is that I'm still receiving email, I just can't send it. This is clearly another saga in the making but I am NOT going to deal with it now. I haven't even had breakfast, and it's lunchtime!

It looks as if my relatively newly acquired scanner is utter crap. Yes, I've had it for months, but I haven't used it all that often... and now it looks as if it was always crappy, comparing the result I'm getting this evening with scans that I did in January (when I first got the scanner). Blast!

The crappiness consists of these "stripey" artefacts in the preview and the scan, as if the light was shaded by blinds and giving it these shadows. I have no idea what would be causing it, but it's there in all my scans. The reason I didn't pay attention to it before was because, when I was scanning my Snape necklace in January, I was more concerned that I wasn't getting the Labradorite right, so I fell back on taking photographs. The stripes happened in the scan of my spiral necklace too, but I didn't realize it wasn't just in the preview until recently when I looked at that image again (because I wanted a picture of a Spiral-6-in-1 weave).

But this means that the scanner is UTTERLY USELESS to me, since the only thing I use it for is to take pictures of my jewellery. My old HP Scanjet 5p was perfect for that, until, after um, twenty years (!) it developed a yellow stripe down one side. Obviously HP don't build them like they used to (the new scanner is a HP as well).

Crap. Crap. Crap.

Taking photographs is much more hassle. With scanning, I could (in the past) get good results whether it was day or night - and it was much more likely to be night when I finished a work and wanted to scan it. With photographs, no matter how hard I try, the only really good results happen if I take photos in daylight, outside, on a sunny day. Which doesn't happen that often.

Bother. Botheration. Botherectomy!

It looks like my home desktop computer is Mostly Dead. That is, the hard drive upon which my Operating System resides is not responding. The computer reboots, but it can only find the disk sometimes, and when it can find it, it can't read it. I've done the "reboot N times while attempting to tweak things" and I probably just damaged the disk further. (sigh)

I expect it is because of the heat; the computer was behaving erratically yesterday too.

I do not have time to fix it or replace it before I fly away for Christmas, because I have to spend the time getting ready to go away, and there's lots of stuff still to do for that, and I'm already going to lose a day of that preparation, because nobody should be expected to do anything on a day with a top of 41C (which is tomorrow) (when I was planning to do laundry and survey my clothes for packing).

Gah!

So. While I am getting ready for Christmas, and while I am away for Christmas, and until the unknown time after that when I get a fixed or replacement computer running:
a) www.katspace.org will be down
b) I will not receive any email

If you wish to contact me, I'll still be keeping an eye on Dreamwidth and LJ and Twitter (because I still have internet and a working laptop), though I might not be able to when I'm away.

(sigh)

Of course these things happen in heatwaves, that's just the way life is. (sigh) Computers are more fragile than human beings.

I got the server up and running, though in such a state that all the software needs to be installed and configured. To that end, I have got the mail working on it, whew. This was the more difficult of the two main tasks (mail and webserver), simply because I have more practice at setting up webservers than mailservers. But also the more urgent task, since I don't like being incommunicado.

And it's ten o'clock at night and I'd better stop. So the webserver will be off the air for a few more days, because I doubt I will have time to work on it until Wednesday.

(sigh)

More news on my video card front.

As per http://kerravonsen.dreamwidth.org/914772.html (wherein I discover that there are problems with Firefox on my NVIDIA video card display, and blame the Nouveau driver)
and http://kerravonsen.dreamwidth.org/915062.html (wherein I discover that the NVIDIA binary driver is even worse)

My initial diagnosis is confirmed, because Arch Linux just updated the Nouveau driver, I installed this newer driver, and my display problems have gone! No more odd behaviour with certain images on certain web-pages, they're all displaying okay. Yay!
It's a great relief to know that my monitor isn't dying, as suggested by droxy. Whew.

When I upgraded to Firefox 12, certain background images wouldn't display properly, while others wouldn't display at all. But it only happened on one of my computers. All the others were fine. The one where things weren't working was my desktop computer with the nice monitor, so it was rather important that things work. The symptoms were that (a) for some background images, rather than display the image, it would display the first line of the image, and repeat it over and over, in one long bleeding stripe (b) if one did "view image", the image itself did display correctly (c) for some semi-transparent images, they didn't display at all.
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Yes, I acted ASAP, and now I have a new monitor; a 24" Dell widescreen monitor. It was pretty tricky lugging it home, but I did it. Whew. Let's hope this one lasts longer than the Acer did.

After such a long delay that I thought they'd taken my money and run, I finally received my "ErgoTouch Mouse", version 1 and version 2. They are small compact trackball mice, which I thought would be great... and turned out not to be.

The first thing which I ought to have realized would be a problem, was something I knew before I bought them: they are designed to be held in the hand, with one's forefinger inside a hole, resting on Button1. This means that it is more difficult to switch from typing to mousing and back again, because it's no longer a matter of lifting up one's hand and resting it on something: you have to stick your finger inside a hole.

Second problem: the version-1 doesn't have a mouse-wheel. I miss my mouse-wheel.

Third problem, an even worse one: while version-2 does have a mouse-wheel, it doesn't have a Button2. Which is worse because there are enough buttons for a Button2, but both the buttons on the top of the version-2 are hardwired to be Button3. This is insanity, and as far as I'm concerned, renders the trackball unusable.

This is really, really annoying.

Karmic Koala (Ubuntu Linux) has bad karma. At least with me. Spent hours downloading to upgrade to it, hours and hours. Finally got everything installed. Reboot. Aaaand... my display kept flashing on and off. And half my keystrokes were ignored. But because I'd cleaned my cache before upgrading (oops), in order to downgrade back to the previous release, guess what? Yep. Downloading for hours. (looks) Oh, the ETA has gone down to about an hour now. It was hovering around 2 hours for the past... four hours? Something like that. (sigh)

While I was waiting, I read fanfic. More HG/SS, silly me. One called "The Traveller", which had a number of good things going for it; decent prose, a twisty time-travel plot, some lovely angst, a happy-ever-after... but in the end, it felt contrived.
But it left me with a desire for Steampunk Harry Potter. With Mad Science, clockwork, polished brass, elegant Victorian-style clothing, a melding of magic and science, with, of course, Hermione Granger right in the middle of it.
Someone write it for me? Pleeeese?

Another story I wish someone would write (where does one issue challenges for HP folks to write, anyway?) is this: Hermione + Snape friendship, with Hermione/Ron 'ship, and Snape and Ron have to work together to save Hermione. Wouldn't that be fun?

Edited to add: (22:45) I have now broken my desktop. It will need to be wiped and reinstalled from scratch. Which I do not have time to do now. (sigh). I am glad I have backups of stuff.