Every once in a while I run across something, that even in my advanced state of uber-geekness, puts me in a state of awe.

Behold, the lego-robot that solves the Rubik’s Cube.

Darn.  One of my favorite news-social-networking-aggregator sites (that’s my meme for it) has closed its doors.  The landing page for http://rediggulo.us now reads:

“It was fun while it lasted but we’re done.

Unfortunately, the experiment that was reddiggulo.us has come to an end.

Why end it?  We’re moving on to greener pastures.

Anyways, thanks for coming and clicking an ad once in awhile.

Anyone interested in buying this domain, the code, database, etc, please contact “info” at this domain.”

Anyone game for snagging the domain and property?  I think I’ve got somewhere to host it!

I have been itching to get Time Machine to work over a (unsupported) network-shared volume since we’re unwilling to drop the cash for a Time Capsule.  I’ve seen quite a few different posts on how to get it done, including the terminal trick to tell Time Machine to use unsupported volumes, but none of them quite worked.

The best I could get was Time Machine to begin to write the files to the share, but after a few seconds die with a vague “Backup disk could not be created error”.  This stumped me for a bit until I came across this.  Apparently sometime around 10.5.2, Apple introduced a new, undocumented “feature” to Time Machine that causes it to fail over network volumes when doing the initial backup.   However, once the files are created it will work fine.

So, the magical combination is as follows:

• CentOS 5 with Netatalk-2.0.3 compiled, installed, and configured per this post.  Note: I also had to modify etc/cnid_dbd/dbif.c with the same code change as specified there, but YMMV.
• OS X Leopard, patched to 10.5.4.
• Changes to Netatalk’s netatalk.conf file per this post at the Gentoo Wiki.
• Following the post linked above precisely.

Once that happened, Time Machine has begun to work great over AFP to our backup volume–even for multiple Macs connecting to the same share. Behold!

It probably doesn’t need saying; but this is clearly an unsupported way to use Time Machine.  It has been running this way for me only about a day.    If you’re concerned about having to troubleshoot problems that may pop up down the road, especially regarding backups; picking up a Time Capsule is probably a far better idea.

It has been almost a week, and the situation out / up here has gotten slowly, and progressively worse.   Most of the fire seems to be focused on the west side of town now, and the smoke has cleared out of the valley for the most part, giving us a view of what is going on up in the higher elevations.

That is pretty much what we have been seeing.   It’s pretty scary how close a few are getting to town, but in general Redding is not nearly densely forested as the surrounding mountains.  So nothing to worry about, yet.

Some good news is that the majority of fires on the east side have been contained or extinguished altogether.

More thunderstorms are in the forcast for the weekend.  Great.

This past Saturday morning I went up to Benton to take one of my last lessons and instead watched a nasty lighting storm roll through.    Mix lightning and dry terrian, and you can imagine what happens next.

We have about 50 or so major fires going on in the highlands around us, and all the smoke is settling down into the valley around Redding.   It smells like BBQ outside and the Sun has turned an eerie red-orange color; you can stare at it without even squinting.

One of the Mt. Lassen fires is a few miles away from my parents place in Shingletown.