Mei-chan 8

Yesterday, I turned Mei-chan on, and after booting into openSUSE, Firefox loaded and immediately crashed. I rebooted and Firefox was fine after that.

Later on, I was transferring some files over from Taiga to Mei-chan and did a bit of spot-checking on the files, and the last two groups I was spot-checking had some erroneous checksums. With the last group, however, I kept getting different checksums, so I gave up and went to bed after finding out that bad RAM is one possible cause of inconsistent checksums.

This morning, after doing a bit of stuff on Melty, I transferred some files from Mei-chan to Melty before turning Melty off (probably for the rest of today). I then pulled out all the RAM from Mei-chan and put the first two sticks back in and ran Memtest86+. I got a lot of test errors and after a while of poking around in Memtest86+ and the net, I figured out what I needed to do and what to look for.

I ran one pass (and a bunch of other partial passes) with both sticks; one pass with stick 1 (and a few other partial passes while changing the voltage slightly, as well as trying bank 2); one pass with sticks 2, 3, and 4; then finally one pass with 3 and 4. Looks like the memory fault was located only on stick 1, which isn't bad.

After testing, I left sticks 3 and 4 in Mei-chan and proceeded to retest the last two groups of files that I gave up on and got matching checksums for the first group, and a couple bad checksums for the second group, which was remedied by redownloading the files from Taiga.

I then tested out stick 2 in the Dell and it seemed to work just fine, though it was running at DDR2 667 speeds instead of 800 speeds, but that was expected. Therefore, if I decided to give Lie-chan a new set of RAM (2x2GB), I can certainly put the old set into the Dell. I probably won't though, seeing the Dell doesn't really need that much RAM anyway.

Eventually I'll contact Corsair to get replacement RAM since it's not a major priority, as it's only one bad stick and 4GB of RAM is plenty to run Mei-chan with. Out of the 24 sticks of Corsair RAM that I've bought, I've only had one bad stick, which isn't too bad of a rate (4.167%).

To a point, I do wish that I had found the faulty stick sooner, since it would've been a lot easier to get a replacement than to have to live with the bad stick even though it never gave me any major problems until openSUSE 13.1, but as they say "What's done is done."

I could also install Windows on Mei-chan, but I don't think it'd really be all that worth it, since the only reason to would be to be able to play a couple games. Besides the fact that it'd be a major headache to redo the partitioning schemes and whatnot, it'd be hard for me to get comfortable with a long gaming session, as I'm usually either sitting on the bed or on a "cushion" on the floor. There's also the fact that I don't really use Mei-chan year-round, since she can raise the room temperature quite effectively in the summer (it can take her a bit longer in the winter, but she still does heat the room).

There's a bit of a load off of my shoulders, now that I know Mei-chan is stable, but the entire load will be off once I get and verify the replacement RAM.

Network Attached Storage 3

Last Saturday, I was backing up my files onto my NAS to allow me to access a spreadsheet I had made from my best friend's house, and I had stepped into the restroom to relieve myself. A couple minutes later I heard beeping and I ran though what it could be from, and after about half a minute, I figured out it was the NAS.

I checked the fans to make sure they were still spinning, and they were. Once I was back in the chair, I saw that the backup had stalled, and I tried to access the NAS via Firefox to no avail (I might have not waited long enough). I then grab my phone and use the DS Finder application to see what was going on, and it told me that volume 1 has crashed.

I tried restarting the NAS and it didn't work very smoothly, but it didn't help, so I decided to shut it down and pull the disk out. Since I had a bit of trouble pulling the disk out, I moved the NAS itself, removing the cables attached to it, and realized I was pushing on the lock tab down instead of up. I decided to clean the dust out and then connected disk 1 to the Dell to look at the SMART info with Parted Magic.

I found that the "Current pending sector count" had a value of 4, and it was considered a "pre-failure" value. I tried to run the short SMART test, but it hung on 90%. I tried to use MultiSystem to run the SMART test, but the disk utility in it was weird and didn't seem to properly start the test.

I found that there was some sort of systemctl bug that made the SMART test hang at 90% and that it was fixed in December 2013. Unfortunately for me, Parted Magic is dated for August 2013 and MultiSystem for September. I'll eventually download Gparted Live, since I'll need something a bit more updated.

The good news is that I can still use the NAS with a drive missing, though the power button flashes orange when the NAS is awake. I'm grateful for using RAID 1, since it allows for the array to continue to be used until the drive is replaced; I'm sure that if I was using any parity-based RAID array, the array would be unusable until I replaced the drive.

Once I get the newer ISO of Gparted Live, I'll try running the short SMART test again and see what it comes up with. I'll probably format it and try to use it for something else - the hard drive doesn't sound right when reading, so I'd rather not format it and stick it back into the NAS just to have it fail again.

I'll update once I get it tested.

Mei-chan 7

I've been lazy to update about Mei-chan, but since I'm logged in, I might as well update.

Firefox continually crashed to the point where I decided to do a clean install of openSUSE 13.2 to see if it was some sort of weird segmentation fault, but after a couple days, Firefox crashed again.

I figured it had to be the faulty address(es) in the RAM, and looked for some possible meanings of inconsistent memtest results, but didn't really find anything conclusive that I could apply. What I decided to do, however, was to poke around with the RAM settings in BIOS - compromising with turning off the "RAM compatibility" setting and manually setting the RAM speed to DDR2 400.

So far, Firefox has been stable, but if it happens again, I have a plan to take half the RAM out from Mei-chan and give it to Lie-chan - giving Lie-chan's RAM to the Dell and hoping the Dell can use it. Hopefully I won't have to go through that headache.

Linux VM on a Chromebook

The specific article I read is: Chromebooks Can Now Run Linux in Its Own Window.

Three days ago I saw the article (may have not been that specific one) come up in my "GNU/Linux" news feed in Google Play Newsstand, and I wasn't really too surprised, since I had found something similar to it when looking to find instructions for installing Linux (overwriting Chrome OS) on a Chromebook/Chromebox. I had actually just disregarded the article, since it wasn't interesting enough for me to read about it.

Two days ago, when I loaded up the "GNU/Linux" news feed again, I saw it was at the top of the feed again, but scrolled down to make sure there wasn't some other article buried below, and.... There was a total of five - five! - articles about it in a row. While I can understand different people from different sites write about the same thing, a news feed application should have some sort of way to filter out duplicate and/or similar articles, and though I say this, this has been the first instance of this happing (more than 2 similar/duplicate articles).

Yesterday, I thought there was only two, but when I scrolled further down, I found the five from before, making it a total of seven articles. Okay Newsstand, I get the point, please give me something else instead.

I was debating about posting about this, and originally decided not to, but since I was already logged into my Google account, I figured I might as well (skipping uploading the imperfect screenshots).

There's really not much to the article, as there's really not a whole lot to say about it, since it's just making the Linux VM more accessible through a window instead of having to switch between it and Chrome OS.

Honestly though, I think it would be better to just overwrite Chrome OS with any Linux, since Linux will utilize more of the machine's potential than Chrome OS will - though this applies more toward Chromebooks/Chromboxes with x86_64 architecture processors rather than ARM SoCs since Linux  distributions for ARM chips are a bit spotty (either with availability or package availability).

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Happy new year to all!

Skype Translations

The article I read is: Skype Can Now Do Spanish/English Translation in (Almost) Real Time.

Well, this isn't anything new to me, as I've read about the "alpha" testing earlier this year. Some other articles compares it with universal translator in the Star Trek series, and while it kind of is, at the same time, the universal translator is just a fictional device - which is what I actually wanted to talk about. I apologise ahead of time of ripping apart a device in the Star Trek universe, but it's the one that's not very logical to me, though I'm a "trekkie".

The universal translator supposedly works in real-time, in other words: as the other person speaks, the translator translates exactly what they're saying. The problem with this is that languages are not structured the same way, so for something to translate in real-time is impossible unless the two languages have the same structure. The only way real-time translation would be possible, is that something knows exactly what you're saying before you even finish saying it. Otherwise, there's going to be a delay between when the person speaks and when the translator starts translating.

If you "study" languages (not necessarily learning them), it eventually becomes obvious that the structures are much different and doesn't (usually) carry over to a different language. For this example, I will use Japanese and English.

私はご飯をたべています。 translates to "I am eating rice."
私 is "I", は tells the reader/listener that the noun/pronoun preceding it is the main subject, ご飯 is "rice", を tells the reader/listener that the noun/pronoun preceding it is related to the verb following it, 食べています is "eating" (simply put). The "am" in the English translation is inferred (though います can be considered the actual source of "am" and "ing"). So if we directly translate this without changing the language structure, it would become "I rice eating." which doesn't make much sense.

Some languages might have the same structure - while I'm not entirely sure about Korean compared with Japanese, I do know at least that Korean follows the same "noun-verb" structure.

 Though a real-time translation is impossible, what we have now is definitely is a step toward breaking the language barriers.

Samsung SSDs

The article I read is: Samsung Brings 3D NAND to Mainstream with 850 Evo SSD Line.

This is something that's pretty exciting for computer and/or storage enthusiasts, as solid-state drives have been sort of a mixed bag for a number of years, at least from my point of view. From what I remember seeing, SSDs with higher reliability or storage space has always been quite pricey, the cheaper ones are usually pretty decent in terms of reliability but not with space, and the cheapest ones are the ones that you would feel uneasy about buying.

I only own a couple of SSDs, and have only been using them to store video files; I've never really had the want or need to use SSDs in place of traditional HDDs mainly because of the price. Back then, I didn't really quite understand the reliability of SSDs, so I wanted to use them in such a way to keep the writes as low as possible, which is storage. However, things are different now that this article breaks down the reliability into something a lot easier to understand than "1,000,000 hours" for the mean time between failures.

The price points of the 850 Evo line seem about the same as other SSDs of the same capacity in terms of retail price, which will let the SSD line have a nice start once released.

I will still be doing what I have been doing with SSDs until the prices are low enough to where I can viably switch to SSD without being gouged in the wallet.

Tablets

The article I read is: Tablets Are Broken. Here's How to Fix Them.

While I've wanted a tablet for a while, the main thing that kept me away was my lack of money, but I suppose the other thing that kept me away was the interface itself (I didn't really realize it until I read the article).

The article makes very valid points about everything that is wrong with the interface with tablets, which I agree with - tablets are supposed to be the in-between device when we want something larger than our phones but handier than our laptops. And as the article said, the problem is that Android and iOS were designed for phones more than tablets, along with that tablets are mostly going to be used in a landscape orientation rather than portrait.

While a proper rendition of Android and iOS (and their applications) would improve the usage of tablets, there is another solution that the author is probably unaware of that would be the "quick fix": Linux. Both GNOME 3 and Unity were meant to support touchscreens, and would work well on a tablet, but there's a couple problems: it's not easy to install Linux on a tablet (I'm not entirely sure of this, as I've never looked, but I can't exactly figure out how it'd be done with the knowledge I have), and that ARM support really is iffy depending on the distribution. Some tablets use x86 or x86_64 architecture processors, which would have a higher compatibility with Linux distributions than ARM, and will be what I'm referencing to from now on.

Unity is really more geared toward touchscreen use, though it's easily used for a normal desktop environment (mouse and keyboard). One of the things I don't like about Unity is that it forces you to type the application you want to launch - it's faster in most cases, but there are some (like me) who would rather not have to.

GNOME 3 is geared a bit more towards touchscreens, but is a lot closer to the neutral point than Unity is. The applications are listed in a flow, which allows the user to scroll through it all to look for what they're looking for (assuming it's not in the recent applications list), and they're also able to click on the search box and type the application name if they wish to do so. What I'm not sure about is how the notification bar would work, as it was something I didn't test, but I'm assuming long-pressing the bottom of the screen would bring it up

While I haven't tried the other desktop interfaces with a touchscreen, the interfaces aren't much different than Windows, so it's usable, but probably awkward at times.

Assuming there's a way to install Linux onto a tablet, it'd still be pretty awkward because of the lack of keyboard - how would one type anything in during installation? Maybe it would detect the touchscreen and enable the on-screen keyboard?

While Linux is a viable alternative for tablets, it voids the warranty of a new device (or one within warranty), requiring you to restore the factory image onto the device before sending it in for repair. Once I get a hold of a tablet, I'll eventually tinker with installing openSUSE onto it (I may also try Ubuntu as well), but for now I can only really speculate on how well Linux is on a tablet as an alternative to Android and iOS.