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Laptop Travel Essentials
Being an intrepid occasional business traveler, I’ve come to rely on my trusty MacBook as sort of an office-away-from-home. Working while away from the office presents an interesting set of challenges. Internet access (particularly Wi-Fi) is becoming ever more ubiquitous, so getting connected is easy, but there’s no guarantee that a given Internet access point…
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Latest Ubuntu Upgrade
I just upgraded my Ubuntu box from 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), and after 3 upgrades (I started out with Dapper Drake) I remain impressed with how easy and painless it is. This time there was a hiccup, though. But, it’s not something that I’d expect an average user to encounter. First, a…
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Ubuntu hard drive upgrade
I just finished upgrading the hard drive on my Ubuntu machine, and it wasn’t as easy or straightforward as I was expecting. So I figured I’d write up some notes for the next time I do it. First I backed everything up. Then I shut down the computer, put the new drive in, and booted…
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Server shuffle again
My server shuffling is finished, and went off (almost) without a hitch. Slight hiccup installing my new Zonet USB 2.0 PCI card. When I first popped it in, it worked fine. But for some reason, after I finished all the hardware shuffling and booted back up, the Linux kernel no longer recognized the USB 2.0…
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The server shuffle
I’ve decided to do a bit of server shuffling this weekend. I’m basically going to do a case/motherboard swap of concerto, my 700mhz server at the office, with my 450mhz server at home. That will give me a little bit more CPU at home to run stuff like GnuCash and OpenOffice inside my VNC desktop.…
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Saturday update
Got a start on winterizing the pool today, with occasional breaks to shoo Andrew off the pool cover. I drained the water down below the tile line and added chlorine and algaecide. The water was nice and clean even after a month of neglect. Wonder if the algaecide I added last month helped. Anyways, tomorrow…
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Calendaring revisited
It’s been a year or so since I gave up on my home-grown calendar sync setup. It was nice for awhile, then we upgraded our Oracle Calendar server, it broke, I tried to fix it and didn’t get very far, and that was the end of that. Well, as it happens, there’s been some recent…
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Fun with ssh tunnels
A couple months back, UMBC decided to block off-campus access to most of its internal hosts. Included in this bunch was concerto, which houses this blog as well as my house wiki. Although I could probably apply for and get a hole punched in the firewall for http and ssh, I decided not to bother.…
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Fixing openoffice.org fonts..
I use openoffice.org all the time on my Debian server box, most of the time through a VNC connection. Problem is, the fonts have always looked horrible. ISTR that they weren’t always bad, but they’ve certainly been bad for awhile. Well, today I finally sat down and fixed it. It all started out when I…
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Let’s go paperless
I’m on a paperless kick. I’ve decided that I have too much paperwork cluttering up my file cabinets, desk drawers, etc., so I’m getting rid of as much of it as I can. My goal is to shrink my paperwork collection down so that it only takes up one file cabinet (I currently have three).…