Al4

Buying a PC Power Supply in the UK, January 2012

Alex — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:30:36 +0000

In the process of building my first desktop PC in about 4 years, I’ve come to realise that I no longer know anything about PC hardware. At one stage I considered myself, perhaps incorrectly, to be fairly knowledgeable about the …

Adding a swap file on Linux

Alex — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:15:20 +0000

At work some of our Red Hat (RHEL5) servers with 32GB of ram were configured with only 2 Gb swap files. For some workloads this might be fine, but a 2-in-1 Apache and MySQL server is not one of them. …

LinkedIn Android “bug fix” update includes invasive permissions change

Alex — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:28:38 +0000

LinkedIn was an app I hesitated to install initially because of the long list of permissions it requires. The December 19th update also added one more: The full description of this permission reads: READ SENSITIVE LOG DATA Allows an application …

Viber battery life – an update

Alex — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:06:18 +0000

My impromptu post about Viber gained a little more attention than I thought it would, prompting a discussion about battery usage and even attracting a response from the Viber development team. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, …

It had to be done…

Alex — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:33:00 +0000

Q: How does well does adsense perform on a site like this?

Alex — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:36:55 +0000

A: Haha: Not quitting my day job. Despite increasing revenue by 50% over the previous month I still need to increase revenue a further 500% to cover the costs of running this site. And at the moment it’s a tiny …

Slow desktop performance on Ubuntu 11.10 with nvidia graphics cards

Alex — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:29:35 +0000

11.10 has been a bit of a mixed bag. On the plus side it has Gnome 3, giving me a practical (and in my opinion superior) alternative to Unity. On the minus side I had upgrade glitches on both my …

Viber – a nice VoIP app that I don’t really like

Alex — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 22:54:57 +0000

Viber (the kiwi/brit in me really wants to spell it “Vibre”), is a VoIP app for cell phones that uses a data connection to make free calls, much like Skype and other VoIP systems. The idea is great in principle, …

How not to troubleshoot an unexplained server reboot

Alex — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:40:18 +0000

We asked our provider to investigate why one of our servers rebooted last night. In the process they accidentally rebooted it again… this is root’s bash_history just before it happened, note line 971: 954 2011-08-17_15:10:39 sar -q 955 2011-08-17_15:10:59 sar …

Disabling that annoying drum beat at the ubuntu login screen

Alex — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:01:42 +0000

As much for my reference as anyone else’s: sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --type=bool --set /desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds false Found at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1756504