I’m on machine #2 of my house-wide upgrade to MEPIS 8.0 which is my Son’s desktop. He’s got some network card that reports itself as a “davicom semiconductor” card and the upgrade didn’t like it. No network access. I poked around and found the following commands that when executed as “su” solved my problem. Note to myself in the future that this may come in handy:
- rmmod tulip
- rmmod dmfe
- modprobe dmfe
My 9 year old son walked into my office yesterday. He was carrying his prized Lego Star Wars AT-TE Walker box and he asked me if I could open the box for him.
“Are you sure you want me to open that?” I say in a playful voice.
“Yes, just open the box Dad!” says he.
“I’m not sure I should open that box.” I say purposefully being annoying.
My son sighs and rolls his eyes. My annoying behavior is having the desired effect!
And then my 9 year old son says this:
“sudo Open My Lego box”
I was powerless. I had to obey his command. I was laughing full out while I did it, but I opened his Lego box.
I’m a proud dad.
I must say that I haven’t ever seen this one before. I’m transitioning from an XP Pro machine to a new Vista machine. I’m now trying to debug through a VCX and … this. What gives?!?!
I wish I was there. I can’t wait to hear of the excellent presentations, lessons learned, and comraderie found.
If you haven’t listened to Chris and Bryan’s show, you gotta:
My wife surprised me with a GPS system for my birthday last month, and I love it. Georgia is a difficult state to navigate around. Each of the older roads are named for where they go.  This means that the roads end up changing names every 5 miles or less. For example, Roswell Rd. is the road that goes to the city of Roswell. However, things get difficult when you are in Roswell, that same road is named Atlanta Hwy because … it leads back to Atlanta. Of course the road just doesn’t end in Roswell but it keeps going, and keeps changing names. You see my difficulty in driving in this city.
Along with the name change issue, the road signs are miniscule and far off the road. Forget it if it is night time, and you’re looking for a particular turn. Add to that that the road signs have often been mangled by trucks taking too sharp of a corner, and you might as well give up.
My friend suggested that I check with Garmin to see if I get a free update to the maps, and I did! Yeah Garmin!
I had to update my GPS software however and it only has software for Windows and Mac. Small boo for Garmin.
They allow for the download of an EXE that is 2G in size and allow that to happen through the Firefox browser. Yeah Garmin!
They require a downloader piece of software that wouldn’t work with Firefox, but did work through Internet Explorer. Boo Garmin.
After downloading the software, I can run it from my network server, but it takes forever to extract. Hmmm.
After validating my software with my Nuvi 350 GPS, it then says that I need more space on my C:\ drive and it doesn’t allow me to specify a different drive. Boo Garmin.
It says that I need about 6G of space on my C:\ drive. I clean and clean and risk instability, but I couldn’t get enough space. My F:\ partition has enough space but that’s not an option for the software. Boo Garmin.
My son’s computer normally boots to MEPIS Linux, but he’s also got the remnants of Windows and he’s got just enough space for this process; 9G free. Whew. Lucky!
After about 30 minutes of extracting the file over the network, and an hour of updates, I’ve got my new maps. Yeah Garmin!
Dang, that was a long hard road to travel to get me to travel our long hard roads. I’ll let you know if the maps are any better. My old Nuvi thinks the road in front of my neighborhood is one way and likes to send me a crazy path. I hope it’s better now.
I’ve been doing more web site designs lately. My clients will often give me hundreds of product images that I need to manipulate. I’ve got Thumbnailer on the Windows platform to do a lot of my processing.
However, I’ve taken to adding borders to the images. Typically I’m adding a white inner border, with a colored border that matches the web site color scheme. Thumbnailer doesn’t have this capability however. At least not the version that I’ve purchased.
After having enough, I finally stumbled upon the solution: MOGRIFY which is part of the ImageMagick suite of tools.
Here are some examples. To add a white border to the images:mogrify -border 10x10 -bordercolor '#FFFFFF' *.jpg
I will then add a thin yello border:mogrify -border 2x2 -bordercolor '#FFCC33' *.jpg
Here are some other variations that I haven’t tried just yet, but I found it on some other sites. What could go wrong?
To convert a set of images from PNG to JPG:mogrify -format jpeg -quality 85 *.png
To resize a set of images: mogrify -resize 500x375 -quality 80 +profile *.jpg
To force your image to a certain size with resizing:mogrify -geometry 400x200 *.jpg
I hope this post helps someone out. Let me know if you found it useful.
I normally don’t post political things on this blog, tending to keep this blog technical in nature but … my friend is running for congress! How can I not post about it?!?
Kevin Ragsdale, FoxForward “Best Presenter” winner, is running for congress. His top priority just happens to be my top priority for this election: our budget crisis.
I’ll be keeping my eye out to see what Kevin’s stance is on the Fair Tax legislation. There’s nothing like bringing Trillions of dollars back into the US economy and giving power back to the people, like the Fair Tax.
Good luck Kevin!!! Give ‘em heck!
My office is an oven in the summer. I’ve got two servers, a desktop, a laptop, and two 19″ CRT monitors. By the afternoon, temperatures are over 84 degrees in my office.
I’ve contemplated doing all sorts of expensive solutions. Window AC unit was one, but it would be ugly, loud and my neighbors wouldn’t like it as my office faces the street. I’ve contemplated re-routing my upstairs AC into my office. The upstairs naturally runs more than the downstairs and that’d help.
I decided that the two 19″ CRTs were a major culprit however and I could replace them. I’ve been watching LCD monitor prices on Dealnews.com and prices were pretty stable for 20″ widescreen monitors, hovering right around $200. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
I decided to hop over to Walmart.com and see what they had to offer. They had an ACER 20″ widescreen AL2016WB monitor for $184. It was capable of 1680×1050 with a nice refresh rate and nice contrast ratio. I watched the price for a couple of days and it was stable (not dropping) so I ordered two of them. For $0.87 delivery to the door for each ($1.94 total), that’s pretty good. Dang if UPS wasn’t ringing my doorbell in just a couple of days. I was really shocked at how fast they arrived. I was expecting 10 business days. Good deal.
Well, the big test was to try it out on my MEPIS Linux based Toshiba laptop. I fully expected to plug the thing in, reboot and have a lovely display. Wasn’t to be. The monitor would blank out with a small window stating “Input Not Supported”. Of course my Toshiba Satellite laptop isn’t the best of laptops so when the external monitor is receiving the signal, the LCD on the laptop is disabled. Not a fun way to debug things. In my laptop I’ve got the Intel Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML video card. I know it’s fairly capable as it was able to run my 1600×1200 CRT display. I’m hoping it’s able to run at 1680×1050 for the LCD monitor.
ALT+F6 gets me a text login prompt and I log in as root. I’ve tried a ton of things including 915resolution and running Xorg -configure followed by a Xorg -config /root/xorg.conf.new to try out what was autodetected by Xorg. No love.
I finally got in and started really playing with the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I removed all of the references to the 1600×1200 resolutions in the Display sections. I added in lots of “1680×1050″ references in its place.
shutdown now -r got the laptop to reboot and … damn, it worked! Joy.
The only way I can explain it is that the laptop and LCD monitor aren’t really “talking” the way they should be so the laptop is guessing what video signal to send over. Because they weren’t talking, the laptop was sending over a 1600×1200 signal which the LCD monitor was rejecting but the laptop wasn’t listening, so we were at an impasse. I finally got the Intel Mobile card to send over the right signal and monitor was happy. I spent a couple of hours spanning a couple of weekend days on this. I searched all over the web. I hope this helps some other poor soul out.
Linux rocks but in this case, it’s got some ways to go. I’m about to try out the second monitor on my Winblows computer. We’ll see how that goes. Let me know if this helps you out any.
I’ve been running Akregator for several months now. It’s working great. For my only complaint, I’ve just fixed a few minutes ago. I don’t know why I lived with this annoyance for so long.
When I want to read a blog entry in an external browser such as Firefox, it wouldn’t open the browser if it wasn’t running. If Firefox was running, it’d open the blog entry in a new tab, just fine and dandy.
The solution was simple. Just put this into the ‘Settings / Configure Akregator’ under the ‘Browser’ settings of the “For External Browsing” command:
firefox %u
Simple. Akregator rocks.