Point Element

Well, since these days the only thing I do with my home laptop is watch a shitload of movies and TV Shows, I don't have anything to share about my adventures right now. But in my office work, I'm facing much adventures. So this is a story about that. I am an embedded programmer these days. Yeah, it is a far cry from the server to desktop coder I worked as few years back. But I want to stick around in my current company and besides it pays the bills ( and EMIs and few shouks that I have). Anyway so I was given a task to run the embedded C code on Desktop and that also on Windows. Now we have an allegory - windows means Visual Studio. So because of this I have a VS2012 install lying about on my Windows partition of office laptop. So I created a branch of the main embedded code. And then created a project in VS2012, and imported existing files. And start compiling... It was really frustrating. On first compile I got roughly 3000 errors. By next day I had fixed almost all the issue...

We - me and my family - wife, brother in law and Sister, went for an outing couple of days back. It was great, nice sunny weather, empty roads and riding the scooters, it was awesome. We hit a snag on a village road - one of the scooters got a puncture. We got out the toolkit but we were not much helpful with it. Thankfully couple of villagers helped us. The problem is the scooter wheel has four nut-bolts holding the wheel to the drum with size 14 bolts. The drum is held to the main shaft with a size 24 bolt. What happpened was the toolkit had only size 14 spanner. So we got on work on the four bolts. Turns out couple of the bolts are made of low-quality soft metal, and the spanner slipped twisting the edges and the wheel could not come off. We did not have size 24 spanner, so we took the other scooter and got a mechanic from 10km away, he had the tools, and soon we had the scooter running. Lesson learned - keep extra spanners - proper round type - flat spanners suck. And bolts are shi...

I have told you in my last post that the 320GB old HDD failed to handle the works. Now today I was looking for some other solution. And I thought of swap file. Upon searching the internet I got to this solution. So accordingly I created a 1G .swap file on the external HDD. Then using mkswap utility I formatted it to swap, and later using swapon utility mounted it as swap. After this I checked the system opening multiple programs and testing the swapfile usage. As of now I could open GMail and GDocs both in Firefox and the laptop has been smooth sailing so far. I know it cannot handle a lot of load. But for me this was the last use case. And I'm happy that its working with whatever limitations. So that's all. This old Acer laptop does have some life in it yet.

So like I mentioned in last post, I did find the old external HDD. And I installed Ubuntu Mate on it.  Hmm. Didn't work out. The drive threw too many read errors. Screwed!!!  Guess no google docs for me. 

As I said in last post, after dithering for a while I got a USB hub. Got it from a local retailer here for 400/- rupees. So now I can do much more with the dying Acer laptop. The hub itself is minimal affair. What I hate about it are 2 things - 1. it's packing was real shitty affair - no clear lines saying where to cut to get the thing out 2. the hub has flat wire which leads to the USB port - I don't have much confidence in it. Lets see how far it goes. Anyway now that I had the hub I could connect the external mouse, my portable HDD and my phone simultaniously I thought of trying to find a light distro which could let me use the 1GB RAM best.  Enter Puppy Tahr - Puppy Linux is great little distro, and Puppy Tahr is based off Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS's packages, which means best of both worlds - Firefox and VLC.  Thing is Firefox with couple of Google Docs tabs still kills my 1GB RAM, which in Live USB mode isn't backed by any SWAP memory. Unfortunately I don't have any ...

This is my first laptop which I bought way back in Aug-2010. Thats about seven years now - and over the years it's catastrofically failed twice. Once about three years back it's mainboard died, I got it replaced for about 8000/-. And found out the power brick was dead too. Ok. Another 800/- bucks got me a non-brand Adapter. OK. It worked for a year since, and then one sunny day died again. I bought a Lenovo G405S for about 19000/- rupees and didn't bother to get this one fixed. It stayed in a box up with some junk for a while. A fortnight ago I got the other laptop - a Lenovo G480 which my sister uses now exclusively - repaired for 2200/- because I managed to get it wet and fried.  So I decided to see if I can get this old Acer Junk repaired. Gave it to the Repair center - the guy quoted 1800/- Rs, I okayed. Got it yesterday, also got an original Acer Adapter for 1550/- Rs too. Don't want to take another chance with no-brand junk. So the laptop is now repaired. Got it h...