What Windows Needs – Synaptic (or any other package manager)

The weekend saw me doing a Motherboard / CPU / HDD upgrade on one of our household’s PC’s – It’s a Windows 2003 server that had an IDE drive in it and the new Mobo was SATA. The day before, the system wouldn’t boot – some cool bad sector business had caused it. So, I …

Troubleshooting tools: ping, pathping, httping and nmap

Too many times I have heard people determine that a host is not up because they can’t ping it. Most of us (myself included) run for ping and traceroute whenever we have an issue with connectivity – but ping and traceroute rely on icmp being permitted on the routers or hosts that you are traversing …

Nomachine – FreeNX fullscreen switching

Something that was not obvious to me when using NX client was the ability to get out of fullscreen. I initially thought that they just hadn’t implemented it as yet.. but we are now on version 3 and I thought that the mere oversight should have been fixed by now. Well, I don’t know if …

Amarok, Listen, Exaile!, Banshee and Last.fm

I am very much into music (and I don’t own an IPOD!) and not quite your normal, radio delivered stuff either – I have a passion for World Music – here’s a bit of a list of some of my favourites – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Fela Kuti, Orchestra Baobab, Fania All Stars, Tinariwen, Cesaria …

Open Source Hardware Projects – Home Fabrication (Part 1)

If personal computing revolutionised the 80’s and the Internet revolutionised the 90’s then I would dare say this decade will (almost) be revolutionised by home fabrication & rapid prototyping. I say almost because, I think it will take 4-6 years before it’s potential is fully realised but I think it holds massive potential. The number …

Google on Steroids or vi for search engines – Yubnub

Seems I am a bit slow to the party on Yubnub – I guess I kind of see it like a cross between the unix command line and the vi of search engines – it has modes, commands and even split screens: For example: ls australia gives you all the yubnub commands that include Australia. …

SONOFON Australia sales technique – Swear at the potential customer

Conversation went like this: Him: Can I speak with “Insert name here”Me: May I ask who’s callingHim: Stuart(?) from SonofonMe: Can I ask what it’s regarding?Him: Some people from our office came out a few months ago and showed him some of our products (complete lie) and I am just calling to let him know …

Professional Accounting Software on Linux

We have just taken over the accounting from someone who was using Quickbooks (US version) and we had no way of reading the files without going out and buying Quickbooks ourselves. I had a trial version which lasted 30 days, but of course we didn’t perform reconciliations prior to the expiry finishing. Left with little …

Django, VIM and SnippetsEmu on TTYShare

I remember watching the first screencasts of Ruby on Rails and seeing class structures appear as the author was typing and it was almost like “fill in the blanks” – then I found out it was Textmate, then I found it was a Mac only thing.. that left me out – anyways (Nacho libre spanish …