A moment's panic this morning when I sshed into my media box (my old laptop, plugged into stereo and TV) to find that it seemed to be in the middle of deleting all its files

dan@buggles:~$ firefox 
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
dan@buggles:~$ ls -l .Xauthority 
-rw------- 1 dan dan 106 2008-06-02 15:47 .Xauthority
dan@buggles:~$ rm .Xauthority 
Bus error (core dumped)
dan@buggles:~$ dmesg
/usr/bin/python: can't open file '/usr/lib/command-not-found': [Errno 2] No such file or directory
dan@buggles:~$ cat /proc/kmsg 
-bash: /bin/cat: No such file or directory
dan@buggles:~$ cd /
dan@buggles:/$ ls
-bash: /bin/ls: No such file or directory
dan@buggles:/$ echo *
big bin boot cdrom dev etc home initrd initrd.img lib lost+found media mnt opt proc root sbin srv sys tmp usr var vmlinuz
dan@buggles:/$ cd bin
dan@buggles:/bin$ echo *
 *

and so on and so forth. First hypothesis being that someone had pwned it, I pulled out its network and rebooted, to be met by a not-normal noise from the disk and the "Not a system disk" error from the bios. So, probably hardware. Fortunately there was nothing important on it anyway, but it does mean I am bereft of last.fm until I have time to fiddle with USB key distros or something like that.

Bruising is calming down again - still looking a bit mustard-coloured but not nearly as garish as it was. Pain-free ROM is I think improving (I'm spending a lot of time with hot packs pressed to my neck), but I haven't really been taking notes.