the difference that is no difference makes no difference
For a long time now, I’ve used an old (black) xbox running XBMC as a media centre in my lounge room plugged into the TV. I just stream content to it, so it only has a little hard drive in it. Cost-wise its hard to beat, and XBMC has been updated enough over the years […]
A few days ago, for whatever reason I found myself repeatedly compiling linux kernels in order to solve some ext3 performance problem (my theory was that kernels after 2.6.18 have very high wait io for ext3 filesystems). This was on my linux server with lots of disk drives. Three of the drives are 300GB ones […]
My main linux server here has a ASUS P5LD2 motherboard. I got it when the core 2 duo chips came out and it was one of the few motherboards that was affordable and that supported the core 2 duo. In many ways it’s quite a good motherboard as it has four SATA connectors and quite […]
As a Unix sysadmin, I am using ssh every day. Its an innocuous little tool thats absolutely essential. Sure it does terminal sessions, but its all the other little features that make it quite indespensable; port forwarding, agent forwarding …. And they always seem to add in cool features that I never find out about […]
Yes, I caved in and bought a macbook. Sure I have a mac mini, but my primary machine is my Thinkpad T42, so switching to a macbook is a big change. I still think Macs are too expensive, so I ended up going to the online Apple store and ordering a refurbished one. It’s the […]
Unlike most techies, I use a very basic mobile phone. I use it for making calls and sending/receiving texts mostly and you don’t need a clever phone to do that. However, recently I’ve ended up using a 3g mobile phone. In NZ, like many places there is a GSM based network (run by vodafone) that […]
One of the more irritating things in linux is trying to get your fonts ‘just right’. If I look at an OS X or Windows desktop the fonts always look great. Obviously some executives involved in these operating systems thought it was a reasonably good idea not to present users with crappy looking fonts. If […]
OK, so my adventure working out of NZ is over. My trip back involved stopping in London and Belgium and Japan on the way back. London was cold, wet and expensive. Belgium was slightly less cold and wet and Japan was ‘just right’. This is my second trip to Japan, and it’s such an interesting […]
I wanted to set up a special extension in Asterisk that would divert to my mobile. A week or two back I found the code to implement the *72* forward function. ie. you enter *72*<some number>. However I could not get it to work very well. So I just added a line to the inbound […]
Have you tried reading a book on a PC or laptop? Perhaps you’ve downloaded a pdf of a book and you start to read it. Usually I lose interest quite quickly. Reading a book off a brightly lit LCD screen is something that my brain just does not like. So up to now, I’ve happily […]
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