Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Running Short of Ideas

It is strange that I do not run short of ideas to write.

This piece is about portable multimedia gadgets of yester year when they were very expensive and not available in Ceylon.

Usually I buy two or three.
One for use two for reverse in engineering, in other words, do things that they were not intended to do and three as a spare part if one breaks down.

It is rare that they breakdown, since I strictly follow instructions of use and buy market leading products, not the cheap Chinese imitations.

Now after two years or so I lose interest and go for next thing that hits the market.

This media player I bought two but second one came six months later since the guy had only one piece and its cost was Rs.25,000/= and there was no rush in my part, even though money was not a problem then.

This was the early SATA  model which I knew nothing about then and it fitted my front shirt pocket and that was the attraction.

I could carry my power point lectures in addition which was a vogue then.

I remember loading two pirated copies is home alone and few more short video fills not Indian films, which I hate.

One was 120 GB and it was full in.no time and the second for the same price was 320 GB.
It was clear the vendor who goes to Singapore cheated me first time round.
I have become very friendly with him he was early tech guy in Kandy who converted his patent's house to a shop and parents moved to a more cosy residence probably.

A son of a rich guy but a sweet tiny guy half of my size.

He was brainy to fit into the schooling system of this country.

I soon lost interest due to complicated RF jack output and needed a few more minutes  of setting up on a cathode ray tube.

In fact several of cathode ray tubes caught fire due to poor electricity voltages supplied by our Electricity Board.

In 1980s I lost 5 lacks worth of pantry gadgets in one night.

It was not lightening but due to two 240 vaults wires touching each other due to illegal tapping of electricity by hooligans of Ceylon.

To cut short this story, I removed them from the original holdings and I am.looking for two external.cases with USB 3 output preferably USB 3 which is very unlikely.

I have formatted all my 1 terrabyte SATA disks and each one doing a specific task in Linux or BSD terminology.

I think.I will boot BSD on.the 120 GB disk.
I have not decided what to do with 320 GB since Linux need little more than.4 GB USB sticks for booting.

It took 4 hours for  the Debian 10 copied from hard disk  to an.external NTFS partition.

One hour for I GB.

My guess is computers work on optimum temperature and with this cold and rainy weather, the external SATA disk does not spin faster to write even Linux text files.

I here they.are developing disk with two read and write heads.

Good on them and hope they do not heat up in both price and temperature control.

I prefer SSDD but they are costly.