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By Matthieu, 2013-06-14 18:01

It’s been a few months, probably a good time to see how I’m doing with my cost savings goals.

1. Cancel Fibe TV. Haven’t done it. I seriously made an effort though, but I can’t receive OTA HDTV in my apartment. Turns out despite being on the 29th floor, I have no line of sight with the CN tower or any other local broadcast tower. I did however cut down my subscription package to the absolute minimum and got the Fibe Internet “dependency” reduced to $0 monthly.
2. Cancel landline. Well, I didn’t do this one either. It kind of ties in with the first point; I did get the price reduced enough that it costs less than the dry loop I’d need if I did cancel.
3. Be more energy conscious. I’ve been making sure to switch off any electric service when not necessary. I don’t leave my desktop computer on all the time anymore, my home server is a low power, compact system.
4. Move to the cloud. Nothing done on this front yet.
5. Cancel personal smartphone. Done. I no longer carry two smartphones, I’ve settled on an HTC One (great device) as my only phone. Saving more than $50/month.
6. Stop buying random stuff. Well I haven’t really bought random tech, but I did go on a trip to Greece… Expensive, but so worth it!

So, overall, not doing too well. But I think it’s a start.

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By Matthieu, 2013-02-27 06:00

The correct way to write numeric dates: 2013-02-27. No ambiguity, sorts correctly, easily legible.

Source: http://xkcd.com/1179/

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By Matthieu, 2013-01-24 22:20

• Don’t sign in with a Microsoft account during initial setup of PC. Create a local account, then link a Microsoft account if necessary later.
• Add credentials for network in the “Credential Manager”
• Change setting in “Advanced sharing settings” to use user accounts and not Homegroup.
• (Mac OS X) Edit /etc/smb.conf, add workgroup = WORKGROUP and master browser = auto.

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By Matthieu, 2012-12-09 23:25

I’ve been having issues with the OOBE on my Nook Simple Touch. It will simply not register to my BN.com account.

Fortunately, there is a way to skip the OOBE and get the device to a mostly-working state:

Skip OOBE:

On the first screen that appears on the NST without tapping any button.
1.Hold the right top button and move your finger from left to right on the top of the screen.
2.The factory button will appear at the bottom right of the screen, tap it.
3.Hold again the right top button and tap the right bottom part of the screen, where the factory button appeared
4.A button labeled skip oobe will appear, tap it, your done

For the Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight and Nook Simple Touch with 1.2 firmware, the “Factory” button appears on the top left, and the “Skip OOBE” button will appear in the blank space at the bottom right.

References:

• http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=29987480&postcount=19
• http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=20121721&postcount=17

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By Matthieu, 2012-09-03 17:59

Tomorrow on CityTV Breakfast Television!

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By Matthieu, 2012-07-18 11:05

Here’s a script I cooked up for syncing my Web server’s config to a subversion repository.

Before running the script, initialize an svn repo at /root/subversion/serveurs-web.

#!/bin/bash
# Path to the previously created SVN repo
svnpath=/root/subversion/serveurs-web
 
# use rsync to copy config files from /etc to svnpath. Allow delete, but don't touch the .svn folder
rsync -auz --delete --exclude=.svn /etc/lighttpd $svnpath/web1/etc/
rsync -auz --delete --exclude=.svn /etc/php5 $svnpath/web1/etc/
 
#svn status $svnpath
 
# svn auto delete, add and commit script stolen from http://blog.sosedoff.com/2009/01/16/svn-auto-add-and-delete/
echo "processing files to add..."
svn status $svnpath | grep "^?" | sed -r 's/^\?[ ]+//' | xargs -r svn add
echo "processing files to delete..."
svn status $svnpath | grep "^!" | sed -r 's/^\![ ]+//' | xargs -r svn delete
echo "processing commit..."
svn commit $svnpath -m "automatic commit from $HOSTNAME"
 
# done!

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By Matthieu, 2012-04-12 16:02

Kubuntu 12.04 is no longer a Canonical-maintained distribution. As such, support for the firefox-kde-support package has been discontinued.

Here’s a workaround to get firefox’s downloaded file handling to work correctly:

Here is a workaround for the Firefox problem from Canonical support:

1) stop firefox
2) rm ~/.mozilla/firefox//mimeTypes.rdf
3) start firefox
4) download a file
5) open it from the downloads menu and choose the application. Browse to /usr/bin/xdg-open. then check to remember your choice

Source: http://askubuntu.com/a/113090