Venting pipe for the tumble dryer

About six months ago our old faithful condenser tumble dryer broke down after 16 years of service. We opted for a new dryer without condenser option as in general they are cheaper and dry better. As it was winter we didn't bother with fitting a vent on the roof, we just hung the sleeve out of the window and when it got really cold we used an indoor condensor kit (one word of advice: avoid).
Anyway, last week we finally got round to doing it right thanks to the help of Freek who volunteered for the job.Before I was able to think about getting my camera ready, Freek had climbed out of the dormer window and started handing me roof tiles. It was a bit of a puzzle to work out the place of the hole. It's not so easy as there is something like 30 centimeters of space between the tiles and the inside of the roof. We opted for working from the outside, although most instructions tell you to work from the inside. In our case we thought it was better because you can plan the outside hole to perfectly fit under the special tile-with-a-hole and then drill through there to make a hole to the inside (one of the other reasons we did it this way was because I don't have a 30 cm drill...)Here Freek is making things fit on the inside. When both holes were ready we could push the pipe through and make some (small) adjustments so that it would be completely vertical. Time for some coffee and and smoke (for Freek) and to take a look from the outside. You can just about see the pipe peeping through.That was the most difficult work done. Just before closing up I saw this view from the inside and told Freek to hold it there for a few more seconds.He was not wearing his shades to look 'cool' but to avoid getting dirt in his eyes. Anyway, then it was time to put the special roof tile in place, put the cap on the pipe and start replacing the rest of the roof tiles (with directions from Daniel who was looking up from the garden).This is what it looks like from the inside. It would have been nice if the pipe was 10 cm longer, it juuust about fit.And finally the completed look from the outside. Thanks again Freek!

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Mingle² - Online Dating

Daniel has passed his finals!

The phonecall just came in: he has passed his final HAVO exams.
Here he is, ready to dig in :)

Windmill day

Today was dutch 'national windmill day'. We have a number of mills in our neighbourhood, one (called very unpoetic 'Molen C') which was burned down over two years ago.
Last year the rebuilding was started, a few weeks ago the thatchers finished covering the last bits and today a big milestone was reached by placing the top.

We start with how it looked two weeks ago, with the thatchers still at work (a picture I took early in the morning, on my way to work).


This was the view when we arrived this morning. There was some delay as the spindle hadn't arrived yet.


The spindle was just delivered as we approached, here it is going up.


Without the slightest hint of 'effort' the spindle was placed in one go.


Added into the mix: some kind of gear thinghy to be put on top of the spindle (actually, that thinghy is about man-size!)

'The man on the top' stands at the ready as the crane-guys figure some things out.

Cables are attached.

Wow! There it goes.

Despite the strong winds today (probably the best kind of weather for windmill-day) the top went up without a hitch. Here it is hovering just above the mill.

Time to leave the builders to do the last adjustments. I hope I can be present when the 'wings' are placed.

Girls sleepover birthday party

We're recovering from the sleepover party that Merel had yesterday (she turned 15 two weeks ago). Four girls watching movies, eating sweets and talking non-stop...
Now just trying to think of the good things:

A winning photo!

No, I did not win a big prize or anything, just the honour. Our department (IT) went to Artis a few weeks ago with the assignment to make pictures on the subject 'animals and motion', everyone cound 'send in' three photo's and then choose the best ones (but not your own).
Of course the most important part of the afternoon (and evening) was to have fun and enjoy ourselves, but as there was serious competition of 'guys with big cameras' I did my best to come up with something good. I think the drinking monkey came out nice (also thanks to the nice sunny weather and some patience).
I had to share the first prize with Astrid, who also used a relativly simple camera. That picture is here.

Now my back would like some rest

The paving of the terrace at the back of our house was very much in need of 'straightening out'. It has been lying there for over 15 years without much overhauls. Last year (actually a year and a half ago) we removed the small shed ajacent to the kitchen to make place for new window-frames all around our house (and sliding doors from our livingroom to the terrace). I never did a proper job of the paving near the backdoor and the rest (as I said before) was in need of a big overhaul. So, up and down with the 40x60 cm stones I go. But in the end, it's the result that counts:
Notice the nice brickwork on the fence at the back. No doubt this needs repair more sooner than later! How about a view from the other side I hear you say:
Notice how nice the parasol-foot is embedded in the paving :-) (click on the pictures to see a bigger size).

Now this was finished I water-cleaned the wooden tiles (it was a nice warm day so it was a good opportunity to the get the garden hose out of the shed!) and placed them. Like so:
And finally, a view to the back of the garden to show the disappeared path on the right (obviously you can't see it because it is removed) and the 'new' playfully placed stepping-stone-path. I filled up the old path with the pieces of grass that made way for the stepping stones and some pieces of border that had to be cut anyway.

Damn Small Linux

Good, small image (50MB). So I fired up the laptop again. Had troubles booting, at first I suspected the pcmcia (so booted with 'dsl nopcmcia') which got me further but would hang eventually. So I tried to boot with 'lowram' which did the trick. As by now I suspected the laptop is 'old' I choose the 'Xfbdev' option for the 'X setup'. After this there are the usual questions about mouse and keyboard and then I get the message 'modprobe: Can't locate module fb0' (and the startup aborts there). It looks like the setup wants to start X but can't. Anyway, by now I changed to manual install: startup with 'failsafe' and then follow the script on the DSL wiki. This works like a charm and after this my X display WILL start.
Resolution is good, pcmcia card is detected, Firefox works: it looks like I'm in business :-)

Tried another Linux distro

As the old Toshiba Tecra8000 laptop was/is doing nothing anyway I thought why not.
I downloaded the 'Debian 3.1 R5 network install' cd and fired it up (it's the easiest way as the iso is something like 100MB and therefore fits on a rewritable, everything else will be downloaded at request; the website has something like 14 iso's for this release and I have no intention to find out which ones I would need). I chose the 'put everything in one partition' option because the laptop has a small 6.5 GB disk and there will be a lot of stuff to download (to be honest, this installation is the second try so I knew what was coming: during install of the downloaded stuff the 1.9GB partition was full).
Installation of the base system went smoothly enough and after the first reboot even my PCMCIA network card was recognised without missing a beat. The system started to download some necessities and then asks for the kind of software: 'desktop' looks about right and downloading continues for a few hundred MB's (still a lot better then any couple of iso's).
After doing some shopping I came back to find the system waiting for my okay for using the 'vesa' driver for it's X server (it sounded familiar so what the heck). Mouse detection is no problem and then the system asks all kinds of stuff about the display. Fortunately, I had found that out before. After that there is more unpacking going on (the harddrive is purring for about an hour). Finally it's ready, the screen becomes a blur and it's the 'fingers crossed' moment while I wait for the login prompt of the graphical interface. It works and I get the familiar looking desktop. So far so good, but exploring the system will have to wait until I have nothing better to do.

Old fashioned tape recorders anyone?

I thought I finally would get round to dusting off some old reel-to-reel tapes and transfer my 80's music noodlings to cd, but noooooo! Both my taperecorders are on the fritz and it looks like there won't be an easy way to fix them.
Yesterday I transferred some of the stuff (I did some quick and rough mix-downs to pc) I have on cassettes for my faithful Tascam Portastudio 244 (at least that one still works after 20+ years) but it's only a fraction of everything I ever did. Fortunately I have copies (or I should have copies) of all my stuff on cassette and I want to start tranferring those (I have not heard this stuff in YEARS) but unfortunately that's an extra tape generation that I could do without.

Nice trip home yesterday

I really shouldn't have travelled to work as there were warnings all over the news that there was going to be a big fat storm yesterday. But because I thought (like a lot of people) that it wouldn't be as big a deal as it was going to be I hopped on my bike towards the train station thinking to myself that there was almost no wind at all. Getting of the bus at work I understood the storm was picking up after all: using an umbrella was useless and a waste of the umbrella.
During the day there was more and more news about falling trees, cranes and of buildings losing bits and pieces. At about three o'clock (too late) I decided that it would be wise to try to get home if I wanted to get home today. The first part of the journey was an indication of things afoot: the bus had a flat tire at the first stop so I decided to walk a bit. After a few hundred meters I saw a bus from another line and quickly hopped on that one to take me to the train station. So far so good, but the crowd of people outside the Haarlem central station told me that there was no good news: and indeed no trains would be going anymore.
A quick decision was needed and as the prediction was that the wind would still be picking up at end of the day I decided on a bus as they were still in operation. Of course there was a ridiculously high number of people for the few busses that were just going their normal route (I never saw a sign of the NS having some sort of plan to utilise busses which is normal procedure if the trains are out of service). I was lucky to stand at the right place at the bus stop and get in the bus using the back door which is otherwise forbidden but the driver was okay with it. So we travelled packed like sardines and safely arrived at Beverwijk Station where we would be able to take the next normally scheduled bus to Alkmaar. At the station there was (as expected) still no sign of NS busses so we waited for the bus to Alkmaar, which arrived but the driver stopped his bus halfway the stop so that the last people to arrive were first in line to get in! This driver also took care to close the back door and to check everyone's tickets (in his words: "I don't drive for the NS"). Anyway, again I was lucky to get in and enjoy the touristic route this bus takes. When we got close to Heiloo I was even able to sit down until we reached Alkmaar station. At the last phase of this journey there was talk that trains would be resuming service after 18:00 hours but it seemed unlikely to me (I was proven right). There was a bus about to leave that would take me to Alkmaar Noord station and after a short and fast ride on my bike (with the wind in my back, making record time) I was, finally, home. All things considered the journey was still reasonably okay, looking at the news with people that got stranded at Amsterdam Central station.

Happy holidays wishes

Best wishes back to everyone!

New teeth

Today, our daughter was finally released from her brackets...









After removing this...





And some extensive polishing...











Here is the result :-)

What is it with this year's Christmas?

I just ordered my third not-to-be-missed Christmas cd. All of them by artists that are special to me. First there was Aimee Mann's 'One More Drifter In The Snow' album which I thought for a long time would be the only one.
Then suddenly there is news from Pugwash who are suppporting a good cause (fighting Epilepsy) along the way. Download or buy Tinsel and Marzipan today! I included their Jolity album in my order to save on shipping costs :-)
And inbetween these there was unexpected news from The Nines. Suddenly there's their Winter Snow and Icicles EP.

Rediscovering Snakefinger

Thanks to a kind person who posted some Snakefinger albums on Usenet I am now very much enjoying some old stuff like the Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers albums that I have never heard until now. Great stuff, some is a bit like Brinsley Schwarz (a 'pub rock' band that I know a bit longer), some is C&W and other songs remind me of Steely Dan.
Funny thing is, this puts his carreer in a whole new perspective for me. Cool: I can revisit all his albums and listen to it from a new perspective :-)

Broken DVD file

From PLG I downloaded a music DVD that 'everyone' is having troubles with. It looks like there's 'something' wrong with the second VOB file and I thought that I had it fixed (using a tool called 'super') but when I came round to burning it turned out the repair was also borken.
So yesterday I wasted some time trying to find out what is wrong with the file but got nowhere. I can split audio and video but I can't put it back together because the file seems to be wrong somewhere, although it looks okay enough in PowerDVD.

Disaster recovery tested, but not planned.

Last saturday I was updating our Sun servers with some patches when one of them gave an error after a reboot and didn't come up anymore. There was a problem with the database that defines how the disk mirrors are configured, but it took me a while to find that out. I'll keep this short and say that I now have a lot more experience with booting from cd, repairing filesystems and software mirroring (I had to build a new database from scratch). Obviously this took way too long for one person who is learning along the way so we decided to switch the application that used a database on the faulty server over to the shadow database on our 'disaster recovery' server which is located in a different city. Monday I got the server back on it's feet, tuesday we moved the database back to the server and tuesday evening we switched the users back. Wednesday everything was running smooth again.
So, we can cross the disaster recovery test off our list for this year: it worked!

Nice start of an otherwise dull Friday

Yesterday evening the part of the city where I work lost power for two hours. So when I got in this morning some servers were down and others were up but not functioning correctly (to be fair, a big numer of systems were up and running with no problem). The main problem is that the order in which some systems are started is important and that order is not taken into account when the power comes back on.

Update xubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10

This seems to be quite an adventure. It's lovely to play with on a laptop that's only used to play around with, I'm glad I don't really need it for work.
The Edgy Eft distribution (6.10) needs special treatment for the update that I found here.
I did that and apart from some annoying things (like a question that is asked after I thought finally I could go downstairs to whatch some tv) it probably went smoothly enough, although it took all evening to complete. That is, I think it was completed as I had only a desktop to look at with no activity so I switched it off for the night.
I quickly found out that the wireless stuff needs some more tweaking as something with the ndiswrapper package is changed or something like that. When starting up the Synaptic Package Manager I got an error message, luckily with the needed commandline (dpkg --configure -a). It looks like a lot of stuff needs to be configured first, or maybe it was not done yesterday because I shut down the laptop.
Okay, the package manager works after the configuration. After some searching I found this document that indicates I have to re-do some work, which turned out to be correct. What I did was:
- selected ndiswrapper-utils-1.8 in the package manager and install that
- sudo rm /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper (a shell script)
- sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper-1.8 /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper
- sudo modprobe ndiswrapper (wheee! success!!)
The wireless card is recognized and the NetworkManager Applet even asks for a keyring password to be saved. Of course I am scepical so I rebooted and waited for the loadndiswrapper error during boot... it did not appear! I also don't have to re-insert the card, however I do have to enter the network name and password (in fact I have to enter the password twice now, once for the applet and once for the keyring thinghy).

Nod32 to the rescue

Not proud to mention it, but our daughter caught a variant of the Troj/Zlob-QK Trojan. This was not caught by the free-AVG scanner. We installed Nod32 and easily got rid of the rubbish.