Joe Fleming dot net

A while back I picked up an ECS 945GCD-M motherboard to replace my dead VIA board that was running my RAID server. The board is pretty nice, sitting there completely silent, running 64-bit Ubuntu and packing far more power than the board it was replacing. But it has one glaring problem; the network card on [...]

I’m a fan of Ubuntu, and I’m kind of lazy about setting up my desktop, which means I’m using Gnome as my window manager. Over the years I’ve grown to like it… it’s not perfect, but it’s livable and works pretty well. One of the problems I’ve always had with it, though, is all of [...]

I recently send my Samsung X360 laptop to the shop. The bearing on the fan had gone bad so I sent it in for warranty replacement. Before I sent it, I thought I would wipe out all my data since a lot of it was work-related and I didn’t need that information getting out, plus [...]

Telecommuting is a pretty sweet gig with a good number of benefits. To name a few, while I’m working I can:

Toss some laundry in the machine
Start my lunch and work while it cooks
Sign for packages when they are delivered

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. However, to make telecommuting possible, there are some technologies [...]

OK, so you have this sweet new computer (much like myself) running 64-bit Ubuntu like a champ. Except for one thing; Flash elements on webpages in keep flaking out. That is, from time to time, instead of seeing the Flash content, you see a grey box that doesn’t do anything. It just sits there, mocking [...]

I recently came across the band 3 on last.fm and absolutely love them. I managed to find all of their albums via torrents, but I thought I would actually buy their stuff since they aren’t on an RIAA label. Their website didn’t help at all and CDBaby didn’t have any of their stuff. I was [...]

I’ve been considering picking up a new laptop for a while now. My old laptop, an ageing Dell Inspiron 8500, had treated me well for a few years, but I really wanted to change to a more portable machine. The Dell weighed in at around 8 lbs., had a battery that lasted about half an [...]

Recently, my SATA controller on my RAID box failed, silently corrupting my entire array. Fun stuff, I assure you. Luckily, I had backed up the array about a month before the failure and was keeping a nightly rsync running. I had a few things that weren’t included in the rsync backup, but I didn’t really [...]

I have a server set up with a RAID-5 array that I use to back up pretty much all of the data I have. Sure I have a bunch of things burned to DVD, but at only 4.3GB a pop, that can very quickly add up to a number of DVDs, and in fact already [...]

So, I had some Real Media (rm) videos that I wanted to view in Linux. But, like so many other sane people out there, I didn’t want anything to do with the official Real Player for Linux. I’ve never been a fan of Real and I’ve always thought their software was a bloated mess. Plus, [...]