Tag: technology

The hard drive case

Our neighbors are moving back to Canada, and in a box of old computer junk I offered to make go away, there were a couple of external drives. Wayne wasn’t sure if they had data on them. I offered to find out, if possible, and sanitize them.

The smaller had a long-deprecated Mini-AB USB port. It’s been a while since I had a cable that would fit the early-2000s USB port, so I pulled out the 2.5″ 160 GB drive, clamped it in the vice, and gave it a couple of smacks with a hammer. Ta.

The other was a monster by comparison, a 5.25″ drive manufactured in 2003 with a capacity of (drum roll, please) 5 GB! It looked like an old Apple Firewire connection–again, nothing like that lying around. I was unable or unwilling to completely disassemble the hard drive assembly, so I drilled a few holes through the drive. Ta.

The case was an aluminum wonder which I planned to recycle, but after mentioning to a couple of people that you could probably run over it with a car without hurting it, I knew what I had to do.

Yup.

That would have been a very well protected 5 GB of data!

Retiring an old hard drive

I didn’t remember when I bought this hard drive (I thought 2004). It was an HP product with an unalterable HP partition, designed for Windows backups. Which I probably never used it for. That was a bother, but even more of a bother was my trying to overwrite the disk so I could give it away. My command-line Linux magic simply rendered it unusable, unmountable, impossible to format in Linux or MacOS.

So, impossible to erase. All my data still on there.

However, that raises a question:

Short answer: That being said, if you just want a quick rule of thumb for how long you can expect the hard drive in your laptop should last, we’d say you should be prepared for disk failure after three years of use. source

Of course, this was not in constant use. But, at 13 years and four months, it is now retired. And my data safe.

We had less memory then

Though we’ve had Mac Minis for almost ten years, I only today discovered they have a slot for an SDXC memory card. I have some of those somewhere, I thought.

Yikes! 16 megabytes? That must be from our first digital camera 20 years ago. Each would hold exactly three photos now at 10 megapixels.

I was reminded of the 128 megabyte flash drive I ran across recently.

Not really sure why I hang on to these things.

Deadphones

I don’t use them often, and it’s been a while, but when I tried to listen to music with these noise-cancelling JVC headphones, there was sound only on the left. I tried three different devices, sent an email, received a reply with a toll-free number, called it and described the problem.

Sold in 2005, they are now a “legacy” product, and JVC doesn’t repair headphones anyway, they replace them if necessary. So there.

They won’t be replacing these. I bought them in April 2019 at the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama.

For $3. They were great.

Until they weren’t.

A little geekiness

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know that occasionally it changes appearance. That’s because I change WordPress “themes,” the templates that determine how everything displays. Many themes don’t allow full-size photos. In my last change, I found one that did. So I was thrilled…

…OK, stop right there. Today I notice that this theme has decided to replace my changing Uruguay header pictures with a black and white photo of mountains with snow, of which Uruguay has neither. How the hell did that happen? Actually, I kind of like the irony. I think I’ll leave it for a while.*

But this theme had something I didn’t like: when I wanted to make something italic, the theme displayed it as bold italic.

So for weeks my daily to-do list has had a reminder to fix it.

But how? I went to the theme developer’s site to find a helpful forum, only to find that the theme hasn’t been updated in two years. Bad news. Kind of on my own.

I downloaded the theme’s stylesheet. Nothing amiss there: the <em> and <i> tags were probably mapped to italic. So what next? I looked at the source code of a blog entry, downloaded the header.php file, and there it was!

html code

OK, not exactly in-your-face obvious. But in line 36, the theme is calling for Google web fonts, and font Open Sans italic is only specified as 700 weight, which as you know — because doesn’t everyone work with Google web fonts every day? — is bold. So I got the correct “call” code from Google fonts, created a “child” theme in WordPress, and inserted the “correct” code in the header.php file there, which overrules the original (without the risk of your changes being wiped out with a theme update, even though that seems unlikely after two years).

And it works!

I still have no idea how header.php was invoked by my blog posts, but perhaps that’s because…well, I did look into PHP programming at one point and essentially decided life is too short.

I’ll leave it at that.

 

* No doubt it has to do with my messing around with code I don’t understand.