June 8th, 2009 admin
I’ve recently been using Dropbox. Its a free offsite backup service, which works with Windows, Linux and Mac and gives you 2Gb of space for free. You can pay for more if you need it. Here’s what I like about it:
- It just works. Drop your files into a folder and forget about it.
- You can join more than one computer to the same account and the files sync between both computers. eg one at work, one at home.
- If you’re away from you computer and you need a file, you can get it from the web interface. (But of course you’d only do this on computers you trust
- There are different levels of privacy. Private files are only seen by you. However you can share files with certain people, by supplying their email addresses. You also have Public files which can be downloaded by anyone at all with the given URL. Much more control than senduit.com for example.
- Photos put in the photo folder are instantly made into galleries. Neat.
- You can roll back to a previous version of a file if you make a mistake.
Having said all that, I wouldn’t trust super secret work or personal documents to it, but for keeping a backup of photos and non-sensitive personal docuements, it works a treat.
Also, there’s a referral program on at the moment, so if you sign up via the link below, you get an extra 250Mb of space. And so do I as well … go on … its free, and you’ll be glad you did.
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTI3NDkwMDk
Posted in General IT, Security | No Comments »
June 2nd, 2009 admin
Man this is the best kept secret in the entire telecoms industry … I’ve been trying to send email through PLDT’s SMTP servers as I’m a broadband customer of theirs, and my normal SMTP server wasn’t working. I needed to get an email out, and I was getting a little desperate.
So apparently the published SMTP servers don’t actually work. Yay! If you try looking on the PLDT website, where you might expect to see this kind of useful information … well just don’t bother. You get seasick pretty quickly from all the flash whoopiness, and the dead ends and 404 start to piss you off after a while. So then you do a few google searches and come up with a couple of published servers, which basically don’t work: smtp.info.com.ph and smtp.pldtdsl.net
So, eventually I cracked and went to the Customer Hotline. After re-phrasing my question several thousand times until I was understood, the answer was … smtpdsl4.pldtdsl.net , using port 587. Which actually works.
Port 587, yes of course, why didn’t I guess that one.
Posted in General IT, Philippines | 1 Comment »
May 4th, 2009 admin
Just came across this awesome tool which will let you format webpages in real time, and then output them to a printer.
Here’s the URL http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/
And here’s a link to this very page opened up in the site, so you can try it out.
Brilliant. Why didn’t I think of that ….
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April 23rd, 2009 admin
Have you ever noticed that when you type a search term into the search box in the top right of your Firefox browser, that a load of junk gets added to the search term. For example, you search for ‘banana’ and you get something like this:
http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a
Well what you’re effectively doing is giving Google a lot of information for free. Which irritates me. All I really need is this,
http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana
and if they really want to know more about me, then they’re welcome to go digging through their logs.
OK its a minor irritation, but one that we can fix! I understand that Ubuntu does it as part of a deal with Google, but there’s no reason why we can’t take matters into our own hands and change the defaults.
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February 23rd, 2009 admin
OK, it sounds simple, and it probably is if you’re sitting at your desktop with Gnome or KDE fired up. However if you’re looking on a server half way across the world, using the command line its not so easy.
There are a number of tools which are useful in finding out things about your filesystem. ls, du, df are three of them, but sometimes they just don’t give you the information you need. In my case I’m backing up a server to a remote location. The script was timing out becase I was trying to back up too many files at once, so I needed to find the number of files in each subdirectory.
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January 3rd, 2009 admin
At last. Its a lazy Saturday after New Year, and I just got around to fixing another one of the things which broke when I upgraded to Intrepid – the video camera. Actually I don’t really use it much, hence it got dropped to the back of the queue, but its nice to get things working again.
Here’s the relevant info: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Linux | No Comments »
November 20th, 2008 admin
I was having trouble with a webserver this week, which I’d just set up for a client. When it went live, it seemed OK initially, but when we left it overnight it curled up its toes and died. It was so dead that I couldn’t even ssh in to reboot it, so we had to do a remote reboot. Crunch.
Anyway, on getting it back up, I poked around in the logs and found that it was running out of memory, which it really shouldn’t do given that it was a fairly low load on the webserver, and only apache, mysql and php were running on it. I looked around the Interwebs and found an excellent resource called Troubleshooting Memory Usage, which gave me some pointers about how to rein in apache and stop it from eating up memory so quickly. Thanks!
Anyway on the page was a script for summarising memory usage, which I thought was a good idea, so i grabbed that one and adapted it to my own purposes. I thought I’d make the results available here, so feel free to grab it and adapt it to your own needs. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Linux | No Comments »
November 14th, 2008 admin
A lot of commentators in the blogosphere have shown disappointment at the fact that little seems to have changed with Ubuntu 8.10. My answer to them is that in fact a lot has changed, but not much of it is visible. To my mind a lot of these under-the-hood changes have addressed fundamental issues which needed to be fixed as a priority, so that normal users could just get on with the business of using Linux, rather than scrabbling around in config files.
Also, Ubuntu has an aggressive schedule, which means release are made every 6 months. I believe the purpose of the April (.04) releases is to introduce new features, and the October (.10) release is to refine them and fix any breaks. Compare this approach to Windows or Macintosh, where releases are made around every three years, and you can appreciate that releasing little and often means that changes are more diffuse and less apparent. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Linux | 1 Comment »
November 11th, 2008 admin
I keep hearing how Ubuntu has finally nailed the dual head hassles of the past, and now you can just plug in an external monitor and go. Alas I’ve never had that experience, either with this Dell Vostro 1400 or either of the two IBM Thinkpads I’ve run Ubuntu on.The IBMs were both 1024×768 resolution, as is my external monitor. The Dell is a less standard 1280×800 resolution. I also, on occasion plug it into my LCD TV, but that’s another story.
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November 10th, 2008 admin
I’ve been getting irritated with the touchpad on this new Dell Vostro 1400. I type for a while, and then my palm touches the touchpad, sending the pointer skimming into the line above, or clicking on buttons I don’t want to click on. So, I looked around and figured out a solution.
First of all for Ubuntu Hardy 8.04, you need to edit your /etc/xorg.conf file, for which you’ll need root privileges – use sudo.You just need to add one line in the input device section, which is the one in bold below. (Intrepid 8.10, see below)
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "SHMConfig"
EndSection Read the rest of this entry »
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