We have a few spare monitors laying about at work, and I just grabbed one with a rotating stand, so I can switch it between Landscape and Portrait. This is nice, because it's got more pixels than my laptop's built-in screen, and it's also larger.

It's also very handy when viewing pages that are narrow and tall.

All I need now is a way to quickly switch the screen's orientation without digging through a GUI. This looks like a job for xrandr and KDE's Global Keyboard Shortcuts

Read more…

A little while ago, I published my 4-bit rules of computing and I promised to blog about them. So here is my first instalment in a series to explain these simple rules, a bit about why I like these over others, and my own take on this wisdom (since it isn't mine).

In this instalment: Rules 0 to 3 (the first 2 bits).

Read more…

I fixed my spelling problem in Firefox today:

The symptom: a bajillion variants of English and Spanish dictionaries are installed/available, and Firefox would always select Spannish (Cuba) on a restart -- then highlight mispelllings for me, in Spanish.

The problem: My default spelling language is set to en_AU for English (Australia), but this doesn't seem to be honoured on a restart. I have to select it from the spelling checker Languages list.

The fix: I'm unsure why, but changing the Firefox setting spellchecker.dictionary_path (in about:config) from /usr/share/myspell, which is present on my openSUSE 13.2, to /usr/share/aspell, which is not (I was thinking — incorrectly — that I was setting the name of an external spell checker program…) resolved this. Maybe Firefox was picking up system-wide settings in myspell? Other programs seem to spell correctly though… so it's a mystery to me.

About a six months ago I started standing at work. There's been a lot of talk on the Net about the benefits of standing desks, and how the sedentary lifestyle of white-collar workers is slowly killing us. I'm not going to weigh in on that debate, but I thought that my experiences might be helpful for others who are considering making a switch to standing, and whether or not to purchase one of those fancy (and expensive) sit/stand desks.

This post is also partly in answer to this Simple Programmer Video.

Read more…

Suppose that there is a song on YouTube and you want the audio from it. For instance: Le Freak, by Chic. Questions of potential Copyright infringement left unexamined, how do you get it?

Read more…

After upgrading work's openSUSE laptop from 13.1 to 13.2 today it would not unlock the LUKS-encrypted LVM, which is a problem since the entire SSD is encrypted (except for /boot). Bummer.

So, I had occasion to test my backup/recovery strategy and found that I had a few issues (of course I did!)

Read more…

Recently switched back to openSUSE after a brief stint with Ubuntu. I guess you need to try other things out to know how good you have it, eh?  Anyway, I'm playing with Leiningen and Quil, but for some reason or other, I could not get Leiningen to self-install, because of an exception:

java.security.KeyStoreException: problem accessing trust storejava.io.IOException: Invalid keystore format

It turns out that the java keystore is somehow corrupt on OpenJDK / openSUSE 12.3. Not sure who's at fault, but here's how to fix it.

Read more…

In a previous blog entry I described setting up a caching-only DNS server to speed up hostname resolution on Debian systems.  I've recently been playing with Ubuntu and noticed that this hack is not working.

Read more…

This is common knowledge, yet strangely every time I rebuild my work PC (which is too often! Gah!) I try and Google the location of Registry keys and folders and always, always get a bum-steer. So here, have another (bum-steer?) version of this hack on the Net.

Read more…