Standardising Android
Don Marti wrote an amusing post about the lack of standards for Android phones and the fact that the iPhone has a better accessory market as a result [1]. I’d like to see some Android phones get...
View ArticleLong Term Adverts
I’ve just seen a mailing list post from someone who needs an ancient printer to work with their old software. As the printer is no longer manufactured and changing the software is expensive this puts...
View ArticleBreaking SATA Connectors
I’ve just broken my second SATA connector. This isn’t a lot considering the number of hard drives I’ve worked with, but it’s still really annoying as I generally don’t break things. The problem is that...
View ArticleServers in the Office
I just had a conversation with someone who thinks that their office should have no servers. The office in question has four servers, an Internet gateway/firewall system, the old file server (and also...
View ArticleThe Death of the Netbook
The Age has an interesting article about how Apple supposedly killed the Netbook [1]. It’s one of many articles with a similar spin on the news that the last two companies making Netbooks are going to...
View ArticleConversion of Video Files
To convert video files between formats I use Makefiles, this means I can run “make -j2″ on my dual-core server to get both cores going at once. avconv uses 8 threads for it’s computation and I’ve seen...
View ArticleGeographic Sorting – Lessons to Learn from Ingress
I’ve recently been spending a bit of my spare time playing Ingress (see the Wikipedia page if you haven’t heard of it). A quick summary is that Ingress is an Android phone game that involves...
View ArticleAdvice on Buying a PC
A common topic of discussion on computer users’ group mailing lists is advice on buying a PC. I think that most of the offered advice isn’t particularly useful with an excessive focus on building or...
View ArticleGoogle web sites and Chromium CPU Use
Chromium is the free software build of the Google Chrome web browser. It’s essentially the same as the Google code but will often be an older version, particularly when you get Chromium from...
View ArticleAdvice for Web Editing
A client has recently asked for my advice on web editing software. There are lots of programs out there for editing web sites and according to a quick Google search there are free Windows programs to...
View ArticleSound Device Order with ALSA
One problem I have had with my new Dell PowerEdge server/workstation [1] is that sound doesn’t work correctly. When I initially installed it things were OK but after installing a new monitor sound...
View ArticleDesktop Publishing is Wrong
When I first started using computers a “word processor” was a program that edited text. The most common and affordable printers were dot-matrix and people who wanted good quality printing used daisy...
View ArticleAndroid Screen Saving
Just over a year ago I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 [1]. About 3 months ago I noticed that some of the Ingress menus had burned in to the screen. Back in ancient computer times there were “screen...
View ArticlePhotograph Your Work
One thing I should have learned before (but didn’t) and hope I’ve learned now is to photograph sysadmin work. If you work as a sysadmin you probably have a good phone, if you are going to run ssh from...
View ArticleDisplayPort and 4K
The Problem Video playback looks better with a higher scan rate. A lot of content that was designed for TV (EG almost all historical documentaries) is going to be 25Hz interlaced (UK and Australia) or...
View ArticleIT Asset Management
In my last full-time position I managed the asset tracking database for my employer. It was one of those things that “someone” needed to do, and it seemed that only way that “someone” wouldn’t equate...
View ArticleA Good Time to Upgrade PCs
PC hardware just keeps getting cheaper and faster. Now that so many people have been working from home the deficiencies of home PCs are becoming apparent. I’ll give Australian prices and URLs in this...
View ArticleComparing Compression
I just did a quick test of different compression options in Debian. The source file is a 1.1G MySQL dump file. The time is user CPU time on a i7-930 running under KVM, the compression programs may have...
View ArticleVideo Decoding
I’ve had a saga of getting 4K monitors to work well. My latest issue has been video playing, the dreaded mplayer error about the system being too slow. My previous post about 4K was about using...
View ArticleCensoring Images
A client asked me to develop a system for “censoring” images from an automatic camera. The situation is that we have a camera taking regular photos from a fixed location which includes part of someone...
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