Summary of June

Summary of June
===============

There was too much work in June. I'm working at an university and there
were exams from mid-May to the first days of July. In the COVID times
there were on-line sessions: 30 minutes per student, 12 students per
day. All in temperatures over 30 degrees of Celsius (our modern
building is hot even when outside temperature is quite moderate). In
the days without exams I was trying to do the rest of work. In short, I
was (and still I am) too exhausted to do anything else.

I wrote two or three short Gopher posts but not managed to transfer
them to any networked computer. Maybe I will able to do it in July or
August.

To make thing worse, my bike tyre get a puncture (I have been using a
folding bike to commute to work as it has been almost the only outdoor
activity I have been able to do). Normally it should be no a big deal.
But it was the rear bike of a Brompton. Not only the tyre of this thing
is unusually small but it also incorporates the Sturmey-Archer gear
hub. So a trivial tire replacement required a lot of time (on an
mountain bike I was able to replace it in terms of minutes). Of course,
I had to get the new tyre first which also took some time because these
sizes are pretty uncommon here. Fortunately, the Brompton dealer was
very helpful and shipped the needed things very quickly.

On the computer side there has been also one considerable loss. It
seems that PSU of my SGI IRIX Indigo died. I used this computer for
weekend Gopher reading and for some light writing, too. But I also used
it to some programming, computing (even for some FEA analyses) and so.
A computer that probably did a lot of useful work for the original
owner (the Siemens Nixdorf company) also did a lot of work for me. Now
it is probably over - I'm not so skilled to repair the PSU by myself
and other options are very expensive. For example, getting a "new" PSU
from a reliable source [1] means to spent some UKP 350 + VAT (22% here
if I'm not mistaken) and customs fees (also a considerable amount). It
is much more that was price of the whole system when I got.

This become a problem for me as my SGI O2 is still not fully recovered
from its RAM failure and I have no other fully working SGI system at
home except the Octane. Unfortunately, the Octane is too power-hungry
and too noisy to be used often. I still have a second Indigo (the
second-generation, 64-bit system with the R4000 CPU). It's faster that
the Siemens system but it has a much worse graphics board - just the
Entry (8-bit colors, the 1024x768 fixed resolution). I cannot swap the
graphics between the systems easily - it would mean IRIX a non-trivial
re-installation which may made even the this second system unusable.
Moreover, the R4000 Indigo is the only actual (and working) computer in
our weekend house - moving it to other place will create a need for
another system.

An another problem is my Sharp Zaurus's battery - it does not hold
charge any longer. I have had a spare one but it seems be only slightly
better (the Zaurus cannot overcome two days of suspend or few tens of
minutes of use). This was to be expected but I'm not sure if there are
any new batteries available.

I expected some new things to come (mostly a new stuff not the old
computers) but everything was delayed considerably for various
reasons.

References:

[1] http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgi.html