Interesting Ultimate Articles/Blog

A short history of the elusive stampers:

http://www.filfre.net/2014/01/the-legend-of-ultimate-play-the-game/

A reverse engineering blog:
http://www.livewiredesign.co.uk/?tag=/Stampers#sthash.CYvkcv1C.dpbs

Studio interview with Sagan, Hawking, Clarke

Great piece of history here a television interview from 1988 with Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Arthur C Clarke.  The interviewer is Mangus Magnusson who asks some great questions about modern science, and existence of god.

One fascinating piece is Arthur C Clarke demonstrating the Mandlebrot set on a high end Amiga computer.  I spent some time recently writing my own generator as an exercise in Qt programming.  Clarke loading the pre-generated images (which apparently took 12 hours or more) worked as fast as my program generating it on the fly.

That is a great observation of modern computing power, and not my programming skills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQQAv5svkk

Recovering an encrypted LVM drive from another system

I had an SSD begin to fail on my laptop.  The symptoms were interesting, a md5um of a large tar file began to produce inconsistent results.

My backups were a little basic on my laptop - so I replaced my SSD and went through this procedure to recover what I could from a SATA disk caddy with the SSD attached.

1.  fdisk /dev/sdb to determine the LVM partition (/dev/sdb5 say).
2.  Decrypt the partition ready for mounting:

          cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb5 recover-disk

3.  vgscan to find the current volumes available
4.  lvdisplay to find the volumes we can say (vg-mint/root say).
5.  Mount the LVM partition:
       
     mount /dev/vg-mint/root /mnt/other-disk

6.  Now the drive is mounted, and we can copy data off (hopefully!)

Useful link:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=940904