The collected works of me4twb

My only experience with Handbrake was about 5 years ago because some university professor was recommending it, and it didn't even work properly on my computer.

If you've got this sorted then good for you, but I'll just drop my 2 cents in here and tell you how I did this.

I don't do this anymore because now I have a proper HTPC that can handle any media type.

AVI Synth is a text file which is like a script that gets executed for every frame of the video. You can turn on filters to de-interlace and de-noise the anime DVD video stream, as well as render dvd subtitles and styled softsubs as well. I think it is still how fancy text in the openings is handled, as most playback systems don't properly support the complex styling, or it would run too slow and lag the video if done live, so it gets backed in. Then you can play the avisynth file as a frame server and render the output using virtual dub.

[EDIT]This was back when I was using .avi as a container and xvid as the video codec. But I assume you can also do it using .mp4/h264, if nothing else then save as hufyuv/wave in avi from virtualdub and then transcode into mp4 using mencoder or super or handbrake or whatever you love? You could easily automate it on the commnandline using mencoder or other cmd line tools.

Hello, I have a 9114-275.

I think I have hard disk trouble, does anyone have some advice?

My system came all banged up with loose parts falling out, and stuffed full of very fine dark powder and sticky clumps of dust. The dark powder was like very fine coal dust, or soot or something.

I bought the system from an Australian ebay seller that was selling 10 of them. I wouldn't be surprised if these systems came from a Geo office on a coal mine site or something.

I had it sitting there in a state of disrepair for quite a while, the return period is well and truly lapsed now. The seller said the systems were working and came with AIX 5.3 but I now think that the systems were configured for net boot.

I eventually got it mostly cleaned up. I couldn't fully disassemble the system for cleaning as the inner part of the case is held together with pop-rivets.

And now it runs the firmware and I get output on an LCD monitor through the DVI connection, but no OS is found. The system in sms is configured for boot order:

1) floppy
2) ide cd-drom
3) ethernet

and that is it. But it has a (presumably scsi) hard drive in the front bay. When I tell the SMS to scan for all boot devices it only lists the floppy, the ide cd rom and then the two ethernet ports. The scsi disk is not being picked up. But I hear the harddrive start up when power is turned on.

Does a disk show up in SMS even if it has no bootable partitions? I have no clue how this works in these IBM systems but on my x86 computer the BIOS will list all hard drives connected to the motherboard whether they are bootable or not.

Maybe my HDD is faulty and I need a new one?

Perhaps I should acquire aix5 cd boot media and a new hdd?

Also sometimes the amber light on the only power supply blinks but then it stops and the system runs fine it just won't boot.

The case has many strips of foam in it. Some parts were perfectly clean, Most parts were atrociously dusty. A lot of the dust was very sticky and had to be manually plucked and fed to a vacuum hose. Maybe previous owners were smokers?

Also I find it odd that the PSU fan runs even when the system is powered off. So long as the power cable is plugged in the power supply fan is running. Is it that inefficient it needs active cooling even for standby power? I plan to use an inline watt meter to measure its standby power consumption this afternoon.

I 2nd/3rd Jin-Roh and Blue Gender

I also liked Macross Plus and Big Wars, they had a kind of top gun vibe to me.

There was also a cyborg movie that I liked called something like squiggan. Though that isn't quite right.

[EDIT] It was called spriggan

Indeed, it might just be super fine particles of some kind.

The system pulls 16.5 watts just by plugging the power cable in. That is more than some laptops with a lit screen and running web browser.

When it stabilizes at the OK code on the operator panel it reads 17.566 watts

On initial boot up it goes to 90 watts when the fans come on.

Then the fans get loud and the reading is 128 watts then about 30 seconds its 145 watts then another 30 seconds and its 250 watts. Screen still hasn't turned on yet.


The keyboard caps lock etc lights flash at 271 watts

Another 20 seconds and the screen lights up instructing me to press 3 to choose it as the console, 274 watts

power stays around 271-274 watts through out the bios logo and the open boot system which ends up looking for a bootp server.

Power it off again via the operator panel and its back down to 17.344 watts

It seems in its current configuration it draws an appropriate amount of power given its namesake, 275.

I wonder if when it goes into an OS it has any power saving?

I have a 36gig drive on the way from the USA, will continue then.

I now have a new HDD installed and I also some 5.3 install media.

I think that the ebay listing (that they ran 5.3) must really have been quite bogus based on something I found out now.

I got the system to boot cd 1 and it installed and it was all good. You can choose between gnome/kde/cde, I chose CDE just to keep things simple.

After reboot I get operator panel status: 9411 and sms message 20ee000b, which is something like os not found or so I think. The AIX installation procedure changes your sms config so that it boots the hdd and only the hdd on reboot. So I rebooted the machine and set it to boot CD again. Its a pain because the boot process takes 8 minutes before you get to the bios banner.

I looked on the internet why this error can occur, and it seems a big reason can be firmware too old to run the OS. You can't seem to list the firmware version number from the open firmware OK prompt, you either have to attach a null modem to the service processor on the back, or boot AIX and use lsmcode utility.

The aix install cd limited function maintenance shell doesn't even have ls, but it does have cd and lsdev. So basically I had to operate the system blind and I gave up on that.

Instead of going down to the garage to get a system with a db9 port to access the service processor, I booted the CD install disk and used normal maintenance mode to load the installed volume group. This gives me usual command lines tools in ksh.

The OS is installed and it has X11R6 and everything. So I found it odd it wouldn't run. Can't start X11 though but I can run normal command line apps so I ran lsmcode and my firmware is version 3F040326, which based on this page: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/ser ... C3F_CD.htm indicates that I can only run 5.1 and 5.3 requires the next version. (this guy: http://unix.ittoolbox.com/groups/techni ... 6#M1480166 seems to think the next version after that is the minimum.).

Well anyway I will have to upgrade the firmware version somehow. Not sure how I'm going to achieve that and its 11:17pm with work tomorrow, so this chapter ends early.

[EDIT]
Also yes, I confirmed that even if the HDD is working and not broken, it will still not show up in sms and so on unless it is marked in an "active" state, which the installer does for you. But even though I have 2 hdds plugged in, only 1 was available for installation, so I assume that the original it came with really was a dud as well. Now I'm thinking it would have been better to just 5.1 install media. I only had 5.3 in my head because of the (bogus) ebay description.

[EDIT 2]
The only benefits (besides generally newer software) that I can see 5.3 having over 5.1 are some JFS2 improvements, and supporting NFS v4. I'm currently the highest bidder on some 5.1L media

Good tip.

My AIX 5.1 cd set arrived. It doesn't include the linux toolbox nor the expansion pack so I'm unable to install web server / netscape / firefox / gcc etc.

But I now have AIX 5.1 installed and running smoothly (using the CDE gui). I am setting up mirroring of the rootvg right now, which of course is taking quite a while.

System has no ssh/sftp/http access but it does have ftp server and telnet server so I am going to use that to get some rpm's onto it from here: http://www.perzl.org/aix/index.php?n=Main.Gcc#v4.5.4

Also it seems that by default all of the file systems are only 64megs in size (var, root fs, home, tmp, and so on) but /usr is 640megs or so. But my disk is 34gb so I have plenty of space to resize those FS to make them bigger.

The SMIT program really makes administering the system much easier than linux or freebsd. Plus linux lvm is based on the system used here in AIX as far as I know (logical volumes inside volume groups which spread over physical volumes).

And the SMIT device list lets you see all the scsi controller ids and connection strings that you need when making physical volumes of them. The installer configures all disks present at install time as a physical volume for you anyway, but only the one that you selected at install time gets used for rootvg.

So now its just a matter of getting svn 1.7 and gcc 4.5.4 and all their dependencies working, and then I'll be able to try and get some open GL / X11 stuff happening on this GXT6500P.

I anticipate that I will run into an issue of no x11 development packages installed but if so then I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

recently I sat in front of a new Macintosh of a friend and I did not find the scrollbar! They appear only if one scrolls

Yeah I've had that problem on 10.7, I'm not a mac pro by any means so I found that annoying.

I've had file loss on ext3 and jfs both on archlinux. I've had a few messed up files on xfs too, though that might have been crash / powerloss induced.

My solution has been to maintain 3 copies of my data:
1) on my direct attached storage on my main pc, which is now open indiana on zfs root.
2) On a synology NAS raid-5 with 4x 3tb hdd
3) On another synology NAS raid-5 with 4x 3tb hdd

And I just copy the data across once a week onto one and then the other, the synology budget nas are just a slow low power arm-cpu linux box that you can ssh into. So I have 1 week and 2 week online backup. They are very slow they it is quite laggy to do anything with them, and torrent hashing overtaxes the CPU to the point that it is painful to get a directory listing from them over CIFS.

But if a file gets corrupted it would overwrite the old copy and corruption would creep into the backups.

Maybe I could have a cronjob create a list of all files along with their md4 hashes and then diff them between both the online backups, and email that to my email account to read during a slow hour or two at work or something.

The images are not easy for me to see without having to disable my firefox security / privacy extensions.

But now I did that so I can see the pics, I have not seen this system before, so I was surprised at the black coated metal on such a vintage computer. I just read that the fullsize model was 300 kilos?

How heavy, roughly, is your baby/36? It looks like a normal desktop computer case so I wouldn't think it would weigh that much. Can you carry it on your own comfortably? I just took delivery of an ultra45 today and although it is only 27 kg I think I must have lifted it incorrectly as my back is a bit aching now that I am in bed.

I wonder how many threads like this there have been? If you didn't have any, but then bought one (not needed to do work with, just use as you please), which one would it be?

Octane/Octane2?
O2?
Indigo2?
Fuel?
Tezro?

I don't have any MIPS based one. I've been considering picking one up. Just for curiosity because I haven't used them in the past before! And try programming them.

So I've been wondering of ones that get offered, there are probably some that I wouldn't want as much. I wouldn't want an onyx due to power consumption and shipping cost. Fuel / Tezro seem rare and expensive. I read about burning audio capacitors on indigo2, failing power-supplies, o2 and indy dieing.

O2 seems to be quite low power electrically which is a plus, and smaller + lighter? But I'm not sure if I am best to prefer having an O2. Out of indigo2 or octane I think I would be better with the octane. But octane doesn't look good to me, I like the look of the indigo2 case better.

With my other systems I always wanted ones with DVI ports to make LCD compatibility easier (13w3) but most SGIs don't seem to have DVI out until later models, we all use adapter cables?

I'm not actively looking for hardware right now just introducing myself to the idea, and wanted peoples feelings in regards to any differences in software they can run, power they consume, weight they weigh, how easy the plastics get broken, how reliable the hardware was.

Software wise I would like only plain text word processing, Ethernet networking with FTP, 3d openGL 1.x support (as opposed to 2d focus of some indy's I think). Hardware texturing would be a plus. Web browsing is not required, PAL VHS tape digitization would be nice (I have VHS player already), but I can do that on other systems if I want.

One of my friends has thermaltake level10, its mostly plastic but he likes it. It has a fold out headphone holder, and some stupid fan light controller where you can press a case button and the leds on the fans play different flash patterns, one makes it look like the fans are spinning backwards, another cycles through colours, etc.


I just have a mountain mods u2 ufo

http://www.mountainmods.com/images/images_big/U2UFODWO.jpg

It comes as a bunch of flat sheets of aluminium and some angle bar and it all screws together. Although honestly, after having done that I would rather make a case myself, it could be more sturdy if they used thicker alu for the frame and bolted it together instead of just screwing into tapped standoff things. It has a bit of wobble no matter how tight you do the screws.