What is it with cats – as soon as they find anything new lying around they have to sit or sleep in or on it, no matter how absurd! Well I found this scene when I came down for a drink in the middle of the night, Pico had been sleeping in the bag of books I left on the kitchen table, when I went back to bed she was still in there, I wonder what she was reading….

I just got an RMA code from ebuyer for my two 1Tb hard disks, so I decided I’d better nuke and encrypt my not-quite-dead-yet drive so when I send it back, they have no way to recover the data (e.g. read my emails/banking!) the totally-dead drive was already encrypted before it died. The commands are slightly different on Fedora10 than Ubuntu9 so not entirely the same as this post, plus I’m only using a passphrase not a key.

I’m trying to figure out what ADSL and phone provider to go with in the UK and am a bit shocked at how 1992 the selection is. After using 2.5-8Mb ADSL and cable in the US and France over the last decade, I’m pretty shocked that most places in the UK still only offer up to 8Mbps and realistically provide more like half that, and very few packages include any free phonecalls or line rental.

It seems that the disk that was failing in my main desktop PC was actually the 250Gb boot drive, although I still think the 1Tb data drive is iffy as its still giving me SMART messages. Not heard a useful response from eBuyer about the other 1Tb drive being replaced….. Anyway I managed to clone the disk to another identical 250Gb WD2500AAKS I had doing nothing in my backup PC; and am now back up and running.

As its a bit of a slow day today and two of my three 1Tb hard disks are dying, I’m currently backing up the stuff that’s not important enough to make it into my daily rsync regimen to a stack of 80-160Gb drives (totalling about 500Gb) I have lying around in USB and eSATA enclosures. Just noticed that as of version 3.0.8, VirtualBox has a Fedora YUM repository, so no more downloading the RPM’s and checking the website for updates.