All About Linux
In my quest to linuxify everyone around me I forgot to mention a blog that's here on the blogger:
All about Linux. It's quite a good blog, regularly updated, full of interesting articles. The author seems quite knowledgable (though nowhere near as much as me, you know) in things Linux. Only sometimes his personal preferences get a bit in the way, I'd say. But hey, I'm trying to convert all of you to Linux, so who am I to judge, right? ;)
Bathroom Renovation My Way
Yes yes, I'm sorry it's been so late since my last post. I'm busy working and having fun. And cleaning up behind those nasty plumbers from the last post. Do you want to know how I do bathroom stuff? Right.
Somewhere around 10 months ago my mom complained her electricity bill was unusually high and she thought it was all boiler's fault since it was over 30 years old. Even she didn't know the exact age because it's been there since she can remember.
So then, I bought a new boiler. But that wasn't enough. The old boiler had to be taken down and the new one mounted. I decided to do it while mom's working so I could be free from all the criticism while working.
Since the old boiler was so old, all the pipes leading in and out from it coroded so heavilly I couldn't disconnect it in any sane way. So I got the help of my crazy sister to disconnect it in an insane way. Saw it off!
Yeah baby, go wild on the pipes!
After I disconnected the old boiler I used some of that ol' WD40 to unscrew the nuts holding the boiler on the wall, took it down, and threw it out. But there remained two couples of screws protruding from the wall, one couple used to hold the boiler in the upper part, and the other couple of bolts used to hold the boiler in the lower part. My sister was all for sawing off those protrusions, too. But I'm more for quality work, so I wanted to get them out of the wall. I chiseled around one of the upper bolts to see a bit more.
And then it occured to me: the holes for bolts were drilled straight through the wall and bolts inserted and fastened from the other side of the wall! The other side being the living room. So I went into the living room and instructed my sister to hit a bit on the bolts and I'll try to see where exactly they'd come out. Well, a light stroke caused the wall to bulge a bit, so I said to her to just go crazy and hit it through the wall. Ahm, I didn't anticipate it would cause
that much of wall to come off. This is the upper part.
This is the lower part.
And this is what remained on the floor. You can see two couples of bolts, each couple attached to a piece of metal that held them in place.
Oh, and this is the chiseled part.
Since it was getting late I had to fix those huge holes fast. My mom was coming home soon. Well then, to the shop, buy some mortar and plaster! First, I put on a layer of mortar.
But while I was working, I heard some nerve wrecking shouting.
It was my mom, who came home, saw the state of the bathroom, and got angry. I wonder why.
She even threatened me to better fix everything or else...
So I resumed fixing the walls, in a rather fast pace. This is how the living room came out.
And this is the bathroom part. You can see that there was no paint behind the boiler. The old boiler was indeed probably there since the house was built. Somewhere in the 1960s, I believe.
Oh, those two holes in the upper part are already holes where the new boiler was going to be attached. Yes, I was thinking of everything. Anyway, after mortar and before paint there usually comes a thin layer of plaster. You see, mortar is coarse, but you need something fine to stick paint onto. This is how the living room looked like after being done with plastering.
After plastering the living room and the bathroom, I and sister painted the bathroom and the small patch in the living room, mounted the new boiler and I connected it to the pipes and electricity. This is how it looks like now.
The new boiler in operation.
So... If you've got a bathroom to repair, want a bit of fun, and pay good, you know who to turn to. ;) Forget those plumbers. They're yucky, wasteful, and take a lot of time.
Bathroom Woes
I am genuinely pissed off. A plumber was supposed to fix the drainage leak in the bathroom. If I were the owner of the flat I'd have kicked his butt a few days ago already. On Monday late evening, when he was already gone, after 5 days of work, this is what I've found when I entered the flat.
After making a step through the front door. Right is the bathroom (not seen), ahead is the studio room.
A look into the bathroom.
Something scribbled on the wall where a mirror is supposed to be.
A look from the bathroom.
Yesterday I checked it again and the tiles were on and the bathroom was painted. It took them 3 freakin' days for that. Seriously, if I were to do all this, it would take me 4 days tops. And yes, I have a fair deal of knowledge about doing this stuff, so nobody will tell me how long it takes to do quality work.
As of this morning, I couldn't even take a dump properly. The toilet bowl was just mounted on the drain pipe, it wasn't even fixed to the floor or connected to the tank. No faucet, no basin, no shower.
Linux Chix0rs
Linux and women is not something you often hear in the same sentence. That's why some chix wrote a HOWTO document:
HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux. Otherwise,
HOWTOs are meant to be comprehensively written guides describing a certain operation of Linux, short descriptions of how to do something. Well, I guess this
is something that pertains to Linux and is badly in need of a good guide... But wait, there's more! There's
LinuxChix, a community for women who like Linux! So, women, ahem... Let's Linux!
Linux for Newbies
There's this
Linux Guide for Windows Users that attempts, well, to introduce Windows users to Linux world. It's a good attempt, but very unfinished. For slovene readers I recommend the chapter about Linux I wrote for the book
Nevladni kako. Otherwise, here are a few short additions to
that guide.
- The politically correct term for this operating system is GNU/Linux.
- ISO stands for International Standards Organization. The ISO image for CDs is a (usually) big file that conforms to the ISO 9660 standard that defines a filesystem for CD media.
- The kernel is actually what the name Linux stands for. In the strictest sense, when you talk about Linux, you talk about the kernel. If you have the operating system in mind, then you talk about GNU/Linux. You see, the folks at GNU started writing a free operating system way back in 1980s. In 1991 Linus came along and wrote the kernel, the only piece that was missing in the GNU system. Today there are also GNU Hurd and GNU Mach that implement things a kernel does.
- Distributions, or distros for short. You can get a list and descriptions of distros at DistroWatch.com. You can download ISO images of a few popular distros from LinuxISO.
- There's a lot of free literature about Linux at The Linux Documentation Project.
Still Alive
Yes, yes, I'm still alive. Only I had plenty of work to do. Among other things, I've been coding a player for a local chain of shops (
Tuš) which is mostly finished (basic functionality working) only I have to tweak it a bit more and I want it to be configured with autotools (
autoconf and
automake). Simply put, the player will be like a radio: playing mp3 music with a commercial here and there. Some other guy (company even) is building the management web interface. And who had to write all the detailed specs? Right. At least now I know where and which „quotes“ to put for quoting in Slovene language.
Anyway, I wasn't only behind the keyboard the previous month. Or put the other way around, as many
coders like to do it, the keyboard wasn't only in front of me the previous month. It's been in front of sweet jammy jams jamming the jammed space bar, so I had to disassemble it, wash everything, and then wonder if it's wise to put it all together again.
The jammer had a striking similarity to my girlfriend. I don't even want to infer further, seeing this nice smile.
As you can probably think, seeing the upper photo, we were out making photos. If you probably can't think then go work for Micro$oft. The alternative is you end up like this shopping trolley. All under the ice.
I hate winter. Seriously, whoever invented it must have been very bored. Probably didn't get accepted to a position at Micro$oft. Just look at what trees must suffer because of this bad idea.
The only nice thing about the winter is that it's all nicely decorated. Shiny colourful lights all over the place.
But even that is because new year happens during winter. Just think of poor Australians. Having no similar thing during their winter. Okay, okay, poor Tasmanians. I don't think even they have such a snowwy winter. Err, summer. Oh, whatever.
