RocketDolphin

Polar Clock

When you compile a new kernel don’t forget to re-emerge vmware-modules:

emerge --oneshot vmware-modules.

Technorati Tags: vmware, linux kernel, gentoo

Don’t forget, when you compile a new kernel also recompile vbetool so you’re laptop screen will come back on when you re-open the lid.

Technorati Tags: kernel, vbetool

So you’ve installed Windows Vista and want to add some favorite programs to the SendTo right-click menu. Cool!

You open Explorer and see the folder below your name in the left hand tree. Click on the folder (a shortcut) and you get an error message. WTF! Well it turns out that Vista changed life somewhat. What you really need to do is go to C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows

A fuller explanation is at: geekswithblogs.net.

Technorati Tags: Vista, tweak

Today I received a spam-mail with the following subject: “Must be fit, have nice face to get Chinese baby”. True dat!

The t-shirt I’d wear at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station:
“NOW the world revolves around me”.

Technorati Tags: jotd, t-shirt

Yesterday I was at Fry’s looking for gifts for my Significant Other and ran across one of their sale items. A 400GB external drive. They were priced at 130 dollars, limit one per customer. I got one. It’ll make the perfect backup drive for my laptop and server. I don’t care about the included backup software since my base OS is Linux. I didn’t find anything in the store for her, I’ll have to order what I want to get.

I finally found a web-cam that works with linux. The Logitech Quickcam Chat so far seems to cool. The trick is to use the gspcav1 driver, available from http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html) or if you use gentoo, emerge gspcav1. The spca5xx driver doesn’t work. The camera I’m testing with actually came with my Significant Other’s at-home company-furnished computer. The vendor id is 046d and the product id is 092e. Finally!

Technorati Tags: linux, webcam, camera, gspcav1, driver

Here at casa RD we suffered a catastrophic hardware failure. The root drive on the server went south in a big way and was unrecoverable. I tried different rescue live-cds, different machines, combinations of the above. I even put the dang thing into the freezer for a few hours to see if that’d help, it didn’t.

The end result is that no machine or OS would boot with the drive (a 7 year old 20 GB IBM) connected.

So…I took the memory from the server and put it, with another 512MB, into the SO’s machine, built a new server with that box, and presto, back again.

The biggest problem actually wasn’t the fact that the drive died it was the fact that I couldn’t find the backups I’d made of /etc and other important directories (databases, etc.). That’s the “ooops” part of the story.

Now, for those that’ve read this far you may be wondering how I managed to confiscate the machine belonging to my SO. The SO said “Use my machine, my employer is giving me a new machine to bring home.” Cool!

Good: I’ve got this blog back up. Bad: I lost all the previous content.