68kMLA

It may make an inefficient space heater, but can YOUR space heater run Halo?

@3lectr1cPPC it's no less efficient than a regular electric heater. All energy consumed ends up as heat, except for some outgoing network energy, but the incoming balances that.

No A/C?

@LaPorta A/C is not very common in UK households. There are definitely homes with it, one of my neighbours has it. It's not hot enough for long enough to usually need it, and most homes have gas-powered central heating. Flats tend to have wall-mounted electric heaters in each room as gas is a bit of a no-no in most flats since the Ronan Point collapse in 1968.

I never know where anyone lives! Maybe I just don't pay enough attention...

What is this Ronan Point? Sounds like a disaster...

I wonder how in the world she managed to create that large of an explosion. Terrible tragedy.

Gas explosions are... incredibly dangerous. If a gas explosion happens in a terraced house, it's not unheard of for it to take out several other houses with it.

@LaPorta if I remember correctly, the walls were not correctly fixed, and even a small explosion acting over a large area results in a significant force acting on what was not much more than a friction hold for the wall. F=P*A
Effectively, the "pop" pushed one card out of a card tower, and the card tower collapsed.
Primary cause : poor building construction.

The inquiry that happened after Ronan Point found that a gas fitting was incorrectly installed/over tightened (I think) which caused the gas leak - it wasn't the appliance itself, and it wasn't the fault of the flat's occupier.

@joshc but also the wall wasn't held in very well? The explosion shouldn't have caused a cascade failure?

There was something about insufficient or missing brackets holding the wall.

Yeah. I was trying to avoid paraphrasing the article as I think it's well explained there. There's a few good YouTube videos about it too.

Anyway, sorry @CircuitBored... I think I started this conversation in the wrong place.

Hard pivot back to topic: Debian on the G5 is tricky but I think I'm slowly getting there. One of the things I love about the Quad is the soundscape of it in action, the harmonic resonances of the fans and pumps going in and out of phase. The slow crescendo of "bowowowubwubwuubwooooo" on a cold boot is so pleasing. There aren't many other computers that communicate "I'm trying really, really hard" quite like it.

@CircuitBored sounds like a good excuse for a video of that

@joshc One thing at a time... I'm slowly but surely making progress on the S900 video, then the Linux Light is next up. I do think the Quad deserves a little bit of focus though!

Nothing quite screams "I'm installing Debian on an odd platform" like wget-ing a script, changing permissions, and then being told that the script is not there even though you tab-completed its name. Classic.

That’s really cool that you get it going on there. I have a chance to buy one of these DP monsters…how bad is it servicing the cooling system? I’ve read a lot of bad things.

@LaPorta Depends on which version of the cooling system you get. Supposedly the single-pump version is easier to service. The dual-pump version is completely sealed with epoxy but servicing it isn't all that bad as long as you know what you're getting into before you start. I wrote a guide called "The New Blood Mod" that details flushing and modifying the dual-pump version.

I’d like to see that. Do you have a link?