coolfactor blog

Earlier this year, my home file-and-everything-else server suffered a failure of both case fans which went unnoticed because it’s sitting in a hard to get to part of a cupboard and NetBSD doesn’t (yet) have drivers for the environmental monitoring hardware on the motherboard.

The constantly increased temperature in the case rapidly caused the failure of a head in the hard drive. Unfortunately, I only had a partial backup of the data so I was quite keen to recover as much as possible from the failed device.
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I’ve had a Canon PowerShot S60 for several years now, but earlier this year it started exhibiting a purple banding across the top of images. It gradually got worse and worse until the banding was across enough of the picture to screw up the auto-exposure. The width of the purple band depended on what the camera was doing, and made me suspect a power supply / decoupling issue.
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I recently rearranged the furniture in my home work area in order to make better use of space, and, because I fancied a change.

When I have done this kind of thing in the past, I have used a simple vector drawing program to draw simple objects in plan form, and drag them around the room until I find an arrangement which works. This is OK, and much better than just moving furniture and hoping it will fit, but nowadays, my friends at TheCharmingBenchCompany.com hipped me to a better way.
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After the best part of 10 years with a holding page, there’s now a site up at www.coolfactor.org.

That is all.

A couple of years ago I had a good go at getting my Sony Ericsson phone to talk to my IMAP server over SSL. That much worked (although the IMAP client doesn’t support folders so I had to do a bit of a bodge with multiple user accounts and symlinks in cyrus to get at important folders) but I could never get authenticated SMTP over TLS to work.

Today I cracked it.
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