I have a new favorite OS!

I have a new favorite OS - spoiler alert, it's Debian!

Where the streets have node names

Have you ever googled your email address? If you do, you'll find all kinds of things you've posted on the internets. And for once I'm not using that word sarcastically!

Samsung 923NW Screws

Got a Samsung 923NW? Did you take the stand off and lose the screws? And now you want them back?

TightVNC selection sharing

With RealVNC you use vncconfig, but according to this post by a guy named Thomas, this is what you'll put in your xstartup for tightvnc:

autocutsel -s PRIMARY -fork

Thanks, Thomas from the Internets!

Reverting iTunes to 10.6.3 -- yes, you can!!

Do you hate iTunes 11 as much as I do? Are you so angry with Apple that you're ready to throw your Mac through a window? Please, open the window first and make sure there is nobody on the ground below.

OR... (better yet, DON'T INSTALL ITUNES 11!! -- I hope somebody reads this before it's too late)

VNC keymap swap

Ahhhhhhhhhh! (that's the choir of angels sound)

I switched to tightvncserver hoping that my vnc crashing will go away ::fingers crossed::

MySQLdb ≠ autocommit

Something else I've learned recently is that MySQLdb disables autocommit.

Permission and PSP Import

If you have a PSP page and you're trying to import a custom module and you get an error like this:

ImportError: No module named mymodule

Getting older sucks!!

;;(mouse-set-font "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-*-*-*-c-70-iso8859-1" "7x13")

(mouse-set-font "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-iso8859-1" "9x15")

Trot Diamond, 2005-2012

Trot has gone to herd the chickens in heaven. He was born with fifteen years of love inside him, but used them up in only seven. 

113 hours

I just finished with a project I've had on my list for the longest time. I watched all seven seasons of The West Wing, my favorite TV show of all time. It only took me 40 days to watch 154 episodes, about 113 hours running time. And no, I have no idea how I managed that!

Android Calendar tip

I stumbled onto a useful feature in the Android Calendar this morning.

I'd been trying without any luck to find a way to make Agenda the default tab. I'd long given up wondering why the Week view wasn't available anymore.

Then mostly out of frustration, I long-pressed the Agenda icon and all of a sudden I was looking at this screen:

So it turns out you can choose which Calendar views to choose from and which order they appear in at the bottom of the Calendar screen. Yay!

Ubuntu notes

Some Ubuntu notes-to-self, because I'm running over VNC and don't have the whole start menu thing going on...

File Manager	$ nautilus
Terminal	$ gnome-terminal
System Settings	$ gnome-control-center
Update Manager	$ sudo update-manager
Backup	deja-dup (ui?)
	$ wmctrl

VNC tip

I was connected to one of my VNC servers with Chicken and I don't know why, but all of a sudden I got an error, was disconnected from the server, and wasn't able to reconnect...

Unknown message type 5

The google wasn't much help, so I just tried stabbing at it, and luckily, it didn't take long for something to happen.

Turns out that if went to the Connection Profiles and UN-checked ZRLE, I was able to reconnect again.

Nope, it's happening again.  :-(

But fortunately, Mac OS's built-in Screen Sharing does seem to work just fine. :-)

Useful ssh tricks

Here are a couple useful things I found recently: Corkscrew, for ssh-ing out of a firewall Using ssh -L to set up a port you can VNC through

Rezound ICS Linking Fixed!!

After the recent over-the-air upgrade of my HTC Rezound to Ice Cream Sandwich, I found that an important feature of Android (and indeed of every operating system) no longer worked: clicking links no longer launched the application responsible for handling that type of link.

I found the problem written up on Talk Android and realized I had a couple of choices:

1. I could restore my Rezound back to Gingerbread (Oh no you can't)
2. I could root my phone and make the fix.

As technical as I am, rooting is still kind of scary/daunting. I was really wishing I could go back to Gingerbread. But the Ice Cream Sandwich is so tasty! So root it would be.

My first search led me to an extremely helpful guide on Android Forums. I followed the instructions there for unlocking my bootloaded using htcdev, a tool that HTC provided. One thing I should say here is when the instructions call for using adb on the PC, you want your phone to be up and running and plugged into your PC. If you're using fastboot on the PC, your phone will want to be in the fastboot state, which, as much as it should have been obvious to me, wasn't at first.

Then I installed Amon Ra as my recovery, and I'm linking to it because that's proper, but you really should go to Android Forums and read up on all of this.

And next, to be honest, I wasn't quite sure what to do. I was under the FALSE impression that you needed to flash a ROM to be root. Don't know why I thought that, but it's not the case.

But where I ended up at this point was really great, the All-In-One Tool. It would have done the bootloader unlocking for me if I hadn't done that already. It also does five flavors of recovery flashing, which I wasn't needing at that point. What I did need, though, was Super User. And the instructions were muddy clear, so let me add some advice about that. You want to run the Perm Root (GB/ICS) command while the phone is plain old up and running, since adb is used to push a zip file, SuperSU.zip. It's after that file has been pushed that you want to reboot into recovery and use that recovery's zip installer. The output of the Perm Root command tends to give the impression that you're already rooted, but that's not the case until you've used recovery to do the installation of the zip.

So now I was rooted, but I wasn't done. I had copied /system/build.prop to my desktop, made the necessary edits* and pushed it back to my phone as /sdcard/build.prop.new, but I needed to put it back into /system. To do this, I used Mount /system (rw / ro) to make /system writable and I used Root Explorer (File Manager) to move build.prop.new to /system, rename build.prop to build.prop.old and finally rename build.prop.new to build.prop.

*Oh, and by the way, I found "ro.da1.enable" in build.prop twice, so I just made all of the changes twice.

Once I rebooted my phone, the good old linking behavior was fixed. Just as for centuries, clicking a Microsoft Word Document link on my desktop browser has always launched Microsoft Word, clicking on an Amazon MP3 link now launches the Amazon MP3 app, just as the gods intended.

Now that I'm able to declare victory, thanks to lots of help from the Internets, I'm off to click some thank-you and donation buttons.

Screen capture!

My HTC Rezound has been upgraded (ha!!) to Ice Cream Sandwich, and I wondered whether screen shots might be possible. It is!! Just power/vol- and voila!!

Emacs Colors Begone

Thanks to Bjørn Hansen, I now know how to rid my Emacs of the annoying syntax coloring!

(setq-default global-font-lock-mode nil)

I'm not sure what version of Emacs that was for, but here's what I had to do (a couple times, actually) in version 23.1.1...

M-x global-font-lock-mode

Database Dropped

If you're like me, you will someday experience that terrifying, dreadful feeling upon reading these words on your phpMyAdmin screen...

Fun with words

What do each of the following have in common?

• something
• tenletters
• eighteencharacters
• two words