Due to my recent bad luck with electricity, I was using my home server as a desktop all last week. As a result, I have some more notes to add about using FreeBSD as a Desktop machine, which I hope others may find useful.
Read on for more about Printing, Firefox and Thunderbird interoperability, mounting a USB mass storage device, CD burning with K3B, and Video playback.
So a week ago I had a rather nasty shock. I was watching a TV show that I was playing on my laptop, which was hooked up to my DVD Recorder via S-Video and composite audio cables. Nothing I hadn’t done a few dozen times before. The difference was: I realized that I had not plugged in the laptop’s power cord. When I proceeded to plug in the laptop — *poof* — sparks flew and smoke rolled out of the laptop from under the headphone jacks. It’s an Acer not a Dell so this was truly a surprise :)
After some minor panicing, I found that the laptop would still boot (thankfully) but the audio was dead. I presume the S-Video port was also dead, but I was not about to test it. Sadly, my DirecTivo was also fried (also connected to the DVD Recorder via S-Video) but the DVD recorder is just fine. The jolt also fried a segment of coax cable between the Tivo and the Satellite dish: Specifically it was the segment that goes from the inside of the house to the grounding block outside.
Read on for all of the gruesome details…
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