I bought my Cobalt Qube in the summer of 2001, to host my personal website. It's been soldiering on ever since, running 24 hours per day except during three moves. Today it stopped working for a while, and when I tried to reboot it, it wouldn't come up.

It was acting like the hard drive had failed. Now after 13 years that wouldn't be particularly surprising but it would still be bad news. So I disconnected it, opened up the case, and gently tapped the drive a few times, then put it back together, reconnected it, and tried powering it up.

And it worked. (Whew!) See, the thing is, it stands between my LAN and the internet. If it's gone, I can't access anything. So it was pretty scary for a while there.

But it's back again, and so am I.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 01:52 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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1 ...And there was MUCH rejoicing! 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at May 25, 2014 03:15 PM (DnAJl)

2 Have you decided what you're going to do to replace it when it finally does die?

Posted by: RickC at May 25, 2014 04:39 PM (0a7VZ)

3 Nope.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 25, 2014 06:43 PM (+rSRq)

4 (You're going to avoid making me mad by not offering unsolicited suggestions and advice, right?)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 25, 2014 06:52 PM (+rSRq)

5 I have no opinion or suggestions whatsoever on what you do about it.  I was just curious.

Posted by: RickC at May 26, 2014 06:52 AM (0a7VZ)

6 Aren't you required, since it would be an "upgrade", to get a HyperCube next?

Posted by: sqa at May 26, 2014 12:04 PM (WWQSz)

7 That would be "hyperqube", wouldn't it be?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 26, 2014 01:29 PM (+rSRq)

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Pixy has spent a lot of time over the last couple of days finding pieces of the server and gluing them back together. (Epoxy futures in Australia rose by $2.)

But it's likely he missed a few pieces, so we'll have to put up with glitches until he can get everything else fixed. He's worked hard on this, and much gratitude for it all.

Unfortunately, we lost all image uploads dating back to March some time. Fortunately (for me, anyway) I keep a full archive of every image I've ever uploaded. I just uploaded a recovery zip file which Pixy has unpacked, so all my images are back. For the rest of you, dunno.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 05:34 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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DiGiKerot watches for mandarin orange boxes. Wonderduck watches for rubber duckies. I've been watching for red half-rim glasses, and the occasional sniper girl. These are just quirky things we do, to find excuses to make posts. The idea is that when we encounter our watch target in the course of our every-day anime viewing, we post about them.

Audience participation is not welcome. There's no intention or expectation of being complete or comprehensive. The series is things **I** encountered, not things that other people encountered.

Completists and self-elected co-bloggers were the bane of my existence back in the USS Clueless days, and I still hate it. So there was a guy hanging around here who didn't seem to understand that kibitzing spoiled the fun, and I started deleting the comments he left when he did that. I hoped that he'd get the message from context, but apparently he got mad and stopped participating.

His choice. No one has any obligation to read here. But it is a shame. Most of his comments were enjoyable, when he wasn't trying to be my co-blogger.

UPDATE: He was doing the same thing to Wonderduck, and Wonderduck tried to explain to him why it wasn't welcome, but I guess it didn't get through.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Ace says that mu.nu is under a massive spam attack today. I know that Wonderduck caught some of the flack. mu.nu is the same physical server as mee.nu (they're different virtual servers running on the same hardware) so indirectly it's possible for it to affect mee.nu performance, and I've noticed performance being poor a couple of times.

Be patient. I'm sure Pixy will do whatever he can to fix it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 05:52 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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Just wanted to warn everyone that Pixy is migrating mee.nu to a new server in the next few hours, Monday morning in North America.

So there will be outages. If this involves a DNS change (which I suspect it will) you might lose access until the DNS record propagates.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Added 50 images from Sekai de Ichiban. Total number of images now 2852.

As always, force a browser reload to make sure you aren't running the previous version out of your browser cache.

Hovering over the upper left corner brings up an information frame. (Which includes the version number.)

Clicking the upper left corner or the lower right corner forces a new image load.

Clicking the lower left corner links to my main page.

Clicking the upper right corner causes the current image (or flash) to be displayed in a new browse tab or window.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So I managed to get 51 candidates from Sekai de Ichiban. It wasn't easy; there's so much duplication in the series.

I'll process and install them tomorrow.

It really seems as if there ought to have been other shows I could plunder in the last six months or so, but I can't think of any. (Maybe I really should take a closer look at Walkure Romanze. Was there a beach episode in that one?)

UPDATE: Can I stand to go through the second Infinite Stratos series? I'm not sure I can stomach it, even when searching for cheap thrills!

UPDATE: High School DxD New? No. Just... no.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Total number of images: 2802

Added 38 images from Suisei no Gargantia and 69 from Yuushibu.

I also added a small piece of code which will automatically load a new image every 30 seconds.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 01:28 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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It's been a long time since I added anything to the top rotation, so I'm doing some plundering.

I just managed to collect 69 images from Yuushibu. Next is Suisei no Gargantia.

UPDATE:

38 images from Suisei no Gargantia. That's from the first six episodes; I'm not willing to look at any more of it because after that the story got stupid.

I wonder if there's anything worth having in Walkure Romanze? I vaguely remember that the protagonist was a cipher and the story was just what you'd expect from a H-game, but the art was excellent.

UPDATE: Maybe not. In the two episodes I have, the girls spend all their time in heavy uniforms, or sweatshirts, or in plate mail, none of which are particularly conducive to fan service.

UPDATE: How do you guys feel about Sekai de Ichiban as a source of top rotation pictures?

There are some anims from the show now, but no stills.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 05:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Checking out Site meter's "last 30 days traffic" it obviously shows the days when I had the bug removed. But the traffic wasn't zero; 5-15 per day. If the bug wasn't online, how the heck did Sitemeter see anything?

I think it must have been people looking at cached copies of the page at Google etc., which would still have had the Sitemeter bug on them.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 02:49 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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