untagged

I have imported content from my previous Wordpress blog (It was MIA for a bit). Pretty much everything older than this post is obsolete.

Here are some interesting links to keep handy. I do not think these are easy enough to come across, so I’m linking to them from here. How to get windows to use a hardware clock set to GMT. You know, like the rest of the world. How to grab the i-sight firmware for use with Linux. Note that the kernel in Ubuntu Feisty already has the driver part.

I have various pieces of computer equipment that I am looking to get rid of. I would much prefer to give them to somebody who can put them to a useful purpose rather than throw them out. Please contact me if you are interested. I’m listing all components separately. While several are currently attached (motherboards + cpus) I am willing to divide up this stuff however necessary. Free Stuff Motherboards + CPUs 2 - 1.

I was just building some statistics of users, and apparently there are 82 unique IPs that access my package repository. This excludes my workstations. I had no idea anybody else was even using them, so “Rock On” as it were. I’ll be creating an RSS feed soon to keep users appraised of future changes to the repository. Also, I apologize for the reorganization that happened a few weeks ago, as it probably had caused some headaches.

There is a rather interesting documentary about Hugo Chavez of Venezuala. The Revolution will not be Televised.

[ zaphod ] ~ $ ping -c 1 yahoo.com PING yahoo.com (66.94.234.13) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from **fifaworldcup**.yahoo.net (66.94.234.13): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=83.8 ms --- yahoo.com ping statistics --- 1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 83.859/83.859/83.859/0.000 ms

So I sent my MacBook in for repairs. The fn key seems to have come right off, which is unfortunately not only a useful key, but perhaps the most heavily-trafficked key on the entire board (being a pre-requisite of such auspicious keys such as Page-Up, and Home). Luckily, the guy at the store thinks it may be ready tomorrow – assuming they can diagnose the missing key and quickly order a replacement keyboard.

My old Phone sucked. It was a small Kyocera slider that had consistently horrible reception and call quality. I was able to opt for a hardware update today, and decided to jump for it. I got a Motorola e815. It seems to have excellent call quality and reception, though I’ve only had it a few hours, so this may be rather subjective. The website linked above seems to indicate the phone does not have Java, but mine apparently does.

I’ve spent the time since my last post playing with encfs and libpam-encfs. It is actually rather easy to have working, and I haven’t noticed much of a slow-down for regular system use yet.

Playing around with PAM modules lately, I have discovered libpam-ssh and pam-keyring. Both require some mucking about in /etc/pam.d/, but provide some worthwhile benefits. libpam-ssh provides automatic spawning of ssh-agent, and populating ssh keys as required. This is handier than the keychain package as you do not have to enter passwords for each key, or even at all other than the initial login. The downside, of course, is that your ssh key passphrases must be the same as your system password.