Entry tags:
Oh man I can't believe it's april. Also I am amped up right now I dunno even. So you get this entry
ALSO Holy Week is the standard time to travel here because we have almost the entire week off in the Philippines. It's pretty relaxing to stay in Manila: a lot of people are either in the province or out of the country, so there is no traffic in Manila. We stayed here last year? last last year? and I drove around AND IT WAS AWESOME. NO TRAFFIC. Seriously *___*
This year is even more awesome though. We're taking my grandpa to Singapore, and I'm getting to watch Wicked. Eeeeh *_____* I have wanted, but I was flinching at the cost of the air fare + tickets to the play itself + lodging + I wouldn't have watched with anyone and it would have been lonely, so I'm flailing right now because I'm getting to watch with my sister and two cousins (my brother watched when he was sent to sg for a company training thing >_> I have been envious of him and now I shan't be), and we lucked into a free upgrade because there are four of us going and so basically I'm *_*
I mean that almost literally. STARS. IN EYES.
Also, phew I thought that sentence would never end /o\
Also also also also... I've lost my train of thought because Wicked. I'M SORRY.
UH okay so I shall probably do the usual hanging out with family etc and eat food etc and I hear the chili crab is amazing also my cousins are total food trippers it shall be great I bet and also also also.
I plan to drop by the apple store and see if I can buy the newest iPad for my brother, just in case there's stock. I'm very tempted to get one of my own, and I keep saying yes (retina display! investment? after the GST rebate, it's actually a bit cheaper than if I got it from a shop in the USA and a lot cheaper than if I waited for it to be available here) and then also no (I have other upcoming expenses to deal with! also I have the first gen one which I love to bits). Ehhh, it will all be moot if it's not in stock, so I don't know which way I'm hoping for *G*
So basically what I'm saying is it would be awesome if I could get one, and yet it would also be awesome if it weren't in stock because LESS CHOICES and that kind of thing. Stuff!
My dreams are weirdly vivid lately. Three nights ago, I was exploring a hotel which had a mystery within it. That dream sucked: I never got to the bottom of the mystery. On the other hand, I did manage to escape from a cult by walking across water? I... that almost balanced it out but that dream still sucked. Hmph. Two nights ago it was a chase one where I was shrunken down to bug-sized proportions, and I was being chased by police thugs also shrunk down to bug-size, but everyone around us was more or less normal sized. And we got into the *slowest* car chase ever because we were all stuck in traffic in our tiny bug-sized cars. And then I stumbled across an orgy, but it was all cool though, because in the end I got to do action movie leaps across roofs and that was almost like flying. I love it when my dreams involve flying <333 And last night was a bit sad: funeral of someone I was in a choir slash fashion agency with. Everyone's clothes were pretty though, and it all took place on a gorgeous island so I.... I guess something? I feel sad now :(
Ughhhh talking to a friend about RO reminded me of how soothing levelling up in RO used to be. RO was a total addiction of mine, to the point where I played even though I haaaated it and haaated the people and haaaated the time suck. I eventually ended up having to switch OSes to escape. (No seriously, the only way I stopped myself was to buy a laptop which didn't have WIndows on it -- and that's how I ended up with my first Mac).
I found out it's possible to run RO via Wine on a Mac, and I decided to give it one last go? Just get to the point where I had a decently high leveled character and run through my old hunting grounds once again. I ended up having to get rid of CrossOver which just silently crashes and went through several third-party Mac apps for Wine before I found one that actually worked. And then it turned out the RO installer I got was corrupted, heh, so had to redo that. And then after installing, the RO window would only show a black screen, so I installed XQuartz. And that got me as far as the login screen (with its familiar background music), but for some reason I couldn't get mouse focus on the window!
So now I've given up on it. (I hope).
Luckily I had much better luck recovering data from my hard drive. I found out that my backup and media hard drive had failed when it simply failed to show up in Finder >.o I started out completely unsure of what I was doing because hardware! data! anything you do is irreversible! But with lots of help from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alierak, pauamma, and geekosaur, I managed to wrangle the data from my failing hard drive to a new hard drive bit by bit.
Some of the things I learned:
larger chunks can help -- going from the default 512b to 64kb cut down what would have taken eight and a half days to just 3.14 days.
As long as you don't accidentally reverse the input/output locations, and end up writing to the wrong place, dd is pretty non-scary. I mean, you can mess yourself up with it, but also it's possible to play around with it without you know, rocks falling and crushing your data irretrievably (it helped that there was nothing absolutely mission critical on the disk, like code or photos or other stuff that was my own creative output, so I could play around a bit).
Mac OS tries to be helpful in mounting the disk from /dev, and then also helpfully ejects the disk if it can't be mounted, which meant I had to figure out how to disable that mechanism. launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist was my friend. (And then I spent some time figuring out why I couldn't mount any disk images after that *ahaha*)
Perhaps hardware is not so scary? Ditto data.
A GRUMBLE: dd refers to the chunks as "blocks" in most of its documentation, but then for some reason says that it's input / output records. That messed me up because I couldn't figure out whether that always referred to blocks, or to other things.
I'm a bit wary because it failed at at 1.875 TB out of 2TB, after which it couldn't detect the device in /dev anymore, almost as if it got auto-ejected again, which was weird. But I did a spot check on the things that were really important to me have and as far as I can tell I got everything important? I dunno!
Also I am grateful for friends who will take care of me when I get myself good and caffeinated. You know who you are <3
This year is even more awesome though. We're taking my grandpa to Singapore, and I'm getting to watch Wicked. Eeeeh *_____* I have wanted, but I was flinching at the cost of the air fare + tickets to the play itself + lodging + I wouldn't have watched with anyone and it would have been lonely, so I'm flailing right now because I'm getting to watch with my sister and two cousins (my brother watched when he was sent to sg for a company training thing >_> I have been envious of him and now I shan't be), and we lucked into a free upgrade because there are four of us going and so basically I'm *_*
I mean that almost literally. STARS. IN EYES.
Also, phew I thought that sentence would never end /o\
Also also also also... I've lost my train of thought because Wicked. I'M SORRY.
UH okay so I shall probably do the usual hanging out with family etc and eat food etc and I hear the chili crab is amazing also my cousins are total food trippers it shall be great I bet and also also also.
I plan to drop by the apple store and see if I can buy the newest iPad for my brother, just in case there's stock. I'm very tempted to get one of my own, and I keep saying yes (retina display! investment? after the GST rebate, it's actually a bit cheaper than if I got it from a shop in the USA and a lot cheaper than if I waited for it to be available here) and then also no (I have other upcoming expenses to deal with! also I have the first gen one which I love to bits). Ehhh, it will all be moot if it's not in stock, so I don't know which way I'm hoping for *G*
So basically what I'm saying is it would be awesome if I could get one, and yet it would also be awesome if it weren't in stock because LESS CHOICES and that kind of thing. Stuff!
My dreams are weirdly vivid lately. Three nights ago, I was exploring a hotel which had a mystery within it. That dream sucked: I never got to the bottom of the mystery. On the other hand, I did manage to escape from a cult by walking across water? I... that almost balanced it out but that dream still sucked. Hmph. Two nights ago it was a chase one where I was shrunken down to bug-sized proportions, and I was being chased by police thugs also shrunk down to bug-size, but everyone around us was more or less normal sized. And we got into the *slowest* car chase ever because we were all stuck in traffic in our tiny bug-sized cars. And then I stumbled across an orgy, but it was all cool though, because in the end I got to do action movie leaps across roofs and that was almost like flying. I love it when my dreams involve flying <333 And last night was a bit sad: funeral of someone I was in a choir slash fashion agency with. Everyone's clothes were pretty though, and it all took place on a gorgeous island so I.... I guess something? I feel sad now :(
Ughhhh talking to a friend about RO reminded me of how soothing levelling up in RO used to be. RO was a total addiction of mine, to the point where I played even though I haaaated it and haaated the people and haaaated the time suck. I eventually ended up having to switch OSes to escape. (No seriously, the only way I stopped myself was to buy a laptop which didn't have WIndows on it -- and that's how I ended up with my first Mac).
I found out it's possible to run RO via Wine on a Mac, and I decided to give it one last go? Just get to the point where I had a decently high leveled character and run through my old hunting grounds once again. I ended up having to get rid of CrossOver which just silently crashes and went through several third-party Mac apps for Wine before I found one that actually worked. And then it turned out the RO installer I got was corrupted, heh, so had to redo that. And then after installing, the RO window would only show a black screen, so I installed XQuartz. And that got me as far as the login screen (with its familiar background music), but for some reason I couldn't get mouse focus on the window!
So now I've given up on it. (I hope).
Luckily I had much better luck recovering data from my hard drive. I found out that my backup and media hard drive had failed when it simply failed to show up in Finder >.o I started out completely unsure of what I was doing because hardware! data! anything you do is irreversible! But with lots of help from
alierak, pauamma, and geekosaur, I managed to wrangle the data from my failing hard drive to a new hard drive bit by bit.Some of the things I learned:
larger chunks can help -- going from the default 512b to 64kb cut down what would have taken eight and a half days to just 3.14 days.
As long as you don't accidentally reverse the input/output locations, and end up writing to the wrong place, dd is pretty non-scary. I mean, you can mess yourself up with it, but also it's possible to play around with it without you know, rocks falling and crushing your data irretrievably (it helped that there was nothing absolutely mission critical on the disk, like code or photos or other stuff that was my own creative output, so I could play around a bit).
Mac OS tries to be helpful in mounting the disk from /dev, and then also helpfully ejects the disk if it can't be mounted, which meant I had to figure out how to disable that mechanism. launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist was my friend. (And then I spent some time figuring out why I couldn't mount any disk images after that *ahaha*)
Perhaps hardware is not so scary? Ditto data.
A GRUMBLE: dd refers to the chunks as "blocks" in most of its documentation, but then for some reason says that it's input / output records. That messed me up because I couldn't figure out whether that always referred to blocks, or to other things.
I'm a bit wary because it failed at at 1.875 TB out of 2TB, after which it couldn't detect the device in /dev anymore, almost as if it got auto-ejected again, which was weird. But I did a spot check on the things that were really important to me have and as far as I can tell I got everything important? I dunno!
Also I am grateful for friends who will take care of me when I get myself good and caffeinated. You know who you are <3