Originally I thought we might head to Youghal tomorrow but someone called to the door a few days ago selling raffle tickets to support renewal of the local area. It’s organised by “Waterloo Renewal Group” who have great plans for the local river area and walk. There will be a BBQ at the Waterloo Inn so it looks like we won’t be going far from home on Sunday!
Well, they made it easier. Saved might be a little strong. When using a Unix based system you use a file called /etc/fstab to designate all the hard drives and external storage like flash cards and where they will mount or live on your filesystem. It’s not quite like the Windows world where everything has a drive letter, although you can use SUBST to get a similar effect on that operating system.
/etc/fstab is easy to maintain when all your drives stay in one place, but since I’m using 3 external drives and a card reader, sometimes the device name /dev/sdX changes for each. It’s horribly frustrating changing entries in fstab just because the card reader wasn’t plugged in when the computer booted into Ubuntu Linux
That all changed when I assigned labels to each drive. Now fstab entries reference those labels instead of devices! The following line,
/dev/sdc1 /media/disk auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
becomes
LABEL=DATA /media/disk auto rw,user,noauto 0 0
So, even if the device changes from sdc1 to sdd1 /media/disk will always mount!
Here’s a great tutorial on how to assign labels to disks, and how to modify your /etc/fstab to support them. It might seem like a pain at first but it’s well worth it!
Jacob’s Elite Chocolate Tea Cakes, described on the packet as “mallow cake covered in thick milk chocolate”, but I’d say they’re the ultimate tease of what heaven is like, they’re that nice. Could I resist biting into the lovely chocolate covered biscuit and the creamy, melt in the mouth mallow? Not a chance. Could you?
Definitely one of my favourite biscuits. Thanks Sheila!
Here’s a small plugin that does a small but useful task. It reports where the people who comment on your blog come from. It then adds a line to the end of your comment notification or moderation emails with that information.
Download: comment-referrers.txt
Install by renaming the file to .php and placing in your plugins folder and activating it on your WordPress plugins page.
Update! Here’s the plugin page for this plugin.
It’s a bit scary how much I use we use Google.
PS. I’m testing a new WordPress plugin. It needs comments to work on, so please leave a comment! It’ll hopefully see the light of day tomorrow! 🙂
I upgraded one of my servers to PHP5 this morning. Two things to watch out for:
apt-get install php5-mysql php5-gd will do the job of installing, the old packages have a php4 prefix.ob_end_clean() to ob_end_flush(). SImple as that!The reason for the upgrade? I wanted to install the gd extension, but after lots of fun upgrading everything my browser tried to download every page, complaining that it was a phtml file. I chose the upgrade to PHP5 to fix it!
And finally, the reason for gd, was to get the heatmap in this wordpress click tracking plugin working. It’s like Crazy Egg and it works well, but I couldn’t get it to display a heatmap for any page other than the front page. Some of the comments on Daily Blog Tips where I found it are hilarious. They completely miss the point of using a heatmap!
Just over a year after buying my Macbook and it has quite possibly died. While using it, it stalled, keyboard wouldn’t respond, and I had to shut it down. When I started it up again I heard 3 distinct clicks which is never a good thing, and after a few minutes of staring at a grey screen a flashing folder appeared with a question mark in the middle.
It has happened to others and the prognosis isn’t good. A reinstall of Mac OS X is required, but those clicks I heard disturb me. I get the feeling I’ll be finding out how good Apple Support are. Does anyone know how to eject a DVD without the OS running? The Bourne Supremacy is in the drive and I haven’t even watched it yet!
I’m paranoid about backups, and what has been bugging me over the last few weeks is that all my email was on the Macbook, and I hadn’t got around to backing it up because the wireless connection was too slow. I’ll find an older Thunderbird directory on my Linux box and fire that up, but if you’ve sent me email over the last few weeks that needs a reply, send it again. I think I’ll allow Gmail to store my mail in future.
If for some reason the machine can’t be resurrected, it’s definitely the last Mac I’ll buy. What with the flickering screen too, I think I might be better off spending the extra pennies on better hardware from a PC manufacturer.
Update! I rang Apple, who put me on to their local reseller/fixer-upper, and they have the laptop. Hopefully I’ll hear back from them before the end of the week. They’ll try to fix the flickering screen too. That’s apparently caused by a missing piece of rubber on the mother board.
Update on Aug 24! The service center rang yesterday evening to say the machine is fixed so I picked it up this morning. All data is gone but I won’t put anything on there I can’t afford to lose. I hope the flickering screen problem is gone now as they replaced a “board, inverter” and “cable, inverter” too. OS X is 10.4.10, and Software Update picked up one iPhoto update. Now to reinstall Firefox and other apps ..
I’ll try to make it into the the Open Coffee meetup tomorrow in Luigi Malone’s. I confess to knowing little about the business side of startups but as I’ve only ever worked for startups I guess some of it has probably rubbed off on me!
It was a dark and stormy night. Thunder rolled over the land and lightning shot from the sky incinerating trees, cars and unlucky people caught out in the worst storms since records began. Out of the dark came a hulking shape. It was transparent, and water sloshed from side to side as it moved down the road, but no! Disaster struck, a little pebble made a small crack in the jug and it’s life force, the magical water seeped into the ground and the transparent walls of the Brita jug finally fell silent.
The thunder rolled on …
Well, I had to make a post about water filters exciting in some way eh? Now, here’s what I really wanted to tell you.
We’re on our second water filter at home. The first one was a Brita jug, which worked perfectly fine until a small crack appeared in the bottom. Filters lasted slightly less than a month before it became obvious the water wasn’t as pure.
My litmus test is my bedside glass of water. If it’s still drinkable in the morning then the water filter works! Without a filter, water in Blarney where I live tastes fine out of the tap, but left overnight it has a distinctly metallic taste.
As I said, the Brita jug was fine, but water leaked out of that slowly but surely and it was time to replace the jug. Little did I know how much the Brita was costing us ..
A few days later we were shopping in Tesco and I remembered the water filter. We made our way to the hardware section of the store, and discovered quite an array of shapes and sizes, not only from Brita, but also Tesco’s own brand. I compared prices and the Tesco filters were half the price of the Brita ones, so buying a Tesco branded water filter jug was a no brainer.
Back home, the Tesco jug works great. The filter seems to last longer and my glass of water can still quench my thirst in the morning a month after installing it. If you’re going to buy a water filter, go do yourself a favour and buy the Tesco one. It’s cheaper and works just as well as the Brita one.
If on the other hand you still have a Brita jug, the Tesco filter may fit it if your jug uses the long and round filters. That’ll save you about €3 a month and as they say, “every little helps” 🙂
No, I’m not paid by Tesco for this. I think it’s too good a bargain to pass up if you use a water filter at home! Normal WordPress, tech and “popular culture” blogging will resume shortly!
PS. ‘course the Brita filter might have been doing more work because the water was leaking out of it, and thus clogging up the filter more quickly!
Rain spattered onto the windscreen in drops and a light drizzle sprinkled the car as we drove through town on our way home. It was warm today and I was looking forward to getting home, putting the baby to bed and relaxing for the evening. The windows were half down to let the air circulate in the car and traffic was going nowhere fast.
As we waited I heard the slowly increasing beat and volume of loud music from behind. A car drew alongside us and the cheering and laughing faces of the guys in it were clearly visible and their music blared into the evening. Their exuberance was catching and we were soon smiling and laughing with them! I think God must have heard their music, because suddenly the heavens opened and the car almost shook with a torrential shower of rain. We all looked at each other and laughed again. Why? Click play and you’ll find out!