Entries Tagged 'Commentary' ↓

If you are looking for a 3G phone running Android on AT&T, the pickings are slim. (Mostly because AT&T’s 3G bands are not compatible with many other carriers, and most Android GSM phones work with T-Mobile’s 3G bands. If you are willing to drop down to quad-band EDGE data most GSM Android phones will “work” with AT&T, they just suffer from slow networking.) Continue reading →

My Thinkpad X31 laptop with a Radeon M6 graphics chip had a problem with ACPI Suspend/Resume. About every five resumes, the graphics card would get messed up, making the screen unusable.
The computer would suspend/resume fine otherwise, but I’d be forced to reboot just to get X working again. (Just shutting down X and re-starting it wasn’t enough.)

The easy solution is to pass a “nomodeset” option to the kernal upon boot, but to do this on different versions of Ubuntu you need to do modify files in different places.

9.04: Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, and look for the defoptions= line. Add nomodeset to the end. Run sudo update-grub afterwards to save your changes.

9.10: Edit the /etc/grub.d/10_linux file to add a line such as:
GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA = "$GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA nomodeset"
or just add “nomodeset” to the end of a previous GRUB_CMDLINE_EXTRA entry. After this, run sudo update-grub.

10.04: Edit the /etc/defaults/grub file and change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset"
(You may have to run sudo update-grub again, or it may be taken care of for you)

Commentary: I find it funny that in each of the last three version’s of UBUNTU the name and location of the grub configuration file has changed…

The following are directions for how to do a quick home-inspection. These directions are intended to be completed in about two hours with a Realtor before you decide to make an offer. I have included the plain text in this blog post, as well as the Open Office .odt and .pdf export.
house_inspection.odt
house_inspection_checklist.pdf

Click through for the plain text of the checklist:
Continue reading →

Brittney is a blond cheerleader played by Heather Morris on the FOX musical TV show Glee. Below are a list of her sayings, help me add more:

Wheels (#1.9): I find recipes…confusing.

Hell-O (#1.14): Sometimes I forget my middle name.

Hell-O (#1.14): Did you know that dolphins are just gay sharks?

Home (#1.16) I’m pretty sure my cat is reading my diary.

Bad Reputation(#1.19):
I’ve been here since first period. I had a cold and I took all my antibiotics at the same time, and now I can’t remember how to leave.

Laryngitis (#1.20): So you’re pretty much the only guy in this school I haven’t made out with because I thought you were capital G gay, but now that you’re not, having a perfect record would mean a lot to me.

Other Episodes:
When I pulled my hamstring, I went to a misogynist.

She’s the one they made me talk to when they found out I was keeping that bird in my locker.

Reference: Glee Episode List

Hear my word down to the very letter,
and you shall know our characters better.
Our first and last are two of one,
Found leading nowhere and leading none.
Also the twins sit together, a pair
following everyone and leading everywhere.
Some more of us stay grouped together as ten,
But going the wrong way,
they end where they begin.
Only one remains, and I stand tall.
Can you give the number of us all?

SSH Login to my Ubuntu 8.04 machine was slow. (It would delay about 5 seconds after I issued the ssh command for the remote machine to request a password.) I believe this is because the remote machine is on my home network, and I have set up it’s hostname using host entries instead of having a true DNS name.
I edited the /etc/init.d/sshd_config file and added the single line:
UseDNS no
which fixed this problem as soon as I restarted the SSH server, with
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Ubuntu 9.04 comes with some visual effects from Compiz turned on by default. This post contains a list of the key combo’s used to active some of them. Compiz also offers many other “cool” effects. If you install the compizconfig settings manager you can enable/disable all of the neat effects (most of which are eye-candy, and not really useful).
Continue reading →

Following the directions on Lars’ blog, I set up an encrypted home directory on Ubuntu 9.04 using LUKS.

The following commands were all executed with root permissions. Add “sudo” to the front of the commands if you are not running with root permissions. Continue reading →

The netflix watch on demand video player uses Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight has an “adaptive playback” mode which attempts to choose one of multiple bandwidths for your video (and switch on the fly if your internet connection has more ore less bandwidth over time).

To see what it is currently using, press the Control, Alt, Shift and D keys all at the same time.
CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-D gives diagnostic information on-screen.

If you would like to force netflix to use a specific bandwidth (typical sizes are 500, 1000, and 1500 KBps, or 50, 100, 150 kilo-bytes a second), press the Alt, Control, Shift and S key at the same time.

CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-S allows you to manually force silverlight/netflix player to use a specific bandwidth for playback.

This can be useful if you want the absolute best quality (and are willing to pause the movie every so often to let it buffer), or if you are willing to use a lower quality than your full network connection supports so that some extra bandwidth is available for other users or applications.

NOTE: I was unable to get the key-combos above to work in full-screen mode. I had to have the netflix player in a browser window for them to work. In addition, sometimes I had to click within the siliverlight window (for example, by pressing the play/pause button) before the key combination would work.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 from 8.10 over the weekend.
The good:
Faster boot up. (worth the upgrade all by itself)
New notification “bubbles” that appear and then disappear again without any fuss.
OpenOffice 3.0 and other software upgrades.

The Bad:
Required tweaks to my pam_mount.conf.xml file to get my encrypted home directory to work. (Not an issue for most users.)

Bluetooth communication ports (serial over bluetooth) started giving errors because standard users no longer had permissions to use them. Adding the following code to an /etc/udev/rules.d/rfcomm.rules file allowed all users in the “dialout” group to access the /dev/rfcommXXX serial over bluetooth ports. (Ubuntu developers know about this problem and it will be fixed eventually.)

KERNEL=="rfcomm*", GROUP="dialout"

Java support for MIDI music failed until I installed timidity again with the following command:
sudo apt-get install timidity pmidi

The Annoying:
The hardware buttons on my thinkpad (brightness, volume, etc) still work, but no longer have an on screen display. I could fix this by installing the tpb (thinkPadButtons) package, but it takes up extra CPU cycles and power. I found that the packagers are actively discussing this issue and have decided to wait until they fix the issue within the default packages.

When running Pidgin (IM client), an “envelope” icon appears inside a “indicator-applet 0.1″ to show that it’s running. Of course, Pidgin itself pops up another icon to show that it’s running on my gnome panel at the same time. I’ve thought about removing the indicator-applet from my panel to remove the duplicate items, but worried about what else I may miss if it’s not there to “hold all of the system indicators”. I eventually decided to go into the Pidgin preferences and select “Show System Tray Icon” only “on unread messages” which mostly fixed this annoyance, although now I need two button clicks to bring the IM window to the top instead of just one.

The ATI M6 graphics processor on my IBM X31 laptop was not automatically configured to use hardware acceleration. To use ppracer and other applications that require hardware acelleration to work well (such as the new version of lyx!) I had to edit my xorg.conf file following directions I found here.