Things I hadn't planned on learning today

How to recover a Linux Volume Manager-managed partition.

/home: not a directory

Ouch.

approximately back in action

Looks like the drive is totalled around about /usr; I recovered my home directory with no apparent damage, which is good. New hard drive ordered, which means the Lesser Laptop jumps from 20GB to 80GB. It started life with 6GB, as it happens.

note to people intent on recovering data from computers

While Global Frequency on VCD makes for some fine watching, it's not a particularly good boot disk.

I am become Finn, collector of cruft...

I used love the idea, when I first read Neuromancer, of standard tech taken off the shelves and jacked up to do things it wasn't intended to do; Cowboy hackers who surfed the net using hardware assembled from whatever they could find and all that sort of thing. ( Of course, I never quite imagined I'd be getting up to that sort of thing myself. )