Time Unknown - Bits and PCs

Warning for Liferea users upgrading to Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10)

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:27:00 +0200

Ungrading to Ubuntu Intrepid or rather to a newer Liferea than 8.04 has will wipe out your news bin contents, permanently putting all those interesting blog posts you have been gathering out of your reach. You can either not do it at all, or prepare yourself to declaring a news bin bankruptcy. If you are at all like me, this will feel like having to run the marathon naked... bad, difficult and like something is missing, but take my word on it, those news bins will be pretty full in a very short time again.

If you have backups, move only the .db file from backups to your updated .liferea_1.4 directory and your news bins should be restored to their former glory. Enjoy! (and thanks for #liferea people on this)

Kubuntu 8.10 Alternative and P5Q Pro network card

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 08:14:07 +0200

If you are installing Kubuntu 8.10 to a computer having a P5Q Pro (or possibly other type of P5Q) motherboard using the alternative install cd and the installer refuses to find the network card, there is no need to panic. Just install as you would normally, then do

sudo apt-get install linux-generic

which will install the ever so slightly newer version of the kernel. After a boot you'll have network normally.

Bookmark add-ons solve issues

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 22:07:50 +0300

My two major bookmark annoyances with Firefox 3 were not having a "bookmark this page" option in the bookmark hierarchy and having to open Organize bookmarks just to look at tags. Seems that Bookmark This Page Plus add-on solves the first issue and TagSifter solves the second. If in addition you feel tired to always have to open the bookmark tree when adding a bookmark the normal route, OpenBook add-on will let you change that.

'Clone' only one directory of your git repo

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:26:26 +0300

As both SVN and CVS support multiple projects under the same root, don't be too embarrassed if you accidentally made your git repository span multiple projects as well. This can be a big problem in situations where you want to publish just one of your projects. Worry not, there is a way out of the mess! You can separate a single directory into a repo of its own.

First, always work with a copy:

cp -r mygitmess myspecificnewname
cd myspecificnewname

Filter to just that one directory you want to single out:

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter MyDirectory HEAD

This will also move the contents of MyDirectory up into your working directory.

Some clean-up actions to make sure everything ends up fine and dandy:

rm -rf MyDirectory
git reset --hard
git gc --aggressive
git prune

Then make sure everything works and start using your project specific git repo! You can remove the old repo (mygitmess) once you have separated all of your projects similarly.

MaraDNS goodness

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:08:49 +0300

If you use Bind as your DNS server, you have probably upgraded it already. If you use MaraDNS, you just didn't need to. How's that for goodness.

Stuck with two browsers

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:21:31 +0300

I'm currently using Konqueror and Firefox 3, mostly because Konqueror is not as tolerant about page quirks as FF and FF on the other hand is still somewhat hoggy. I'd like to change to just one of them for most of my uses, but kind of feel I'd be giving something up in the process. It might be I still like Konqueror better, for some reason. Hmm. Any hints to ease the transition?

One needy Fox

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:35:50 +0300

Powertop result with idling Firefox3:

Power usage (ACPI estimate): 22.1W (2.6 hours)

Without:

Power usage (ACPI estimate): 19.2W (2.9 hours)

That's one needy Fox!

Huawei observations

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:11:12 +0300

Plugging in Saunalahti nettitikku Huawei 169 worked fine, and I could browse the web and ssh out. Soon, however, I realized that Akregator was failing to fetch feeds. I tried again and then fetched some feeds manually with Firefox.. that worked so it seemed unlikely .rss was somehow discriminated against. When I tried fetching podcasts with Amarok, that did not work either! I closed and restarted both apps, but no cigar.

Turned out both started working when I closed Knetwork-manager. I guess they believed it too well about there not being a network.

Happiness is a warm script

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sun, 04 May 2008 17:28:16 +0300

Now and then I notice I went away from my irssi without setting myself away and no messages got logged as the result. That's annoying and inconvenient. However, the autoaway.pl or even away.pl didn't look like they'd play nice with randaway.pl and I was not about to give up my randomnness for this. Luckily screen_away.pl does all I want it to and does not mess with my random aways. That's happiness.

External monitor goodness

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:53:13 +0300

Seems I ridiculously overestimated the difficulty of getting an external monitor working with my HP NC8230 laptop in Kubuntu. I fiddled with the GUI settings. I fiddled with the xorg.conf. No image. I pressed Fn+F4 (the button for external monitor) till my finger was sore. Only a login screen, then nothing. I asked for help in#kubuntu and they fiddled with the settings with me. Occasionally I got settings that worked worse than my originals and had to revert. I tried displayconfig-gtk with miserable results.

Then I thought to try xrandr --auto and it just worked! Not only did it work, but when I closed my laptop, the image on the external monitor just briefly blinked off and then came back. I'm one happy geek now.

2008-05-02:
Alas, later I discovered this too easy fix might not been all without drawbacks. I needed to switch the video.driver setting in Xine to get video playing work again in Miro and Kaffeine. For Kaffeine it was easy, just modify the settings from within the app, Miro however does not offer a human-writable config file, so I ended up adding --xine-driver=xshm to Miro's flags.

Mobile hard drive recommendation

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:33:18 +0200

If you want a mobile hard disk for backups or other purposes, WD Passport is a quite cool drive. Unlike many of the drives of this type, it only requires one usb slot from your computer, no external power source, and does not spin down automatically so it's a new filesystem away from being just perfect for Linux backups.

Two weeks off from pro-bono

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:57:31 +0200

I'm taking two weeks off from Ubuntu and Debian related pro-bono support on IRC starting now. No special reason for this, I just need a vacation from it.

Confessions of a gamer

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:08:15 +0200

Every time I get a new computer, I wish I did not like computer games so much. If I did not play PC games, I could skip having Microsoft Windows on the computer.

I don't like Microsoft Windows, but I do like the games and this puts me in an annoying Catch-22 situation. Outside gaming I'm an enthusiastic Linux person. I wish someone solved my troubles by making adventure games for Linux.

5-A-Day Lite

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:19:12 +0200

5-A-Day is an Ubuntu effort where everybody involved deals with 5 different bugs every day. 5 seems like a lot, if a person is also having work and life in addition of Ubuntu and from the project stats one can see in the last 7 days only 4 of the project participants reached 5 bugs a day. How much time it takes probably varies hugely depending on the action taken and the bug, but I'm really curious about the time spend and number of bugs dealt with by an average 5-A-Day volunteer.

Also, I'm hoping there would be "5-A-Day Lite", maybe 1-A-Day, to get people who are too busy for the time five bugs take to deal with a measly one bug a day, everyday. That too might make a difference. Currently, a solid 1-A-Day participant would make it to the 5-A-Day top contributors list easily.

The beautiful irony of things

nospam@example.com (Lynoure) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:28:16 +0200

I ran into a lovely site called Tao of Backup. It's a beautiful and witty story about importance and best practices of backups. Alas, the site it was made to promote, Veracity looks lost, with just robots.txt and an empty file named contents. I felt moved by it, and emailed the webmaster address for Tao of Backup with a note of sympathy and got "PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13)" promptly back.

Oh, the nasty double-whammy of irony!