My Move to Mac Posted on May 14, 2012 As I’ve tweeted recently, I sold out earlier this month and bought a Mac. A Macbook Air to be specific. So why abandon all my years and years of Linux use? Because Apple seems to be the only company making laptops worth buying. I think this is evidenced by the second-hand Macbook market, which is doing quite well. It’s not uncommon to see 2009 model Macbooks being sold with relative ease. The same can’t be said about hardware from other manufacturers; most will leave their users in the dust as soon as they release the next model. People have this idea that Apple hardware is overpriced, but that’s not true. Yes, it’s expensive compared to the throwaway $500 laptops that line the shelves of all the electronic stores, but Apple’s hardware is on another level. What’s more, it holds its value, so 2-3 years down the road when you’re ready to upgrade, that hardware is still worth something. I’ve got a few old laptops kicking around here that’ll tell you that’s not true of other company’s hardware. It wasn’t always this way, mind you, but it definitely is today. Even spending the same or more on a laptop from another company doesn’t give you the same level of quality. Continue reading →
Tweaking Gnome for Low-Resolution Displays Posted on May 13, 2010 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 the window elements in it are huge. This makes it look kind of childish and eats up a lot of screen real estate on the 1280×800 display on my desktop. I couldn’t even imaging running it on a lower resolution! I was discussing this with my friend Jason and he recommended playing with the font sizes. Sure enough, that did the trick! It seems that the reason everything is so big is that the default font sizes are 10pt. I shrank them down and MAN does it look nice now! You can edit these values one ways; via gconf-editor or via gconftool-2 on the command line. I won’t post the gconf-editor direction since, if you know your way around it, you can extrapolate the parts you want to edit via the gconftool-2 commands. The following settings worked extremely well for me, but you can adjust the font faces and sizes as you see fit. gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font "Sans Bold 8" gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/font_name "Sans 9" gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name "Monospace 9" This will adjust the title bar, all normal window text and all monospace text, respectively. Again, these numbers looked the best to me, but you can make them even smaller (or bigger) to fit your needs. I did these adjustments on my 1680×1050 display as well, and it looks amazing. Then again, I love small text! Continue reading →
Samsung X360 Backlight Control with Ubuntu Posted on March 30, 2010 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 I didn’t want to confuse the poor tech with Linux. When I got it back, I immediately installed Ubuntu’s most current version, 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I was really impressed with it; even more-so than with 9.04 in fact. But I ran in to a problem when I was setting it all up; I couldn’t get the backlight adjustment to work. Continue reading →
Living with PulseAudio via PulseAudio Device Chooser Posted on January 6, 2010 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 I simply MST have working. VPN is a big one, so I can get at the computers back in the office. SSH and FTP access is important to manage servers and files. And of course, I need to communicate with people; for that, we use AIM and Skype. Up until recently, it’s been enough for me to use my Nokia N800 to make my calls back to the office. It’s no good for chatting with video though, so I needed to set it up on my desktop with my camera and, preferably, my headset. Simple enough task really; both my Logitech webcam and Plantronics headset work out of the box with Ubuntu (at least in 9.04) with nearly zero configuration required. I just plug them in, tweak Skype quickly and I’m up and running. However, with the addition of PulseAudio in the more recent version of Ubuntu, this became a little trickier. Continue reading →
My Sweet New Laptop Posted on March 11, 2009 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 hour at its best and ran almost too hot to touch at times. Ultimately, I just wanted a machine that was light, had a long-lasting battery and had a full-size keyboard. The 10-inch netbooks looked like a good buy, but it was difficult to find one that was worth buying. I had been considering the Lenovo S10, and came close to picking one up about a month ago when I found one for just under $300. What stopped me was reading about overheating problems with the machine. I’ve wanted the MSI Wind since it was announced, but it was always over the $400 mark, which I don’t think is a reasonable price for that class of machine. All of the other offerings were either overpriced, lacked some key features or had batteries that just weren’t going to cut it. In most cases, all of these were true. Continue reading →
Multiple Drive Failures in RAID-5 Posted on January 29, 2009 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 has. My server is actually an upgraded version of my old machine, running 4 500GB drives in a RAID-5 configuration. Since I’m cheap and don’t care all too much about performance, I use software RAID in Debian with mdadm running the show. A short while ago, I had a drive that started clicking every time I would transfer large amounts of data to of from the box. Since all of the drives are mounted on the same bracket, it was nearly impossible to tell which drive was actually doing the clicking. I had a spare that I picked up a while back, so I figured I would wait for the drive to fail and then simply replace it. The problem was, when the drive finally did fail, another drive also failed with it, and if you know anything about RAID-5, you know it can only handle 1 drive failing at a time. Things were looking bad. Continue reading →