If it ain't broke, ... break it!

Dear Reader,

One way or the other we all at diablog like to tinker with things.
Somehow we never grew out of that childish phase, where one has the desire to take things apart and "improve" them.

Glynsky can't keep his hands off Alfa Romeos, just read his posts "the never ending story, la passione ....". And right now he is tinkering with an apartment. I cannot wait to hear about the mess he created there.

Pete is my hero, he goes all in, tinkering with his entire life.
Everything is fine? Let's sell all property at once and look what it feels like to be homeless. We need a home? Let's buy a boat first. We like it comfortable? Let's move to Hotzeplotz. Kudos to the most fearless tinkerer at diablog.

By the way, Pete, should you ever be tempted again, here is another interesting, mobile, two-people-housing solution:

If Mrs. Pete follows you into this one, she deserves a medal.

I just tinker with computers.

They always leave one thing or another to desire.
The sound might not be perfect, a special, exotic application is missing or does not work as expected. I admit, the expectations might be the root of the problem. But real man do not let this get in the way of "fixing" things, do they?

 

Last week, without reason or need, I tinkered with one computer. In the middle of things I got impatient and deleted an application, that had been causing some trouble in the past.

After a reboot, the whole system was dead silent. Not a beep. No sound at all. But that's no problem, we can just re-install that application, right? Wrong!

The re-installation collided with the release of a newer version. I hadn't checked, the new version had a bug. Not a minor one, but a huge one. The new version killed the X Window System. Upon reboot I was facing nothing but a dark screen. Mission accomplished, operation successful, patient dead. Fubar.

How did I get out of this unnecessary, self-created mess?

Luckily, I had an excellent teacher a while ago. Among others he had taught me two very valuable lessons:

1) Have all your data on a separate partition.

2) Make a daily (!) backup of important data.

Following those two rules, the screw up of the computer had no major consequences.

Instead of trying to fix the operating system, which I had fucked up so royally, I just made a fresh installation. That took less than 15 minutes.
Side note: An alternative is to use Clonezilla.

The data was undamaged on the separate partition. And the one missing piece, I was able to retrieve from the last backup. Nothing of value was lost.

Within less than an hour the computer was not only back to normal, thanks to the updated operating system it works better now. Sound is perfect.
Or should I say almost perfect? There seems to be a little bug somewhere. Yes, we all know where this is going.

During the whole process I learned a lot about my tinkering mistakes. And about a few things to check before tinkering with.

Yet, I insist:

If it ain't broke, break it!

Stay young and curious,
Engine Room