Happy Newton's Birthday!

Today is, among other things, Newton's Birthday, which makes the flower_cat's gift to me of a copy of God Created the Integers: the Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History by Stephen Hawking particularly appropriate.

It's an anthology of some of the most important papers in mathematics, with Hawking's introductions, starting with extracts from Euclid's Elements and ending with Turing's On Computable Numbers. I'm planning to just read the introductions and skim the rest -- it's the sort of book in which I could easily lose myself for months.

Thank you, love!

Printers and server updates

( Important info for computer users at Grand Central Starport )

Having finally decided to find out whether Linux would handle two USB printers on the same machine, I tried it. It worked out of the box, so I was able to take down dantooine, the little Mini-ITX box currently being used in the office as a print server and guest machine.

This lets me put the chaoswolf's old HP desktop in place as the guest machine without having to resort to a KVM switch. So that's 40 watts I won't be spending. Having to get at the connectors on the back also gave me an excuse to take down nova, the main fileserver, and replace the UPS with a spare. I have a new battery on order, but meanwhile I won't have the annoying warning signal. Also it's been behaving oddly and not talking to the computer -- I may be better off simply replacing it.

Of course, bouncing nova also runs a fsck on all the disks, which have gone some 9 months without checking. It was time.

The next thing that wants doing is doing an upgrade dance with the routers.

( The router upgrade dance )

Free audio book: Alice in Wonderland

From BoingBoing comes a little Christmas present from Cory Doctorow:

Happy xmas! I've just posted a 2:23 reading I did of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland -- the first book I ever read to myself, and one of my all time favorites. The reading's under a Creative Commons Attribution-only license, so do anything you'd like with it! MP3 Link, Other formats.