It is long past time to retire the phrase.
Writing Versus Typing
I believe this, but I despise writing by hand with a white-hot passion.
[Saturday-morning update]
It’s worth noting that this topic is about taking notes, not writing per se.
Continuing Windows Problems
Decided to start a new post from the previous one.
I followed the instructions on how to create a Windows install drive to the letter, the files seems to have been copied cleanly, but the machine still refuses to recognize the drive as a bootable drive, after several attempts.
Now what?
[Friday-afternoon update]
I hadn’t realized that I hadn’t followed up on this, but I ended up giving up and just using Media Writer in Windows from the laptop. It went off without a hitch, except that her Windows installation wasn’t salvageable. That’s why I keep data on a different drive in both OSs. I just did a clean Windows install on the new 1T NVME that I’d installed on the motherboard (this all started when she was running out of room on the 250G SSD that Windows was running on). Anyway, all is well now.
Mars Is Earth’s Destiny
Boot-Drive Problem
I’m trying to create a bootable 32G stick from a new drive for a Windows 10 install, but for some reason neither GParted or fdisk will allow me to use more than 4M of it. ‘fdisk F’ won’t show the other 32G. Any ideas? I can’t even figure out how to wipe it to start with a clean drive.
Here’s what happens if I just want to wipe the drive:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4M iflag=nocache oflag=direct
dd: error writing ‘/dev/sdc’: No space left on device
2+0 records in
1+0 records out
4194304 bytes (4.2 MB, 4.0 MiB) copied, 0.00521806 s, 804 MB/s
IOW, it’s saying it’s writing 4M, and then it runs out of room, because it’s only seeing the first 4M.
WTF?
The problem is that I’m following the instructions here. But when I look at the disk, unlike his, which is showing the whole drive, I’m seeing that 4M of unallocated space (which isn’t actually a petition, according to fdisk) at the front, and I suspect that it’s why I can’t boot from it. And I can’t get rid of it (that is, allocate it to the rest of the drive).
[Update a while later]
I’ve tried most of the things suggested in comments, but now I’ve got a new problem. I did ignore the 4M segment, and copied the Windows boot files to the 31G partition, so in theory I have a Windows boot drive. In practice, though, the BIOS on the machine I want to repair with it refuses to see it (MSI board). Moreover, I did manage to boot into Fedora, and Nautilus in Fedora saw it, even though the BIOS doesn’t. But to top it off, Fedora is becoming unusable on the machine, freezing shortly after boot, or refusing to open any programs (including a terminal), which makes it an unuseful OS.
Other than that, things are going great.
[Update a while later]
So I restored defaults on the BIOS, and now it sees the drive. Unfortunately, when I tell it to boot from it, I get “No way, Jose.”
So I still don’t seem to have successfully created a Windows boot drive.
[Monday-morning update]
I’m now starting to wonder if I have hardware issues (in addition to the thumb-drive issue). I have an SSD that looks like it might have a Windows install on it, because I can see it on my machine (the problem is with Patricia’s, which has the same type of motherboard). But when I plug in into her machine, the BIOS refuses to see it. Furthermore, sometimes (and the most recent time in which I tried to look at it on her machine), the BIOS is unresponsive, or slow. The mouse is glitchy, and there are long (as in many seconds) delays between hitting keys and anything happening. Even furthermore, I’m having the Fedora problems described above.
I hate to replace the motherboard, both because of the cost and the PITA, but if a BIOS is flaky, not sure what else to do (other than maybe trying to flash it, which could be difficult if it’s refusing to see flash drives).
[Late-morning update]
I do see at the MSI site that there have been several BIOS updates since I bought the board, so maybe I should try that.
[Late-afternoon update]
Well, now I’m royally screwed. I’ve lost another computer, and am down to a single laptop.
Fedora had been going into a mode after I removed a flash drive from Nautilus of refusing to accept keystrokes, and there was nothing I could do to get it back except to reboot. I had successfully flashed the BIOS on Patricia’s machine, and decided to update my own. But when I tried it, unlike on Patricia’s machine, the flash wizard couldn’t see the update on the flash drive, so I had to abort. It still goes into the BIOS, and will boot Fedora, but now the login screen won’t accept keystrokes, so I can’t, you know, log in.
I know that there’s nothing wrong with the keyboard, because I’m using it right now, on the laptop.
[Tuesday-morning update]
So the keyboard works in the BIOS, and when it goes into grub, I can use the down arrows to select which kernel to boot. The problem arises when it boots into a login screen. I can select the user with the mouse, but when it comes up with the password box, it accepts no input from the keyboard. And it does this with more than one boot drive, so it’s not an installation issue. Something is happening during boot that makes it stop listening to the keyboard. I’d look at dmesg but, you know, no keyboard to ask to look at it.
I’m typing this from Patricia’s computer, which I booted from a Linux drive that I usually use on the laptop. The problem here is that it runs like molasses in an Arctic January, with long periods of non-responsiveness from any software I run, though over time this morning it’s gotten better. When I look at the system monitor, there is no process that’s using a lot of resources, so it’s a mystery why the machine is so slow.
[Bumped]
OK, a little progress. If I select rescue mode in grub, I keep the keyboard. I looked through the journal and saw lots of issues but none of them obviously related to this and apparently it’s something that doesn’t happen in rescue mode. I did modify fstab so that I can boot a different computer with it (normally, it mounts a separate drive to /home, so I can keep my data off the system drive). So I’m going to reboot this machine with it and see what happens.
[Afternoon update]
Bad news, and good news.
The bad news (at least in theory, if not practice) is that the Fedora drive from my machine won’t boot in her machine, despite the same motherboard, processor, etc. It just circles and never gets to a login screen. The reason it’s only bad in theory is that I had no plans to use it with her machine–it’s just concerning that I’m getting different behavior from the two machines.
The good news is that my machine has started to pay attention to the keyboard again, and I’m doing this update from it. Perhaps the process of going into the rescue mode straightened out whatever the issue was, but at least it’s functional again.
Now to try once again to build a Windows boot drive. I’m going to use a 60G SSD that has an old Fedora boot on it, which I won’t be using, so it’s safe to just wipe it clean and see if I can make it happen this time.
[Wednesday-morning update]
I had more keyboard issues yesterday, but I think I’ve resolved it. The keyboard and the USB port that I was using for the USB stick were sharing the same port on the motherboard, and it was probably causing a conflict. I moved the keyboard to a hub on a different port, and so far, so good. Now back to trying to create a Windows drive.
[Bumped]
World’s Fairs
Reflections from Lileks.
We went to New York in 1965 and Montreal in 1967. I remember on the way back from the latter we had to pull over and duck in a ditch for a tornado between Port Huron and Flint. New York had some things that later went to Disneyland, including the wretched “It’s A Small World.
I also went to Vancouver in the 80s, but don’t recall the year. I was particularly amused by the Romanian Pavilion (this was before the fall of the communists) that claimed they’d invented the airplane in 1906.
We’ve Lost Another Great One
Bill Anders has died, apparently piloting his own plane.
He was the astronaut who took the iconic photo of the whole Earth from the Moon on his trip around it on Apollo 8, which was the actual moment when we won the space race. And it became the icon for the environmental movement, for good or ill.
I consider myself privileged to consider him a friend, and I’ll explain why anon, but for now, farewell, yet another hero of that era, who (unlike many of his Apollo cohorts) understood how important commercial space was.
[Saturday-afternoon update]
I was at AIAA SciTech Forum in San Diego in 2016. Bill was speaking, discussing the history of Apollo, while standing under a huge Lockheed Martin banner (they were the primary sponsor of the event). He was talking about risk aversion and how it was holding us back in space, and how today’s NASA could not do Apollo in terms of the accepted (at that time) risk. In other words, echoing themes from my book.
But he also started to bash SLS and Orion, wondering out loud why we were building them (this was after SpaceX had started landing boosters, which happened in 2015). After his talk, I walked down to meet him, and gave him a copy of my book and a business card, and talked to him for a few minutes. As we were talking, Ann Sulkosky (who had replaced Jeff Bingham as chief staffer on the Senate Space subcommittee, and then gone on to become a flack at Lockmart) came running down with her hair on fire, saying “Bill, Bill! What are you doing?” It was hilarious, because obviously Bill had no copulations to give.
Anyway, a couple weeks later, he called me, and said “I got around to reading your book, and I couldn’t put it down.” We talked for half an hour or so.
Later, Alex McDonald at NASA got some money to do a study on safety and risk acceptance, much of which was based on my book, and gave a contract to Resources for the Future, a think tank in DC where Molly MacCauley worked, and she was put in charge of the study. There was a workshop at their place in Dupont Circle to which I was invited, along with fairly high-level people, including the chairman of the ASAP, Scott Pace, Jim Bennett, and some historians. She also invited Bill, who attended by phone (it was hard to get him to leave his home in the San Juan islands). We had a bad connection, and ultimately decided to give it up, but before he hung up, he said “I think that everyone should read Rand’s book.”
Tragically, Molly was murdered near her home in Baltimore a few months later, stabbed in the neck. Her dogs stayed with her, but she’d exsanguinated before she was found. No motive or murderer was ever found. When her co-workers tried to finish the report, they couldn’t find her files, so it was never published (a very frustrating thing, not just for the shocking loss of Molly, but the failure to spread the word on the problem of risk aversion beyond my book).
General Anders was one of the most accomplished of the former Apollo astronauts, and remained sharp (as far as I know) right up until the plane crash. I was honored to know him.
[Monday-morning update]
Bob Zimmerman remembers the astronaut who like to go fast.
[Bumped]
Institutional Racism
Why Caitlin Clark isn’t going to the Olympics (probably).
I’m going to not watch Olympic basketball just as hard regardless of whether or not she plays, but it’s an interesting moment.
[Update a few minutes later]
Link is fixed now, sorry.
From Cars To Star Wars
We’re not buying what they’re selling.
The average age of our two cars is seventeen years. I might buy something newer if my finances dramatically improved, but I’m also leery of all of the “features” in the newer cars. When I look at new car prices, I think about what I could do with the (2000) BMW if I put two or three thousand into it, especially given how new stick shifts are an endangered species.
I hope that SCOTUS will force a rollback of all the illegal mandates coming from Washington.
How To Fix Higher Ed
Yes, the notion that everyone should get a college degree has been tremendously destructive.