Tales from Tammela

I’ve pretty much settled on Android as far as mobile devices goes. One thing that bugs me about most Android devices is all the bloatware manufacturers put on them. They’re either annoying to get rid of or impossible to uninstall without rooting one’s device. I’ve just cleared the data, uninstalled updates and disabled unwanted apps that cannot be uninstalled.

It would appear that someone at Nvidia/openSUSE realised that the latest driver release was broken. The drivers in the repository have been reverted to a previous version. My main desktop is operational again with these drivers, although with an rpm database that is missing many installed packages. The box that I had already upgraded to openSUSE 13.1 is now running the open source Nouveau driver.

Earlier this week, openSUSE released new driver packages for Nvidia GPUs. These new drivers are causing massive instability on my main desktop. Old packages aren’t available, so I’m rather stuck at the moment. Oh well, having several computers is neat sometimes.

I’ve started using an Android app for updating this blog. Well, the app is rather neat, but so is the web interface. The mobile app is however more suited for use with mobile devices. I do prefer the desktop experience.

Today is Independence Day in Finland. I do find it quite bizarre that people celebrate being slaves in a tax farm. Oh well, humans are not exactly rational beings.

As it happens, the Finnish state subsidises all legal costs of the poor. Well, while the intention might be that the poor could defend themselves, the result is that the poor can frivolously sue others. This is just another example of state intervention causing an unintended consequence.

A rather significant website, eroakirkosta.fi, I and a few other people run turned 10 years old yesterday. In retrospect, one rarely sees how one’s actions have changed society. Some 380,000 Finns have resigned from the Finnish state churches by using eroakirkosta.fi during its first decade. It would appear that it is only a matter of time until the status of the Finnish state churches has degraded to the point that Finland turns into a secular state. Eroakirkosta.fi will have made itself unnecessary at that point.

SUSE Suomi had an event in Tampere on the 20th. There was plenty of interesting information on enterprisey solutions at the event. SUSE Manager was a particularly interesting topic. In case I ever manage a large number of SUSE or Red Hat servers, I’ll seriously want to use SUSE Manager. Dinner and a chat with SUSE Suomi technical staff was also much appreciated.

I finally got around to inspecting why my main desktop box had started freezing. Well, having eliminated pretty much everything else, it would appear that some capacitors are the culprits. All the through hole electrolytic capacitors near the northbridge are clearly bulging. I’ll just replace the capacitors at some point and have the box up and running again.

I spent last week helping out my brother build an addition to his house. It was a nice break from software. The addition looks a lot like a house now with the roof finished and windows having been installed.

In other matters, the impending winter caused some changes to my modes of transport. The 3-series coupé has been put into storage for winter and the 5-series has been taken out of storage. Driving will be more comfort than fun until spring.

Here’s yet another entry in my line of infrastructure updates. Transferring torrkulla.net to another registrar roughly halved the yearly costs of having the domain. Whilst I was manually copying the zone entries, I added a backup MX server. It’s free a free service, so I’ll be getting exactly what I’m paying for. There are no additional infrastructure updates planned for the near future.