Ridiculous bug in Photoshop (CS4). If you try to load a batch script, the default location appears to be Desktop, and if you happen to have an alias to a server volume there which you’re not currently connected to (e.g. networking’s off or you’re not at the office etc.) it has a completely modal dialogue box with no cancel button or option to change location, which halts everything and just comes up every thirty seconds or so saying this server can’t be connected to. The only solution seems to be to force-quit and move your server volume aliases. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to go back to pre-CS Photoshop and never return. Lower processor temperatures too . . . I have no idea whether it persists in later Photoshops and I don’t plan to submit to a licensing scheme to find out. So I’m using the GIMP for the purpose.

Bang

Some time ago I needed a new soldering iron. And a heat gun would be handy, but I had little cash spare. Soldering stations with temperature readouts seem to be the thing now, and I can see the attraction. My interim solution was a WEP 852D⁺ 2-in-1 iron / heat gun. (Which may be a rebranded something else, not sure.) I prefer a more modular approach to tools, but, well. Worst case, I thought, it would do as a heat gun with a fallback iron, and I’d pick up a primary soldering station at some point. Initially, all was well, and I’ve been doing a few essential jobs with it while life beyond electronics gets sorted.

A few weeks ago during my last bout of repairs, the soldering iron handle began to loosen every time it warmed up, eventually falling apart in the hand in the middle of a job. Lacking time to do anything about this, the only immediate solution was to tighten it manually.

[...]

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an experience of recovery from Postgresql database files

Ooh weirdness.

I had a significant drive failure a few weeks ago during backup, which managed to take out both the source and destination drives. OK I should be rotating backups to avoid this problem, check that for the future. Amongst the files was the most-recent-state postgres, and this is tricky. I could have restored from the last dump, but thanks to a months-long bout of illness this was a bit behind.

I managed to recover basically everything else by dint of some older recovery software on an older machine, but as I suspected, just switching the recovered postgres data folder to the new installation didn’t work. Part of which might be that the recovery software writes all its recovered files under ownership of ‘privoxy’ rather than the original owners . . . perhaps on the basis that you won’t know how to chown, not sure. Or perhaps because the original owners might not be present on the new system, fair enough. Maybe that’s enough to prevent postgres starting with the old folder (even with a few configuration tweaks).

So instead I cloned the whole drive . . . slightly overkill for 100-odd MB of database gunk, but hopefully simpler than either figuring it out or trying to reconstruct manually — and I think the latter would be easier of those two. This isn’t really critical data, just a convenience thing. But it took several hours.

The particular implementation of postgres here is Bitnami’s MAPPstack, and this makes one particular option attractive — to run the whole thing again from the cloned drive (which would include the data files), do a dump, and restore to the new installation. Will it work?

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OhhhhhFFs. Oafs. What happened to Firefox? Not surprising its market share has crumbled away, there’s so much wrong with it since about version 18 (or 5?) . . . seems now there is no longer any option to really set the default encoding recognition to UTF-8, which means FF can’t be made to work as a convenient tool to view plain page fragments any more — unless you’re a Windows-using American, addressing only that part of the domestic Anglo audience which has never had any exposure to either traditional typography or emoticons, to take two examples. How many of that remainder can even read ASCII I couldn’t say, but that’s the market segment Mozilla are catering to here.

Apparently this default is now set in Gecko, and so can’t be changed in FF about:config. You could recompile it, presumably, if you really wanted to. Oh, and adding a BOM doesn’t trigger recognition, and the menu option retains the UTF-8 setting on reload even though the display is mojibake — not interpreted as requested. And changing locale doesn’t make any difference.

Seriously, Mozilla, if you don’t want people to be able to view fragments and text files, don’t allow FF to open anything without an HTML header. Then your project can just die off quietly and you can all go home and find something useful to do.  <angry dinosaur emoticon placeholder>

Some tubes from a newly arrived vintage radio, out for cleaning . . . for about the first time since it was manufactured. Aren’t they shiny? The story with these is the strange and wonderful alliance of thermionic valve technology and the Internet.

This set is a little over fifty years old. (And I suspect there are people out there who could identify it from the tubes alone.) One of the same model used to live in my parents’ house, humming away happily for nearly twenty-five years, until one day in the late eighties they said it had stopped working and would I look at it.

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(Or closer-to.)

Since I last wrote on this topic I’ve been living uncomfortably with my fourth Apple MagSafe PSU in a temporary-repair state; and many other things have been getting in the way, some of which have been much more interesting than fixing old PSUs. But recently the (now, what, 18-month-old?) cable on Nº4 has shown additional signs of deterioration, requiring further bandaging. Won’t last long. So on to a full refurbishment of Nº2, which (including previous emergency repair) looks like this:

As the migrant plasticiser had almost completely evaporated when I took photos last year, there is no significant further deterioration, though a few flakes of sheath have fallen off. The plan was:

“3. Whether or not (2) is successful, open up Nº2 and replace the whole cable. I did look for something similar in the way of coaxial cable last year, unsuccessfully. But I suspect this isn’t necessary; it’s just a DC power supply. Ordinary 2-core flex should do — though all things considered I think I’ll opt for heat-resistant. Ideally this should include putting a socket in the adaptor, so the cable can be replaced if need be. This will probably not look very elegant . . . but nor does it in its existing state.”

So, to work. Start with cutting.

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