Technology and Society

Piano Problem

8 Comments

We have an older-model electronic Yamaha piano. While I had the living-room wall open for various wire run, I decided to run an RCA cable from the piano location to our home-theater receiver, so we could hear the piano output in the home-theater speakers, instead of the built-in ones.

Lo and behold, though, when I plugged it into the headphone jack on the instrument, there was a distinct delay between hitting the key and hearing the sound, which makes it difficult to play. Why would there be any latency? This seems like it would be a problem using headphones with it as well. It seems like the only solution may be hack into the thing, to tap the speaker wires directly, and match the impedance somehow, maybe with transformers.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Disk Disaster Update

8 Comments

So I got the estimate from the recovery company.

The good news: They can recover the files.

The bad news: There will be no directory tree or filenames, just numbered files with extensions.

The worse news: They want a minimum of $1700. That’s if I’m willing to wait weeks. More if I want it sooner, up to five grand$2700.

So have to find another solution. I could probably live without the file names, given that I’m primarily looking for mailboxes, and the virtual Windows machine file.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

VirtualBox Issues

15 Comments

While I’m waiting to get my disk repaired, I’m trying to get Windows running again as a guest in the machine using VirtualBox. It was working fine until the disk disaster. I have a Windows installation on an SSD, in SATA port 2. But when I try to start the machine, it says no bootable source found. I’d like to tell it /dev/sdc, but there is no way to do so. The manual only talks about pointing to an img file on the host’s hard drive, but not about how to use a physical device (though one would think telling it port 2 would be adequate). This seems like a different procedure than it used to be, when I would have a configuration file telling it where the boot drive was. Has that changed?

[Thursday-afternoon update]

I’m still hoping that my drive will be restored, and that when it does, my virtual Windows installation will work as well, but I’m trying to figure out how to get Windows going in the meantime, because I need it to trade (I’m currently using Patricia’s computer, but she needs it, too). So I thought I’d just install a new machine. Problem is, I don’t have my product key, because it was also in a document on the lost drive. Even though I’ve restored from my notebook from October, and it should be there, I can’t find it. All of the advice I see on line to recover a key requires having the drive that Windows is installed on, so I’m out of luck for that. Do I have any alternative to purchasing another license?

[Bumped]

Administrative, Technology and Society

OK, New Problem

25 Comments

I’m going to take the drive to a recovery service in Studio City this afternoon to get an estimate. Meanwhile, I want to boot back into my regular OS, but I doubt if I can do it without sdb1, because the fstab specifies that it overmount /home at boot. So I either have to set up one of the other drives as /home (not sure how to do that, other than mounting it and adding myself as a user) and make it sdb1, or get into the fstab on the SSD to tell it not to do the overmount. I haven’t been able to figure out how to read or write to sda3, which is my Fedora partition, to get at etc/fstab. Any ideas?

[Update a while later]

OK, I’m now booted into my regular system, with one of the new drives as /home. But since I currently have no data, there’s a lot of rebuilding and reconfiguring to do.

Off to Studio City now to drop off the drives.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!