GB TO BURN, MB TO FREE
I haven't posted anything in a while and I've got about an hour to
burn while the washing machine's going and my wheel bearing races
are shrinking in the freezer before I get back to hammering at the
other rear wheel hub of my Jag to try and repeat the success of the
passenger wheel rear bearing replacement, but with a little less
failure in between. So, ramble time. I like reading other people
rambling on their phlog actually, they tend to be the ones where I
go through and work through all the old posts since they started,
lately I've started reading through the old posts by Viz here,
which ramble quite a lot:
gopher://park-city.club:70/1/%7einvis/phlog/
Anyway I just finished scraping out some unneeded files on the 2GB
HDD of this old mid-90s PC, where it's starting to become difficult
to fit my complete email archive since 2014 in amongst all of the
other junk and OS files. The emails only amount to around 330MB
(though annoyingly most of that is useless logo/button images and
HTML that I never even see, I may try to strip them out one day),
and the OS partition is only 300MB, but somehow I've managed to
fill up the rest. But I do like to keep a lot of it - old DOS and
Win98 (installed on its other, 1.2GB HDD) stuff that wouldn't be as
convenient kept elsewhere. Plus it's nice to have just a few things
like photos and MP3s to play for the fun of it, even though I
mainly just use this machine for routine internet browsing (not so
hard on a 120MHz Pentium given that my routine browsing is mainly
email/usenet/gopher these days, plus now I can even bring up
Firefox via the Internet Client), writing, and listening to tracker
modules. But I've now only clawed back about 30MB of space, so I
think it's really time that I moved my email archive over to the
Internet Client instead of duplicating it between this PC and my
laptop. Actually I'm still using my old laptop, because with the
Internet Client eliminating most immediate problems from its speed
and outdated pre-Systemd Debian version, I _still_ haven't switched
over to the "new" one (with Devuan installed) yet. Though last
night I did set up ModemManager on it so that I can connect
directly to the internet when away from home via a USB 4G mobile
broadband modem, which I can't do on the old laptop since my PCMCIA
USB 2.0 adapter card broke (tried hard to fix that, but it's
looking like a problem with one of the obscure/ASIC chips) and
these USB modems don't work on USB 1.1.
But at the same time I don't have the time to set all that up
properly on the Internet Client, I'm too busy trying to find bigger
hammers to belt bits of my car with. So... away with some old PDFs
downloaded before HTTPS made direct web browsing too hard, and move
away those directories for software that I've compiled and planned
to package for outdated Linux distros that nobody except me uses
anyway, and... hey did I install muLinux on here once? No time to
try booting it, but I don't need a copy of the distro's floppy disk
images both there and in "floppy_linux", so that's a few more MB
saved. This is the second time I've gone through cleaning up like
this, there are dimisnishing returns here for sure.
But I did stumble across the link to the ABC Jazz online radio URL,
which I remember was damn hard to discover on a PC that couldn't
run the fancy javascript player program on their website. Back then
it turned out this computer couldn't cope with the 48KHz sample
rate though, so I never did get it to work reliably. I tried it
again now though and hey, they've dropped it down to 44,100Hz,
which plays fine! So I'm listening to it now - proof that if you
just grumble to yourself and do nothing about your problems the
world fixes itself for you, err... maybe.
http://live-radio02.mediahubaustralia.com/JAZW/mp3/
On that note, I usually never listen to internet radio for long
anyway, because why pay for the internet data used when you could
just listen to the radio for free? With ABC Jazz I do still agree
with that sentiment, because even though it's not broadcast over
nice simple analogue radio like ABC Classic (these are Australian
government-funded radio stations, by the way), they do broadcast it
with digital TV. So I really should just set up some old PC
speakers connected to my TV set-top box and use that to tune in (or
even better pipe it into a small FM transmitter so that I can use
those old radios after all). But onto the "GB to burn" part of the
title, I've ended up with a surplus of the SIM cards that I buy for
my internet because I thought some of them had expired early but it
turned out that the telco had just stuffed up the activation page
on their website so that it no longer worked when your internet
connection was via the same card that you were trying to activate.
They limit the domains that can be accessed, and apparantly their
site started requiring one that was blocked, and defaults to saying
that the SIM card has expired when actually it's the site's
Javascript that has failed - I did make a real effort to report
that issue (with no obvious way to report website bugs presented by
them), no response received yet of course (even when I tried
reporting it in their real-time online chat!). Anyway I only
figured that out after forking out $15 for more SIM cards. Fifteen
bucks! That's half my whole yearly internet cost when I get one of
the good deals! So now I've got a whole bunch of 3GB pre-loaded SIM
cards that are going to expire before I have time to use them each
after the other. Ain't it annoying when the system cheats you while
you're trying to cheat _it_?
Anyway I've now got GBs to burn, so on with the internet radio.
Plus it turns out Adam Curtis released a new doco the other day
called "Can't Get You Out of My Head" (and while I haven't watched
it yet, it's already left me completely unable to get the Kylie
Minogue song, appropriately, out of my head), so one whole SIM is
devoted to downloading all that from here (search the page's source
code for "mp4" to find the direct download links):
https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/
Right, washing ready to hang out, over 100MB of data wasted, 30MB
of data freed, and a few more lines of rambling ready to pollute
the waters of internet consciousness. This Sunday is going well, or
nowhere at all, it's hard to tell.
- The Free Thinker.
