Popular Culture

A New Talent

7 Comments

I just discovered this young woman yesterday. This was recorded nine years ago, when she was fourteen years old, and had only been playing for two years.

Here’s something more recent.

Her technique is amazing, using lots of harmonics, and hitting the strings with both hands. She doesn’t look it, and you wouldn’t know by her name, but she’s Swedish.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s another very nice piece. Note the percussive effect of hitting the string with the backs of her fingers. It’s nice to see a young woman playing songs written decades before she was born.

[Update late afternoon]

OK, one more. This is the one that I discovered her with. Just amazing guitar work, recorded a couple months ago. The strength and precision of her fingers is incredible.

Business, Space, Technology and Society

The First High-Altitude Starship Test

99 Comments

…coming this week.

Regardless of the outcome, it will be exciting.

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

It could be as soon as Friday.

[Bumped]

[Tuesday-morning update]

Today seems to be the day. It’s being covered by NASA Spaceflight.

[Bumped again]

[1440 PST update]

Raptor abort. They aren’t going partway to space today.

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Fuel is loading, T-26 minutes to launch.

[Bumped]

[Post-flight update]

Well, that was kind of spectacular. As I said, guaranteed to be exciting. The exhaust looked a little weird toward the end. It was greenish, as though it was maybe running fuel rich. If so, Perhaps the thrust wasn’t up to spec, and insufficient to control the landing on final.

[Update a while later]

Elon said that the header tank pressure was low on landing. I’m guessing that this maybe resulted in bubbles in the cooling channels, overheating of the nozzle, and injecting copper into the flow, for that green effect. And reduced thrust, of course, which is why they came in too fast.

[Update Thursday afternoon]

Am I the only person who thinks it would be pretty unpleasant to be in the nose of that thing at final (even with a successful landing)?

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Computer Problems, Continued

8 Comments

This post and comments were getting to be too much, so I’m starting a new one.

So when we last left our intrepid hero, he couldn’t reinstall grub because the shell wouldn’t talk to the Internet.

So I rebooted the live USB again, and after I did so, I could ping the net. So I went to this suggested page, and tried to do what it said, but his lsblk issues this tree:

Continue reading Computer Problems, Continued →
Administrative, Technology and Society, Weird

Computer Problem

56 Comments

I’m posting this from Patricia’s machine, because mine died in its sleep last night. When I got up, it had reset for some reason, and was ready to boot. But it wouldn’t. It just spins forever. I tried reverting to previous kernels, but still no joy. It even fails when booting to rescue it. Not sure how to even start to diagnose it. I could try booting her machine with it (very similar hardware), to see if it’s a software issue, but I’d have to figure out how to edit the fstab, because it overmounts a separate drive as /home, and her machine wouldn’t have it.

Anyway, fun times.

[Update a while later]

Definitely not a software problem; I tried booting it from the drive I use to boot my laptop, and the same issue. I looked at the hardware monitor in the BIOS, and not seeing any issues. The CPU temperature seems fine. And the CPU seems to be working well enough to get to the boot menu. I suspect it is a motherboard issue (though it could be memory). I should see if it will boot with memtest.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Per comments, in the BIOS setup, I am seeing all three drives (the SSD that the OS lives on, the hard drive that is /home, and the SSD that Windows lives on for the VM), 32G of RAM. All looks fine from that standpoint. Next step is to find a stick and put memtest on it.

[Update a while later]

OK, I’m posting this from the machine. It seemed to boot fine from a Fedora 33 live USB (i.e., it doesn’t seem to be a hardware problem). Now to figure out why it won’t boot from its own drive, or from the other Fedora drive I tried. Any diagnostic suggestions?

[Update a few minutes later]

So I ran fsck on /dev/sda (my system drive). It said there was a dirty bit set on the first partition, but other than that it found no problems. But it still won’t boot.

[Afternoon update]

So, using the instructions on this page, I tried reinstalling grub2. On the last command, I got this error message:

****************************************

[root@localhost-live /]

# grub2-install /dev/sda
Installing for i386-pc platform.
Unknown device “/dev/sda1”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda1”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda1”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda2”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda1”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda2”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda3”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda1”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda1”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda1”: No such device
Unknown device “/dev/sda1”: No such device
grub2-install: warning: ../grub-core/partmap/gpt.c:190:this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won’t be possible.
grub2-install: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
grub2-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.

************************************************************

[root@localhost-live /]

# ls /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1

So I don’t know why it’s having trouble knowing the device (sda1 is my boot partition). Any ideas?

[Update a few minutes later]

Wait a minute. Why is it installing for an i386 platform? This is a Ryzen. [Off looking up man on grub2-install]

Weird. It says the default platform is the one that the installer is running on. I’m pretty sure that this live USB is x86_64.

Here is the boot partition:

EFI grub2 mach_kernel System

[Update a while later]

OK, weirder and weirder. I’m following the instructions on this page (just the last one to reinstall grub and shim), but when I do the dnf, it times out getting to the repositories. And I can’t ping Google. Yet I’m able to web surf. Riddle me that, Batman.

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