Owen wants his drives back. They've been sat there for fuck knows how many years and suddenly he wants to use them. Arsehole. Just 'cos he's mentioned in Wikipedia and I'm not he thinks he's right.

I was planning to have another go at getting the mirroring working before I disconnected them. I had a peek at the layout on the drive which wouldn't work, and found a partition which had been hidden. It's a concatenated disk layout, mirroring done the old way. I force-mounted the single plex, fsck'ed it, and had poke around.

Like I said, it's not fair. And yes, I am drunk.

Wasting my time,
Resting my mind,
And I'll never pine
For the sad days and the bad days

I give up. I can't think of any use for a Raspberry PI. The Study is overheating, so I've switched off a whole bunch of computers, including the build servers, all the PIs, the Wandboard and the Beaglebone.

Work is as soul-destroying as usual. The worst part of the day is being pressed into a corner on the bus by young women during the commute home.

And I've been sent another of these weird emails which purport to be from the future. They're kinda disturbing. I'll ask the email guys to block them.

I just managed to get a Raspberry PI with a USB hard drive to self-compile FreeBSD. It took nearly a week!

Personally I think the image looks pretty good. But the PI playing didn't go well.

I couldn't work out how to put the root partition on the external drive. And that's singular, since the mirroring didn't work either; the module version didn't match the kernel. But I managed to stuff /var and /usr onto faster media.

I also need to name these toys. The blue and red ones are azul and rosa. Those I've got on the operating table exposing their guts are daisy and saffron, and the other two I'll call peter and aaron, because I haven't got enough p's or a's.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the time it takes a PI to recompile itself must be down to the slow SD card, so I've hooked up a couple of old USB drives to another PI. I'm going to mirror them, and chuck everything except the boot code there.

I didn't have suitable drives at home, so I've taken the liberty of, um, borrowing a couple I found lying around at work.

And I'm also trying to link an image:

I just managed to get a Raspberry PI to self-compile FreeBSD. It took nearly a week!

A few months ago I received a short, personal email from an unknown sender, asking me if I'd left Manchester. I hadn't then, and I still haven't. But I've got another of those weird emails.

I've kept a copy of it this time, you can see it for yourself. Look closely at the headers. WTF?

Found it! All 6 of my PIs are running the same code, but the latest two don't crash.

If I use the PSU from one of the new ones with one of the old PIs, that doesn't crash either.

It's not a quality control problem with the RPI, it's just shitty power supplies!

Forget it. They seem to work just fine, but die without any diagnostics.

I wonder if, at 25 quid each, they're a bit substandard. I'm going to buy a couple more just to see if it's a quality control issue.

Aoyama Daisuke has fixed the SD card problems with FreeBSD 11 on the RPI.

I have two RPIs sat there doing nothing, I'm going to leave them just doing the usual overnight jobs and see what happens.