Sunday, March 22, 2015

Nerd moment

I'm shifting my Raspberry Pi to use LVM for everything except the boot partition. I've duped /home and my music partition to LVs on a spare drive, and now I'm pvmoving my LVs back to a partition on the HD the pi usually uses. Listening to Wierd Al's White and Nerdy. No hiccups. Gotta love the Raspberry Pi 2, but the only way to make this moment nerdier is to be playing D&D at the same time. Heh.

(Pi doesn't have an initramfs by default, so it can't boot into LVs.  You can set one up, but they have a reputation for flakiness. IMHO it shouldn't need one given that the kernel and bootloader (such as it is) are on an SD card separate from /root, but I haven't figured out how to connect that all up yet. :)

-JRS

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Factoid of the day

Most people who were tarred and feathered, unless otherwise abused as well, survived. This seems impossible to us today. Tar, after all, melts above the boiling point of water. You'd be looking at second and third degree burns over most of the body, right?


Well, no.

The tar in question wasn't asphalt. It was pine tar, or pitch. The same stuff baseball players put on their bats (and their hands, if they're sneaky pitchers) which is sticky at blood temperature and molten in sauna temperatures. Further, you weren't dunked in it. Most often it was applied with a mop. Sailors handled molten tar regularly in the process of preserving wooden ships and their rigging, and sticking their hand in the tar bucket wasn't a punishment, it was part of their job.

So it might be more correct to imagine it being like superglue and feathers. Sticky, obnoxious to get off, but usually nonlethal.

(Note: did you know that cyanoacrylate, or superglue, if overheated, releases cyanide gas? Those superglue fingerprint fumers need to have good temperature control. Yes, surgical superglue still has the cyanide. The solvents are different so they're not poisonous or irritating to flesh.)

Now, back to work.

-JRS





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