Smothered in mud at the foot of the river.

• McLennan in SMH, with a good obituary by Bernard Zuel.

Further creativity needed: VistaPrint are doing 100 colour postcards "free" (you pay £2 to upload your design and a few quid postage). I need some use for 100 colour postcards. I don't have anything I particularly need to promote. Ideas welcomed. I'm also still after ideas for fridge magnets, though I'm certainly going to get some AAAAAAAAA! fridge poetry made.

Today it is pissing down in buckets. I will be leaving shortly to collect another PowerShot S100 (Digital Ixus original) won off eBay. If you like the idea of really nice photos, you may want this one.

I have One Zillion other things to do. What a great day it is for doing them.

He likes the look of that Cadillac.

I forgot to note previously: B-Movie February 2005 up. There are some really gorgeous shots in this set, thus proving it's the subject and photographer. stephmog is the star of this one, and the shot of sushidog was good enough to iconise.

I just got another camera for the Ixus pile that I'm eager to find good homes for. Presently it looks like:

• Two PowerShot S100 — the first model. Thirsty and slow compared to later models, but very nice photos. Cheap: £40 each to you squire, with charger and spare battery. — one bagsed by hazybubbles!
• A PowerShot S110 — a.k.a. Ixus v. Later model, same picture quality but a bit more advanced. the_rin expressed an interest but hasn't gotten in touch. £60 with full original kit in box. the_rin has bagsed this!
• Not an Ixus: a Casio Exilim EX-S1 — only 1.3MP real (2.0MP interpolated), but an insanely tiny spy camera with a remarkably low shutter lag time. £50, full kit except box. This is an EX-S2, 2MP real.

Anyone with an interest in any of the above, please let me know — anything not going to you lot (or this lot) will end up on eBay. Pick up in person from E17 or six quid post/pack. The 2MP Ixus are particularly noteworthy for really nice optics for a miniature camera; that is, a five year old 2MP that takes far better shots than the 5MP you're trying to work out if you can afford right now. Also, feel free to ask for assistance in camera stalking if you're after something else. Email: dgerard@gmail.com .

Others in the works:

• An Ixus v2 which doesn't take pictures — daneel_olivaw's old camera. Works perfectly otherwise. Could be a bad CCD, a loose wire or something severely fucked up in the optical path. Will be extremely nice when fixed.
• An Ixus IIs suffering an E18 error — bought to see if I can fix an E18 myself.
• An Ixus 400 — one of the very best Ixus ever made, on its way now. This one is likely to become mine. Though it's complete in box, so I might sell it on and get a lone 400 for myself.
• Two Ixus 50, not quite working — one here with a stuck lens, one on its way with "cosmetic damage." Frankencamera is likely.

And of course:

• One Ixus 50 — my lovely little camera I did these sets on. My current very own camera, though the optics are actually better on the older models.

The guy I got the S100 from this morning has a shiny new S2 IS. What a very useful toy that could be ...

Hard drive recovery advice needed.

arkady has had her third IBM DeathStar laptop drive give the clickety-click of doom. Now it's displaying the following symptoms:

• When trying to boot into Windows, it keeps repeating the same reading clatter over and over ... sounds normal except it repeats forever.
• When we boot into an Ubuntu Breezy live CD and try mount -t msdos /dev/hda1 /mnt , it gives: mount: /dev/hda1: can't read superblock . (We think it's FAT32 — when we try mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt, it gives wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1, missing codepage or other error.) We tried parted and that can't make head or tail of the superblock either.

Now then. We would like very much to recover the data on the drive. Does FAT32 do something sensible like litter spare copies of the superblock about the drive? Is there something else we can do?

And who the heck else makes drives any more, and do any of them have 2.5" drives rated for 24-hour use in hot environments? _nicolai_ has mentioned Hitachi, but them holding the DeathStar licence leaves us understandably reluctant ...