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Month: September 2014

Reed College nuclear reactor tour.

Reed College nuclear reactor tour.

Reed college is having an open house today and doing 2 tours through their nuclear reactor. 
You get to enter the reactor room while it is running at 90% of it’s 250 kwatt output (they turn off the lights so you can see the Cerenkov blue glow!) – and then they scram it for you (shutdown). Sadly, they use a magnetic control rod system – so there isn’t really a guy with an ax anymore…

 

   

James Bond actor Richard Kiel – aka Jaws – dies

James Bond actor Richard Kiel – aka Jaws – dies

Richard Kiel is best known for his role as Jaws in the James Bond movies. But did you know he was an accomplished salesman, house developer, and tremendous family man despite the many difficulties he faced trying to make it as an actor? He was a very hard working guy that worked on countless projects and created the comedic nature of the character Jaws. On top of that, he was a pretty inspirational guy later in life.

Learn how he got that lump on his forehead and how a man with many things against him made it in one of the most image-based industries. Definitely worth a listen.


The last chapter of his book is particularly touching where he discusses his faith and asks if the reader is interested in Christianity. He provides a prayer for you to say outloud and even puts his email address and mailing address down if you said it and want to talk to him about it. He then says, “Thank you for letting me share my life with you.”

What a guy.

Steam: Failed to add new steam library folder

Steam: Failed to add new steam library folder

Until we get 1TB SSD’s for less than $1000, space on them is always at a premium. One strategy is to split your Steam game installs between drives. For slow loading or games you play often, you might want those on your SSD.  For infrequently played games, you likely want those on a big, cheap platter drive. Steam gives you the ability to have multiple libraries on multiple drives, but it doesn’t always work as expected.

I tried recently to add a library to a big platter drive, and got the message 'Failed to add new steam library to folder'. I tried all kinds of ways of creating the library, but always got the same message. My drive was not out of space, I had adequate permissions. I started/restarted steam. No luck.

The problem:
Failed to add new steam library to folder
The issue is that the Steam client cannot add new libraries while anything is happening to the existing game library.  In my case, one single game (way off the bottom of the screen!) was updating.  This activity prevents the Steam client from being able to add a new library folder.

The solution:
Pause or cancel the download/update. Make sure nothing is updating, then go to the Library display view in the Steam client. Then select: Steam->Settings->Steam Libraries Folders->Add Library Folder. You should then be able to select/create new library folders on new drives.

The shaming:
Valve engineers – fix that dialog! Be sure to tell people WHY you can’t create the folder, not just that you can’t. Error messages are useless unless they give you enough information about what’s wrong so that you can fix the problem. Especially one so simple to report.