I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for years…. my computer desk has a shelf on it to put the monitor on. which means a person sitting at the desk is looking up at the monitor, rather than slightly down. which meant I couldn’t sit at the desk for more than 10 minutes. Tonight I spent an hour and half, moving the monitor, re-routing a dozen cables, and taking the shelf off.

I decided to go ahead and do a fresh install of kubuntu gutsy gibbon on my work laptop too. the main motivation was to utilize the disk space better. I wanted to eliminate some little or not-at-all used partitions, and I was almost out of space in my /work partition. this install went almost as smooth as on Jupiter, but the laptop has a lot more software on it and a lot more requirements.

upon reading that the newest ubuntu release, gutsy gibbon, had support in the installer for encrypted partitions, I decided it was time to do an install from scratch on my workstation, Jupiter. Jupiter was running fiesty fawn, and the whole disk was encrypted, but I practically had to roll my own initial ramdisk to get it set up, and I doubted that would make it through a dist-upgrade to gutsy without some serious intervention.

Replaced the gas cap. the seal wears out after a while and starts causing the check engine light to come on. It was only $16 online from the sponsors of rx8club.com

so debian etch is totally rocking. It was a fun experience just reading the installation manual. The manual was impressive, I’ve not seen a work which conveyed so much information in so little words. Let me explain what I mean by that; I, as an expert Linux user, found the directions extremely helpful, easy to follow, with just the right amount of hints along the way. However, a Linux newb would be hopelessly lost.

got debian etch booted on entropy. the only problem I had was I tried at first to use lilo. several years ago, grub wouldn’t work on this machine, and I had to use lilo. Rembering that, I tried to install lilo from the get-go. but the complication of installing lilo into the second hard drive on the system so it would later boot as the first drive were a bit much.

My 90Mhz pentium named entropy has been my firewall machine (running iptables and a dns server) for quite a while now, without any trouble. unfortunately, it’s really been bothering me. why? because it was running Gentoo Linux, and had become un-upgradeable. it was at the point where nothing could be upgraded without first upgrading gcc, but the gcc build apparently requires 2gb of memory and/or swap space. Entropy has 128MB of ram, and a 4GB disk, not enough space to make a 2GB swap file without re-partitioning and doing a re-install.

Got some Michelin Pilot tires installed for autocross

Installed an Audio Link in my car. this adds an ipod dock connector in my glove compartment. It keeps the ipod charged, and also pipes the music through the cd change connector on the back of my head unit. The car thinks the ipod is a cd changer! (which has cd with thousands of songs on them) the steering wheel controls will change tracks, and the head unit itself can select between the first 5 playlists on the ipod, as well as fast forward and rewind within a song.

had a persistent leak of some sort. Turns out it was the transmission input seal (took two trips to the dealer to diagnose it though). seal replaced under warranty.