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New Router Follow-up
Today, I finally got the house to myself for long enough to take the home network down and swap our Verizon FiOS router out with a new Ubiquiti Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra. I had spent a good while researching how to do this, and a week or so ago, I wrote out a step-by-step plan.…
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New Router
As part of an ongoing project to get rid of our landline phone (which nobody calls any more except spammers), I am looking to replace our Verizon FiOS Quantum Gateway router with my own router. There’s nothing wrong with the FiOS router, but when I contact Verizon to switch our plan to internet-only, I want…
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I’m baaaack..
A few years back, I set lpaulriddle.com up on Ubuntu Linux running on a AWS EC2 instance. It ran just fine there, but to be honest, was kind of a mess. I was dreading the day when I would eventually have to update it or move it somewhere else, because I didn’t document anything that…
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Cloud
For a long time, I have been running an Ubuntu desktop in my basement “office”. However, lately, I’ve been using it less and less, in favor of my laptop. It runs a local web server which hosts a private wiki that we use for household stuff (recipes, scanned documents, etc); it also has two monitors,…
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Enumerating Contract Bridge Auctions with Lisp
I’ve been a fan of Contract Bridge for a long time. I’m really bad at it, but all the same, I find it fascinating and compelling. One of the interesting facts about Bridge is the astronomical number of possible auctions. For any given deal, there are over 128 × 1045 possible auctions. The exact number is:…
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ZyXEL WAP3205 – Not Recommended
Last Fall, I got it into my head that I needed to upgrade my home network’s wireless access point (WAP). I’d been using an old, but trustworthy, Netgear WG602V2 since around 2001-2002, and while it worked, I was hoping to get something with a bit more range, that supported 802.11N and various newer features. I…
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Another GIMP Trick
Recently, I had occasion to convert a few shapes extracted from a flash movie to PNG format. I used the excellent swftools suite to extract the shapes from the movie, and then I used Gnash to render the shapes and save PNG format screen shots. This works great, but unfortunately, the resulting image is missing…
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Text Effects with GIMP
As part of my fledgling hobby/future side career doing game development for the iPhone, I’m becoming sort of an inadvertent GIMP expert. I’m not a graphic artist, and I don’t do any original artwork for the games I code. However, I often need to edit and re-touch existing artwork, which is where GIMP really shines.…
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Moving Ubuntu to a New Hard Drive
Well, I guess it had to happen some time… the system disk on my home Ubuntu server started going south recently. Just a few errors here and there, but once it starts, it only gets worse. So I thought I’d write down the steps I took to move my system to a new disk, partly…
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Perl rocks
I’m doing a bit of tidying-up of my online music library for consistency.. editing tags, renaming files, that kind of thing. My library consists mainly of FLAC files ripped from my CD collection. My music player of choice on my Ubuntu box is Banshee. Banshee has an “Edit Metadata” feature which looks very handy on…