Tonight I had a bit of a scare thanks to jumping to conclusions from the first Google result. I thought it might be a good idea to drop a reminder here to take a step back and remember that .bash_history is a thing. While I was inspecting /etc/passwd on a new Ubuntu server to confirm a home directory, I noticed a new line at the bottom I had never seen.

While I work I like to have one earbud in for listening to background music or podcasts, and for a few years I’ve been buying various Plantronics bluetooth headsets such as the M50 and M70. They provided a cheap solution for long battery life (7+ hours) of audio in one ear. After I accidentally put my M70 through the wash one too many times (yes it survived more than once) I decided to start looking at stereo solutions.

Create A RAID-1 Array mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 /dev/sda /dev/sdb Scan For Disks mdadm --detail --scan Add Disks To mdadm.conf mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf Check Status cat /proc/mdstat Mark Disk as Failed mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sda Remove Failed Drive mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --fail /dev/sda Add Disk To Array mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda

All posts have been migrated from Squarespace. The site is now running on it’s own server running WordPress. The process was painless, and I lost no functionality. I’m paying less and I’m able to do a lot more.

My 1-month old tablet, the Asus Transformer T100 tablet started draining slowly while it was plugged in. Today I drained the battery down to around 30%, plugged it in, and continued with web-browsing and streaming music. An hour later I noticed that the battery percentage wasn’t climbing, and it had actually discharged another 5%. Windows claimed it was “plugged in, charging” and the LED on the power button was lit up like normal, but the battery percentage was still slowing going down.

Have you ever been afraid to open a package? On the first day of Feburary, 2011, St. Louis had a major ice storm. On this day, the ice was so bad that I couldn’t get my work truck out of my driveway, which was impressive because it slightly slants down toward the road. Before I had a chance to call into work to let them know, my boss called me and said it’s not worth trying to drive, and to stay home try to do a bit of work remotely and answer phone calls.

If you’ve ever managed a linux machine, you’ve likely manually editied the /etc/fstab file to automatically mount filesystems. If you manually specify it’s location (/dev/sdb1) you may know that adding other devices can change location, meaning you will need to change your fstab. If you’ve looked at modern Linux distributions, you may notice that the fstab file does not contain any /dev devices, but instead uses the partition’s GUID. From what little reading I’ve done, I’ve found this is a feature of ext2 and up filesystems.

Yesterday I wandered into an electronics store intending to buy nothing and walked out with an old computer, a “dmx ProFusion X Digital Media Manager”. From what I can tell this was designed to play music in a store. On the back it has connectors that convert the standard 3.5mm audio outpus to RCA’s that I’m assuming go to amplifiers. When I walked to the register with the PC, the clerk was wondering why the machine was on the floor in the first place.

I’ve recently replaced an aging Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT with a PC running pfSense. Around a month ago I added a second NIC to an old mini-ITX 1ghz VIA motherboard I had lying around and dropped it in place of DD-WRT. The PCI NIC started locking up daily about a week ago. pfSense automatically restarts the interface after a minute or so, so it wasn’t very urgent. I recently aquired a P4 machine with dual onboard NICs, so last night I swapped it in place of the VIA machine.

Running an OS other than Chrome OS on a CR-48 turns it into a perfect portable computer that can do much more than when it was just a browser. The biggest drawback I’ve found is that the keyboard is customized for the OS it came with: It’s missing keys, the function keys are labeled only with icons, and there is a Search key where a caps lock key should be.