We had a full solar eclipse on April 8th, and we were lucky to be in the path to totality! We had a nice afternoon by the lake and enjoyed the eclipse. It was looking like it might have been covered by the clouds but we got lucky and it …
I inherited this Korting Scandia MX stereo console from my grandfather. He had bought this back in his youth and had held onto it for a long time. It was in pretty rough shape, but I've been working away on it on and off over the course of a year …
This site has been broken for the past year or so, after upgrading some systems and pyblosxom no longer working. I think that project is mostly dead now and getting it running started to look to be more work than it was worth.
For a long time I've been considering …
Real world example of paypal FX fees...
$196.83 USD purchase, option to pay via paypal letting paypal handle the FX was $279.66 CAD. If you click through and force it to charge the credit card in USD, onto a credit card with a 0% FX fee, the actual …
I've been using a pair of Samsung 245T monitors since 2008 (13 years!) and I really quite like them, something about the 16:10 aspect ratio that just feels right. They were very expensive monitors at the time, but they have really lasted quite well since I use them pretty …
I have a western digital 2.0TB Black hard drive that was returning a SMART error of "9 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors". This probably means the drive is on it's way out, but it was passing long smart tests ok, and it's in a raid so I've decided to try …
Had an issue connecting to a wifi network on debian stretch. I would connect and then get then get the error:
wlp4s0: deauthenticating from b6:fb:e4:14:aa:f8 by local choice (Reason: 3=DEAUTH_LEAVING)
This would happen after a successful authentication where it would then timeout after 45 …
I ran into some problems updating image magick on older centos6 systems. Specifically ImageMagick-6.9.10-50 which would error during the make compile with:
magick/.libs/libMagickCore-6.Q16.so: undefined reference to `clock_gettime' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[1]: *** [utilities/animate] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr …
So this has been bothering me for a while now where I would sometimes get notifications on my desktop from reddit r/archlinux posts. I finally took some time to track down where they are coming from, and it looks like it's push notifications from firefox. I guess these come …
Debian packages the firefox-esr release which works quite well most of the time, but I find often the newest browser is often required for some functionality. I've put together a little script that basically sets this up with a local firefox install in ~/.opt
You can copy/paste this into …
I ran into an issue recently trying to install a application menu link on a debian system (desktop was mate in this case, but I think it applies to any gnome based desktop). The issue was that I would install a new .directory file for a new menu entry along …
I couldn't seem to find this information anywhere, and I just spend longer than I'd like to admit sorting this issue out. I use the Logitech Media Server (v7.9.1 as of now) and I just reinstalled it on my server. After doing that the "Server IP Address" was …
We had about 70% coverage of the sun where we were which actually seems to be about 70% less production on the graph (which is what you'd expect, but neat either way).
Simple script to get the current exchange rates from the bank of canada
import requests
r = requests.get('http://www.bankofcanada.ca/valet/observations/group/FX_RATES_DAILY/json')
rates = r.json()
date = rates['observations'][-1]['d']
rate = rates['observations'][-1]['FXUSDCAD']['v']
I was having some issues on a server where a particular plugin (bb-plugin) wouldn't update, and I'd just get this error:
PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Invalid archive structure
After much poking around, I ended up installing the php5-curl package (on debian), and this ended up solving the problem. I think php was …
I've used mpd on various desktops for a long time, and I've always just set the output directly in the mpd.conf file, but that leads to the sound device being tied up if you ever want to do anything else with it. I finally got around to setting this …
I had this usb cash drawer for a point of sale system, and needed to trigger it to open. I assumed it would be a serial protocol as I saw the drivers mention something about COM port selection in windows, so I figured it would be easy enough to figure …
So I have been using qmail-autoresponder. for vacation messages on qmail, but it doesn't work with qmailadmin. which expects the program autorespond. So I finally got around to fixing this up and patching qmailadmin to write the proper files, and set the .qmail file to use qmail-autoresponder.
In doing so …
I wanted to setup claws-mail to be able to load contacts from owncloud recently. There is no direct way to do this as far as I can tell, but I did find some people exporting the contacts list to a vcf file, and then pointing claws-mail to use contacts from …
I upgraded my debian desktop from wheezy to jessie today, and in doing so my triple monitor setup stopped working. This was originally a complicated thing to setup, and I had originally done it with a very specific xorg.conf file using Xinerama and some LeftOf RightOf screen setups. This …