Misery and a DLT7000

I had a really weird couple of days. Just felt really down, angry and miserable at everything and everyone. Not sure what caused it. Hence the cheerful, welcoming message I posted yesterday. I didn't feel better until I got home today. Not even a spectacular pork, stuffing and apple sauce bap from the decent sandwich shop at lunchtime today cheered me up. Work wasn't exactly fun today either, with a cretinous A0 plotter causing no end of hassle. The damn thing is 10 years old and causes so many problems.

However I did get hold of a DLT7000, which I had ordered before the Discovery fiasco. This probably sounds exciting, and brings to mind the BFG9000 from Doom. Surely this must be some kind of intriguing weapon! But sadly the truth is much more mundane. It's an old Quantum tape drive I installed into my Linux box for backups, and so is rather dull. It could possibly be modified into a lethal weapon though, after all the cartridges contain several hundred feet of tape which pass through the mechanism at some ridiculous speed, perhaps some sort of tape lasso gun could be made from it.

Truth be told, I don't know how reliable it'll be, the drive is several years old and appears to have been taken out of an old Compaq server. The idea is that the Linux box shares a 160gb hard drive over the network and stuff to be backed up is copied to it. This is then dumped to tape. Each tape can hold 35gb data, or 70gb compressed. Unfortunately it looks like the compression doesn't really work if the data is already compressed and since a lot of it is JPGs and MP3s, it doesn't all fit on one tape. The DLT standard is pretty much obsolete now, replaced by the newer LTO drives. These are expensive, but can hold 400gb of data, or 800gb compressed - the next generation which is out soon will hold 800gb per tape, and 1.6tb compressed.

The fun part is that the drive can be controlled entirely from a Linux shell which means it can be scripted. Well, it's fun if you like that sort of thing, fortunately I am a hapless geek so I do.

Also played Wii Sports and got my tennis skill level up again. My Wii fitness level is now 28, not great as I once had it down to 23.

My ever faithful first generation iPod Shuffle went stupid. I filled it up last night with fresh music and left it to charge. However when I turned it on, it just flashed it's orange and green lights. Worrying as sometimes this indicates a terminal problem. But when I plugged it in again this evening, it just came up as empty for some gimpy reason. Hope it's not on the way out - can't afford to get a replacement right now and I depend upon it for music in the car.