Blue box

I appear to have acquired a Cobalt Qube. It's very pretty, but currently useless as it's not got a mains adapter. Assuming for the time being that the person I got it off does't pipe up and say they found it, I'm going to have to either buy one (from where?) or bodge some other power supply into service (something for which I have no relevant experience).

So far I've found someone repurposing an HP adapter, a description of the pins and a picture of the missing object.

Backups

For some years I semi-regularly backed up my computers to tape. This is actually pretty inconvenient, but I never had to restore.

At the beginning of this year I switched to a disk-based backup scheme, using a program of my own devising, originally in Python but now with a C++ implementation as well.

Since then, I've used this software to restore my laptop (which was stolen); to preserve naath's files across a reinstall; to recover the configuration of my firewall (which failed roughly a month ago) in order to replicate it on another machine; to save (but not yet to restore) lnr's files, though they're still hopefuly on her hard disk as well; and to restore my home directory on my desktop PC, a bunch of files having been smashed by (I think) a new kernel, and though diff hasn't finished running yet so far it's looking like the only files damaged were in /usr and so already restored via dpkg.

While repeatedly discovering that my backup software works well is gratifying, I am left wondering why I've needed it three times this year, in addition to the times it's merely been useful, when I've had so little pressing need for backups for many years previously.