This is a collection of the late Aaron Swartz’s blog posts.

I’m adding this post not through blogging software, like I normally do, but by
hand, right into the webpage. It feels odd. I’m doing this because a week or
so ago my web server started making funny error messages and not working so
well. The web server is in Chicago and I am in California so it took a day or
two to get someone to check on it. The conclusion was the hard drive had been
fried.

When the weekend ended, we sent the disk to a disk repair place. They took
a look at it and a couple days later said that they couldn’t do anything. The
heads that normally read and write data on a hard drive by floating over the
magnetized platter had crashed right into it. While the computer was giving us
error messages it was also scratching away a hole in the platter. It got so thin
that you could see through it.