Wagonlicious

So, over the weekend I pulled out some bushes with the wagon. It worked just fine – apparently the relatively torquey engine and 3.42 posi is adequate for yanking stuff around. Beth got some video recorded, so I’ll add that up here sometime in the real near future. :)

So, driving in to work this morning, I thought I’d open the Chevelle up a little.  I added some transmission fluid a few days ago to see if maybe that’s why it was slipping (apparently, I cut the dipstick off just a little long, so “full” isn’t really full).  I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a fluke – and I just like quickly accelerating.  About the time I hit third gear, I noticed that there was suddenly a lot of white smoke behind me.  At least the shifts were firm.

I pulled to the side of the road, and verified that there was apparently about a four inch split in the upper heater hose.  I cut the other hose down and used it as a bypass for the heater.  So, I don’t have a heater – but I do have a not-leaking coolant system.  A friendly person stopped and got me two gallons of well water to fill the system back up.  I’ll have to flush and drain the system soon, therefore, since the mixture’s all wrong for cold weather.  I’ll be getting some high-pressure line and using AN fittings for the new setup, though.  My bulkhead fitting was leaking a little anyway, which has caused some carpet discoloration, so this’ll be an opportune time to rectify that situation.  I’m thkining about using push-lok fittings or similar this time; we’ll see how things go as far as affordability… :)

So, using most any Debian-based distro (Ubuntu’s my flavor of choice right now), there’s a pretty easy way to free up some diskspace wasted by a bunch of extra localization files for languages you probably don’t speak. Install the localepurge package, and just pick the language(s) you care about from the menu that comes up. I just picked en_US and en_US.UTF8 (or whatever the two us English packages were) on mine, since that’s all that’s spoken by anyone who uses my machines.

So, installing’s pretty straightforward:

sauer@hotrod:~$ sudo apt-get install localepurge

Then you’ve gotta actually run it. As root.

sauer@hotrod:~$ sudo localepurge
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 42101K
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 3313K

Total disk space freed by localepurge: 45414K

Whee. There’s 45MB I can waste on something else now! :)