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Pröfy a enfin construit une maison qui ne s'effondre pas, mais elle est détruite par les autres trolls lors de la fête de la pendaison de la crèmière. Pröfy devient alors catatonique et les trolls partent à la recherche d'un médecin humain pour soigner son coté humain qui est malade. Ils rencontrent un psychanaliste qui déclare que Pröfy a un problème avec son père. Ils partent donc à sa recherche, et après l'avoir retrouvé, partent en croisade contre Tonsantöh qui brûle toute la forêt pour y faire pousser du maïs et du blé sur brûlis grâce à son pouvoir; ils finissent par se débarasser du bonhomme.

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Jim et Jenna disparaissent de leur nouveau magasin. Leurs amis enquêtent et Fernand, ayant lu un document laissé par Jim et à lire en cas de dispartion, leur apprend qu'au début de sa carrière au bureau royal, Jim travaillait sous couverture pour un traficant de drogue. Ce dernier l'ayant percé à jour, il livre Jim à son fournisseur, “l'Invisible”, un homme vivant dans une ville flottant dans les nuages et capable d'échanger son corps avec celui d'une femme au moyen d'un miroir. À la fin de l'épisode, une groupe de femmes arrive, et parmi elles se trouve Jenna.

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Hugo et Flora enquêtent sur la disparation d'un spectre, frère assassiné d'Ours-Espiègle, un indien médium dans une foire. Ils finissent par découvrir que le spectre a trouvé pour compagne une fantôme hantant un manoir, et a pour cette raison quitté son frère. Pendant ce temps, Dupin enquête sur une série de meutres qui ont eu lieu dans toute la france au cours des années passées.

Wikipedia

Un coupeur de bambou, Okina, trouve une princess minitature dans une pousse de bambou. Cette dernière se transforme en bébé, adopté par Okina et sa femme; le bébé grandit en un été pour devenir une fillette de 10 ans qui joue avec le enfants des voisins. Okina découvre une autre pousse de bambou remplie d'or et une autre pleine de riches tissue. Il décide que c'est le signe que sa fille doit devenir une princesse et vivre à la capitale. Il y fait construire une demeure, déménage avec sa femme et sa fille; cette dernière y reçoit une éducation digne de la noblesse, c'est à dire qu'elle se doit de rester cachée sans rien faire d'utile, mais continue à ses heures perdues à cultiver son jardin et travailler dans la maison. Lorsqu'elle atteint la puberté, elle se fait baptiser Kaguya et attire l'intérêt de cinq nobles qui veulent l'épouser. Sans l'avoir jamais vue, ils la comparent à des trésors mythiques. Kaguya annonce épouser le premier qui ramènera le trésor qu'il évoquait. Trois ans plus tard, certains reviennent avec des faux, mais leurs mensonsges sont percés à jour. L'empereur décide alors qu'il veut faire de Kaguya une des épouses. Alors que ce dernier cherche à l'embrasser de force, Kaguya disparaît et réapparaît un peu plus tard. Elle explique alors qu'elle a invoqué la Lune, d'où elle est originaire, de l'emmener loin de cette vie qu'elle n'aime pas, et que le 15 du mois elle sera obligée d'y retourner; son apparition sur Terre état une punition pour avoir voulu connaître autre chose que la vie parfaite et monotone sur la Lune. Kaguya fait alors une dernier visite dans la montagne où elle a passé son enfance, et comprend qu'elle aurait pu avoir été heureuse si elle y était resté et avait épousé son ami d'enfance. Le jour dit, une délégation de la Lune arrive et enlève Kaguya à sa famille; on lui passe de force le manteau de plumes qui lui fait tout oublier, mais elle verse tout de mêne une larme en voyant la Terre s'éloigner derrière elle.

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Richelieu reforme un groupe de soldats/espions d'élite surnommé les Lames du Cardinal, avec pour mission, dans le cadre de délicates négociations diplomatiques avec l'Espagne, de retrouver un chevalier espagnol réfugié en France avec un compagnon. Les Lames retrouvent puis perdent la trace du compagnon et empêchent l'enlèvement de la maîtresse de celui-ci. En parallèle, la Griffe Noire, une société secrète espagnole composée de decendants à forme humaine de dragons et de leurs fidèles, tente d'ouvrir une loge en France, ce que Richelieu cherche à empêcher. Ils finissent par découvrir le lieu de la cérémonie d'ouverture de la loge, où les âmes des fidèles sont liées à l'esprit d'un dragon ancestral et empêchent la cérémonie de s'accomplir. Ils découvrent aussi que la maîtresse du compagnon est en fait la fille de l'ambassadeur (déguisée en chevalier pour voyager plus discrètement), enfuie avec son amant, et que l'ambassadeur cherche à retrouver, utilisant les négociations pour forcer Richelieu à s'en occuper. On apprend enfin que la jeune femme est en fait la fille naturelle du capitaine des Lames, et que le mari de la mère, actuel ambassadeur d'Espagne, est une ancienne Lame qui avait trahi ses compagnons lors du siège de la Rochellem provoquant la dissolution du groupe.

On the radio the other day, I heard a mathematician warning about too hastily interpreting probability results. Here's the example he gave.

Imagine a population of 100,000 people, 100 of which having a rare disease (but not knowing about it) and therefore 99,900 of which not being sick. Imagine moreover there is a test that can detect this disease with a 99% accuracy: this means that the test will on average give a positive result on 100 × 0.99 = 99 of the 100 sick persons and a negative result on 100 × (1 - 0.99) = 1 of them. It will also give a negative result on 99,900 × 0.99 = 98901 non-sick persons and a (false) positive result on 99,900 × (1 - 0.99) = 999 non-sick persons.

This means that out of the 99 + 999 = 1098 persons (out of the whole population) who got a positive result, only 99 actually have the disease. This means that the test indicates, for a random person taken from the whole population, only a 99 / 1098 ≈ 9% probability of being sick. In other words, even if the test is positive, there is still a 91% chance of not being sick! This new result needs to be put into perspective with the probability of being sick before doing the test (0.1%) and after getting a positive test result (9%, i.e., 90 times higher chance of being sick). But it also means that because of the imbalance between sick and non-sick populations, the 1% failure of the test will yield a lot more false positive results among the non-sick population than correct positive results among the sick population.

“once described as gooseberry pie and cream, this beer has subtle notes of kiwi and apple with a marriage of walnuts and cramy toffee”

Kind of creamy and fruity. Contains malted barley.

Belhaven Brewery Company Ltd., Dunbar, Scotland. 3.9% alcohol.

Christian, Mexique Mokaya bio 66%: doux, biscuit, safran

Christian, Panama 70%: sec, un peu astringeant, noix de coco

Christian, Trinidad 73%: doux et crémeux, fruits secs

Christian, Cuba 77%: légèrement fruité et amer

Wikipedia

In the near future, mutants are exterminated by invulnerable robotic creatures names Sentinels. They have been developed by Trask from the 1970s, and his assassination by Mystique in 1973 has convinced the government of the mutant threat and the need to eradicate them. Thanks to Kitty Pride's ability to send someone's mind back in time into ones own body, Logan wakes up in his 1973 body with the task, set by both Professor X and Magneto, to prevent Trask's death and the development of Sentinels. He manages to convince Charles Xavier of the veracity of his story and knowledge of the future, and thanks to the help of young Evan Peters they free Magneto from his cell in the middle of the Pentagon. The then track Mystique to the Vietnam War peace conference in Paris and prevent her from killing Trask, but she is wounded and thanks to her blood Trask manages to progress with Sentinel. During Traks presentation of Sentinel at the White House, Magneto flies a stadium around the building and uses the Sentinels to fire on the guards. He then extracts the saferoom containing President Nixon, his staff and Trask from the White House's basement and prepares to kill the President. Finally convinced by Xavier's arguments, Mystique prevents Magneto from doing that. Nixon is then convinced that mutants don't need to be exterminated, and Logan wakes up nowdays in his current body but in a new timeline; he and Xavier then exchange their knowledge of history since 1973.

“combination of new world hops deliver citrus and spicy notes”

Citrus all right, with also some flowers. Contains malted barley.

Fuller, Smith & Turner, London, England. 4.5% alcohol.

“three different yeast strain”

Very sweet, very strong, not that interesting. Contains barley malt.

Ridgeway Brewing, South Stoke, Oxfordshire, England. 12.0% alcohol.

Wikipedia

The story takes place in a fictional alpine country in 1932. Gustave H. is the concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel and (among others) the lover of Madame D. After her sudden death, he inherits a valuable painting, but decides to steal it after being threatened by the children of Madame D. Soon after, he is accused of the murder of Madame D. and arrested. The lawyer of Madame D. is murdered after having announced to the family that a document is missing from the numerous amendments to her will. Thanks to his lobby boy and protégé Zero, Gustave escapes prison and try to find Serge X., Madame D.'s butler, who had been forced to testify against Gustave. They find him in a monastery, but he is murdered by a killer working for Madame D.'s son Dmitri. Back at the hotel, now general quarters of the army since the beginning of the war, they recover the painting hidden in the hotel's safe and discover the missing document in the back of the painting, placed there by Serge X. who had helped Gustave stealing it. Gustave is named sole heir of Madame D., and thus becomes owner of the hotel. But Gustave is soon after killed by a grumpy soldier who attacked Zero. Based on a deal Gustave and Zero had made just after stealing the painting, Zero inherits from Gustave and becomes the owner of the hotel.

“Maris Otter malt and… English hops”

Just another ale. Contains barley malt.

The Abbey Brewery, Camden Row, Bath, England. 4.2% alcohol.

“single malt beer made only with pale malt… hoppy aftertaste”

Quite flowery, but otherwise just another ale. Contains barley.

RCH Brewery, Weston-super-Mare, Avon, England. 4.3% alcohol.

Wikipedia

Harris cannot stop the wave of robberies in his precinct; he then gets help from Lassard and his best men. They soon undertand that there is a mole among them, telling the robbers about all their moves. After loosing a priceless diamond, used as bait, they are dismissed and continue investigatin on their own. They find out that the robbers are obeying the orders of a mysterious man, and that all the robberies are taking place along the path of the future tramway. After a long chase, they eventually find out that the mysterious head of the gang is no other than the mayor, who had been buying property along the future tramway line at very good price because of the robberies in the area, planning to resell them once the tramway has caused the prices to increase again. The unwilling mole was Harris, who was reporting his progress to the Mayor.

“zesty flavour and aroma… finish the beer over specially toasted oak”

Sontrg citrus aromas, very nice, but I would have expected something more distinctive from Innis & Gunn. Contains wheat, barley malt.

Innis & Gunn, Edinburgh, Scotland. 5.6% alcohol.

“tangy red-fruit flavour with nutty, toffee overtones”

The first sip didn't taste much like anything. After that, it turned out to be a bit more sour than most beers. I didn't find any nutty/toffee flavour though. Contains barley and wheat.

Felinfoel brewery, Llanelli, Wales. 4.2% alcohol.

“Cascade and Mount hops”

Just another ale, but quite nice. Contains malted barley and malted wheat.

Wood Brewery, Wistanstow, South Shropshire, England. 4.4% alcohol.

I finally built the timer for the new Leffakone. It is based on an Arduino Uno, which controls two reed relays and one LED. The reed relays can be activated with a very low current (10 mA), meaning that the Arduino can drive them directly from any I/O pin. The relays' contacts are connected in parallel to the power button and the reset button. The Arduino's serial-over-USB port is connected to one of the USB headers of the motherboard with a home-made cable, and the timer is set by software through this serial connection. All the wires coming from the computer case's front panel are connected to the circuit (to the 8-pin header protruding from the protoboard), and wires go from there to the motherboard's front-panel header (2 white wires for the power button, 2 grey wires for the reset button, and 2 blue+black wires for the power-on LED. The two boards are screwed on the bottom plate of the case of an old CD drive; for installation, I closed the case and put it into the computer as a regular CD drive.

While the timer is counting down, it blinks the computer case's HDD LED (which therefore is not anymore indicating the HDD activity).

When the timer expires, it closes the power button's relay for 500 ms. An optional watchdog timer would close the reset button's relay if the machine does not boot correctly i.e., if the timer is not reset within 30 s. This watchdog timer is currently disabled in the code, since the problems I have had with GRUB freezing on startup seem to be related to manually powering the device and switching the TV on shortly after. I'll enable it if it seems necessary. Here is the code for the Arduino.

The software client for the timer is written in Python and is very straightforward: send ASCII digits to the serial port, ending with a newline character. It interprets this number as a number of seconds, and starts counting down. When disconnecting the client from the serial port, the Arduino resets and forgets all about the timer value; I found out that setting the DTR line to False in the Python Serial object prevents this from happeining. I haven't however found out how to prevent a reset when connecting to the Arduino; this is less a problem, since when I connect to it, I want to reset the timer, and reseting the whole program does just that. It seems that it's the Linux driver that asserts the DTR line when opening the serial port; I haven't investigated further. It is worth noting that when the machine boots, it does not reset the Arduino.

Finally, the cristal in the Arduino is accurate to 99.5% which is not enough to guarantee that the timer will wake up the computer within a minute after a countdown of several days. I therefore apply a corrective factor to the time sent to the Arduino. The factor was estimated from a 15.5 hour countdown, which lasted about 90s more than it should have. Over a 7-days countdown, it would cause the timer to expire about 16 minutes too late.

“tawny coloured, fruity ale with a light hoppiness in the aroma”

Just another ale, but quite nice. Contains malted barley and wheat.

Goffs Brewery, Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England. 4.0% alcohol.

Before Easter, the supermarket was selling Rölli suprise-eggs, announcing that every fifth egg contained a figurine related to Rölli's universe. This made me wonder: how many eggs you need to buy to ensure that you get at least one such figurine?

The following formula gives the probability (p) of getting at least one Rölli figurine given that one has bought n eggs, and that every k egg contains such a figurine:

p = 1 − (1 − 1/k)ⁿ

The answer to the first question is not straightforward, though. To be absolutely sure to get at least one figurine, you need to buy 4/5 of the egg production plus one egg, because there is always an (admitedly slim) chance that the 4/5 of are made entirely of eggs containing something else than a Rölli figurine, and that the 1/5 that is left is made only of eggs containing Rölli figurines. The extra egg that you need to buy is therefore taken from this last 1/5, and is guaranteed to contain a Rölli figurine.

If you are not willing to spend so much time and money tracking and buying most of the egg production, you can trade time and money for a tiny bit of uncertainty. For example, if you can accept to have only 90% chance of getting a Rölli figurine instead of 100%, it is enough to buy 11 eggs. If you want a better chance yet and want to go for 95%, you need to buy 14 eggs. Finally, if you want a 99% chance, you need to get 21 eggs. These values were computed from the formula above, setting k = 5 (“every fifth egg”), p = 0.90 or p = 0.95 or p = 0.99, solving the equation for n and rounding the result to the nearest, larger integer.

It is also worth noticing that if you decide to buy 5 eggs (because every 5th egg contains a Rölli figurine), you have only about 2 in 3 chances of getting a Rölli figurine.

The table below gives the minimum values of n for a given value of k and different probability thresholds. It also gives the ratio n over k, i.e., given a “one in k” probability, how many times k does one need to get to have a probability greater than the thresold. The second column also indicates, given a “one in k” probability, what are you chances of getting what you want if you get k items. Notice that these values grow toward a given, finite limit when k grows larger.

One can use this table to find out how many times one needs to play the roulette in a casino to have 95% chance of winning at least once: a european roulette has 37 numbers (k = 37), and the limit of the n/k ratio is about 3; one therefore needs to play about n ≅ 37 × 3 = 111 times (the row for k = 37 indicates the actual value is n = 110).

A dark lager, not my favourite. Contains barley malt.

Saimaan Juomatehdas Oy, Mikkeli, Finland. 4.6% alcohol.

Sweet and roasted. Contains barley and wheat.

Tennent Caledonian Breweries, Glasgow, Scotland. 4.7% alcohol.

Just another ale, quite bitter. Contains barley malt.

Wychwood Brewery Co. Witney, Oxfordshire, England. 4.1% alcohol.

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After the events of The Quantum Thief, Jean le Flambeur and Mieli are on their way to Earth. Jean is trying to open the Schrödinger's Box he retrieved from the memory palace on the Oubliette. After making little progress, he is prodded by the ship Perhonen to talk to Mieli, who turns out to be possessed by the pellegrini again. This time, Jean identifies Mieli's employere as the Sobornost Founder, Joséphine Pellegrini, and gets her to reveal how he got captured, thereby picking up the clues to make plans for his next heist. No sooner is that done that an attack comes from the Hunter. The ship and crew barely survived that, and Jean realizes that he has to find a better way to open the Box – fast.

In the city of Sirr, on an Earth ravaged by wildcode, Tawaddud and Dunyazad are sisters and members of the powerful Gomelez family. Tawaddud is the black sheep of the family, having run away from her husband and consorted with a notorious jinn, a disembodied intelligence from the wildcode desert. Now Cassar Gomelez, her father, hopes to get her to curry favor a gogol merchant, Abu Nuwas, so that he has enough votes in the Council for the upcoming decision to renegotiate the Cry of Wrath Accords with the Sobornost. Soon, Tawaddud is embroiled in an investigation with a Sobornost envoy into the murder that triggered the need for her father to forge a new alliance in the first place, and forced to confront old secrets that will change Sirr forever. The envoy is Jean in disguise; he is trying to find where the mind of Matjek Chen, another Sobornost founder, is hidden and recover it.

(Shamelessly adapted from Wikipedia's The Fractal Prince)

“Brewed with yeast cultured from the original bottle saved in a 1825 shipwreck off the English Channel… ruby red colour with a liquorice aroma”

Sweet and roasted flavours. Contains malted barley.

Geltsdale Brewery, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England. 4.5% alcohol.

Wikipedia

During a blue moon night, a few smurfs and Gargamel travel through a vortex to modern New York. The smurfs meet Patrick, a marketing agent for a cosmetic company, and his wife Grace. To go back to their village, they need to find when a new blue moon is possible by reading the stars, find the correct spell and execute it. The find a star gazer in a toy shop (where they wreak havoc), but must fight Gargamel who is still trying to catch them. In an antique shop, they find the spell in a book about Smurfs, but are caught up by Gargamel who captures Papa Smurf. They are supposed to flee, but thanks to the spell, they manage to bring all the smurfs to New York, attack Gargamen's lair and free Papa Smurf. They all go back to their village.

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Recueil de nouvelles de Jean-Philippe Jaworski.

Janua Vera: Leodegar, Roi-Dieu de Leomance a des cauchemars où il entends des coups frappés. Pour se changer les idées, il part à l'assaut d'une forteresse, est blessé mortellement, et meurt en frappant le portail dudit chateau. Il reconnait alors les coups de ses cauchemars.

Mauvaise donne: Benvenuto Gesufal échoue à assassiner sa cible puis découvre que son patron est assassiné. Il découvre que sa cible était le Podestat de la ville de Ciudalia, et qu'il était lui-même le commenditaire de l'assassinat, dont le but était de discréditer un opposant politique. Benvenuto affronte le Podestat, et le convainc de le prendre à son service.

Le service des dames: Pour payer le droit de passer une rivière, le chevalier Ædan doit rapporter la tête du baron voisin, Hywel, qui a tué le mari de la baronne locale. Ædan s'exécute, mais se rend compte qu'il a été manipulé, le mari de la baronne avait agressé Hywel.

Une offrande très précieuse: Cecht le barbare est bléssé lors d'une bataille et, perdu, tente avec Dugham, un compagnon mortellement blessé, de rejoindre son pays. Perdu dans la forêt, il rencontre la Vieille Déesse qui le convainc d'accepter la mort de son fils adoptif pour prix de la guérison de Dugham. Cecht se réveille alors sur le champ de bataille plusieurs jours plus tôt et un Dugham en bonne santé le guide vers leur pays.

Le conte de Suzelle: Toute jeune, Suzelle rencontre un elfe et en tombe amoureux. Toute sa vie durant elle espère le revoir. Son fils meurt à a guerre, son mari meur aussi, et chassée de chez elle par sa bru, part vivre dans une cabane dans la forêt. À la fin de sa vie, cherchant du bois par un hiver terrible, elle revoit l'elfe, qui se souvient d'elle, mais qui croit qu'il ne s'est écoulé qu'un an ou deux.

Jour de guigne: Maître Calame, scribe, souffre du Syndrôme du Palimpseste après avoir écrit sur un parchemin de sorcellerie mal gratté: il a une malchance pas possible et devrait statistiquemen se faire encore assassiner. Le bailli décide de le contraindre à servir d'appât pour capturer un meurtrier ; Calame se retrouve finalement face à ce dernier, un Changeur de Forme qui prend son apparence, attrape sa malchance et meurt bêtement.

Un amour dévorant: Deux fantômes hantent le bois depuis deux siècles à la recherche d'Éthaine, une jeune fille. Un prêtre du Désséché enquête dans le but d'appaiser ces âmes perdues, découvre l'identité des fantômes (un baron et son écuyer) mais échoue à retrouver le fantôme de la fille. Le pêcheur local, que le prêtre a oublié d'interroger, sait que le fantôme de la fille enceinte, hante l'étang où elle s'est suicidée pour échapper aux deux hommes.

Le confident: Un prêtre du Désséché fait voeu d'Obscurité et s'enferme dans une crypte, où il finit par entendre les confidences des morts.

Plutôt fleurie, sucrée et un peu amère. Contient des malts d'orge et de blé.

Sainte Crucienne, Sainte-Croix-en-plaine, Alsace. 7.5% d'alcool.

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Fourteenth book of the Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, published in 2012. The Trollocs are attacking on multiple fronts. Rand manages to unite all the people to fight in the Last Battle under Elayne's command. He also convinces Tuon that the Seanchan must take part in the battle against the Shadow. In the Black Tower, Taim is revealed as a Darkfriend and turns Asha'men to the Shadow. Logain, his prisoner, resists and with a few followers manages to escape when Perrin, in the World of Dreams chasing Slayer, deactivates the ter'angreal that prevents making gateways. The battle is going badly for the forces of the Light, especially since the four Great Captains are under Compulsion from Moghedien and do mistakes on purpose. They are howerver relieved of their command and Mat, unaffected by the Power thanks to his medallion, becomes the General of the armies. Meanwhile, Rand enters a cave in Shayol Ghul and confronts the Dark One in spirit while swordfighting against Moridin. He is shown possible futures where the Shadow wins and where Rand kills it as he intends, but none of them seems good to Rand. On the battlefield, Galad and Gawin die figthing Demandred, leader of the Sharans, who have suddenly appeared on the Shadow's side; Egwene dies as well, burned out by drawing too much Power while reparing the rips in the Pattern caused by Demandred's repeated use of balefire. Faile, in charge of taking the Horn of Valere from Tar Valon to Mat, ends up with the Horn in the Blight, and then at a Trolloc's camp. She gives Olver the Horn, asking him to find Mat, while she disappear distracting the Trollocs. Olver, trapped, eventually sounds the Horn, making the Heroes of the Horn appear and fight along the forces of the Light. Lan finally manages to kill Demandred while Rand understands that the Dark One cannot be killed and closes the Bore, preventing it from reaching the world again. He then wins against Moridin and exits the cave carrying his body. The Shadow being without a leaders, the forces of Light eventually win the battle. The last of the Forsaken are killed or taken prisoner. Rand apparently dies, and his body is burned on a public funeral pyre, but his spririt wakes up in Moridin's body; he quitely leaves.

“crystal, black and pale malts, Challenger and First Gold hops”

Sweet with an initial hint of honey. Contains malted barley.

Greene King, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England. 6.5% alcohol.

Fruitée mais assez amère. Contient des malts d'orge et de blé.

Sainte Crucienne, Sainte-Croix-en-plaine, Alsace. 6.0% d'alcool.

Douce et fruitée. Contient des malts d'orge et de blé.

Sainte Crucienne, Sainte-Croix-en-plaine, Alsace. 5.4% d'alcool.

My new computer has a UEFI firmware. I installed Debian Wheezy, which in turn installed the EFI variant of GRUB. For that purpose, the Debian installer made the first partition on the hard disk drive of type VFAT and mounted in /boot/efi.

My problem is that GRUB tends to freeze, either just before booting the kernel (showing forever “Loading initial ramdisk”) or just after the welcome message (“Welcome to Grub!”). Pressing the computer's reset button allowed to reboot the computer, and everying went then fine. It seems to be possible to reproduce the bug at will by switching off the power supply, waiting 15 seconds for the capacitors to get empty and then reboot the computer. Booting however also hangs quite often after powering the computer off in software (where the power supply still provides some power to the motherboard).

I read here and there that EFI GRUB was quite buggy, so I decided to switch to PC GRUB (the variant for booting with the Legacy firmware, aka BIOS).

In a first attempt, I configured the motherboard's firmware to use “Legacy ROM only” instead of “UEFI only”. Debian continued to boot normally with the still installed EFI GRUB, and the freeze when rebooting after having switched off the power supply seemed to have disappeared. It howerver froze again today and so I decided to change from EFI GRUB to BIOS GRUB.

/usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: This GPT partition label has no BIOS Boot
 Partition; embedding won't be possible!.
/usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: Embedding is not possible.
 GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists.
 However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..

After a bit of research on the Web, I found someone's advice to change the flag of the FAT partition to bios_grub. I then forced the reinstallation of grub-pc with apt-get install --reinstall grub-pc, which didn't complain anymore.

On the next reboot however, the startup script indicated that “fsck died with status 6”. I found out that it tried to check the VFAT partition, but since GRUB is now installed there, it is not anymore recognized as a VFAT partition, and fsck was legitimately skipping it. parted confirmed that fact, and blkid does not list the VFAT partition anymore either. I therefore commented it out in /etc/fstab and now the boot does not fail anymore.

“malty and fruity Christmas ale… bitter finish”

Just another ale. Contains malted barley.

Greene King, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England. 4.2% alcohol.

Very sweet ginger beer, quite nice if you don't mind the sweetness.

Produced for Accolate Wines Ltd, Guildford, London, England. 4.0% alcohol.

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Published in 2010.

Miles is in to Kibou-daini to investigate the hidden motives of a cryocorp (a company specialized in freezing people before their death and storing the bodies) who wants to expand its business on Komarr. A failed attempt at kidnapping him (and other foreigners attending a conference organized by the cryocorp) leads him to meet a small community running an unofficial cryocorp in abandonned faclities, allowing poor people to benefit from cryopreservation. Thanks to Jin, a homeless orphan whose mother Lisa was frozen in suspicions circumstances eighteen months earlier, Miles manages to contact the Barrayaran consulate and continue his investigation. Jin, arrested by the police while carrying a message from the consulate to Miles and returned to his aunt's, escapes with his sister Mina and find refuge at the consulate. Miles then wants to find Lisa's body to find out what she had discovered before being forcibly frozen. He eventually finds her in the basement of an employee of another cryocorp; the latter had told Lisa about a fraud that the cryocorp had tried to hush up by silencing Lisa and her associates. During his invetigation, Miles also discovers that the cryocorps receive a mandate from their patrons for voting in their place during the elections; this gives enormous power to the cryocorp on Kibou-daini, and because of Komarr's peculiar laws, would have given them the same power there. Thanks to Lisa's revival, the fraud becomes finally public, the guilty executives of the cryocorp are arrested, and Jin and Mina have their mother back.

“A toasted malt flavour… pronounced hop”

Quite flowery, otherwise just another ale. Contains barley malt and oats.

Wychwood Brewery Co. Witney, Oxfordshire, England. 4.7% alcohol.

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Sixième et dernier volume des aventures d'Oksa Pollock.

Orthon a assassiné le président des États-Unis et a fait du nouveau président sa marionnette. Il a proposé aux dirigents de plusieurs pays de se joindre à son projet d'éliminer tous les humains qui ne satisfont pas ses critères et de batir un monde nouveau. Ceux qui ont refusé ont vu leur population attaquée par des Chiroptères, forçant des millions de personnes au suicide. Oksa et les siens ont traqué Orthon jusqu'à Washington, puis à sa base secrète à Detroit, où il construit une fusée chargée d'uranium ; ils apprennent qu'Orthon veut détruire l'étoile qui permet à Édéfia de rester invisible, tuant Oksa la Gracieuse du même coup. Les Sauve-Qui-Peut parviennent à s'échapper, et contactent les dirigeant des pays qui avaient refusé la proposition d'Orthon. Grâce à eux, ils découvrent qu'Orthon bâtit une cité au coeur de la forêt amazonienne, sur le modèle d'Édéfia. Un bombardement, organisé par le Brésil détruit la cité. Oksa et les siens retournent alors dans la base de Detroit et parviennent juste à temps à empêcher la destruction de l'étoile. Oksa affronte Orthon et parvient à se résoudre à le tuer. Tous partent finalement pour Édéfia, sauf Abakoum, Tugdual, Zoé et Mortimer qui décident de rester sur Terre. On apprend qu'alors que les trois enfants étaient brièvement prisonniers d'Orthon dans sa base de Detroit, on leur a inoculé un virus qui leur a donné la capacité des Diaphans pour absorber les sentiments amoureux d'autrui jusqu'à tuer, ainsi que le besoin de se «  nourrir  » ainsi. Abakoum reste avec eux pour les protéger.

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Hulk se marie. J'ai bien rigolé.