When my previous printer ran low on toner, I bought a new printer. Billing is critical. A Brother MFC-8880DN, which I already know from setting it up for someone else.

It's a decent network printer. Notable positive aspects: It can scan in colour (even though it's nominally a monochrome printer). (more…)

My previous laptop (a Lifebook P7210) grew bad-tempered. Investigate or replace? Stupid question considering how much netbooks cost.

My new laptop is a Nokia Booklet 3G, a moderately expensive netbook with good battery lifetime, a 3G modem, a high-resolution screen and no fan. Ubuntu 10.10 runs well (more…)

jam -g is the best make system I've ever used. Best for the simple reason that when the build fails, it usually fails quickly. I start the build, and a second later I'm already looking at my mistake. That feature outweighs any and all drawbacks.

Sadly, I don't use jam very often at the moment. I mostly use maven 2, which starts the build by determining from first principles which source files to use and which libraries to download. In practice the set needed hasn't changed in the past minutes, (more…)

So Paul Allen sues over patents and I'm sure he'll attract a lot of flak for that. But a side issue interests me particularly: The patents were originally awarded to Interval Research, a tech R&D firm founded by Allen and former Xerox executive David Liddle in 1992. The firm was folded in 2000, and the patents were later transferred to Interval Licensing. (more…)

Three million web forum postings contain wrong, misguided or overly complex solutions, so here:

When ubuntu complains WARNING: untrusted versions of the following packages will be installed, that's because of bad data in the keyring for ubuntu packages, which is part of the package ubuntu-keyring. (more…)

I've had the 4828 for half a year, and have had several bad experiences.

I have crashed the printer twice. Once by printing the guice guide using chromium and once by printing a book-length ΤΕΧ (dvips) document, mostly text with some tables and figures.

The copier is really, really bad at copying grey-on-white or green-on-white text. (more…)

The normal linux pptpd will talk to the normal Android PPTP client, but brokenly by default. The magic (more…)

Some fonts have already been updated to include ẞ, including the ones I generally use (on ubuntu 10.04). Lovely.

If AnyDVD pops up a big warning dialog about read errors (suggesting a region-free fimware from rpc1.com, cleaning the DVD, etc), and you're using it inside Virtualbox, then the correct solution is: (more…)

I need to use Puppet, a system to configure linux boxes (add the right users, install and configure the right services, make sure the right things are running and the wrong things not). Puppet seems good, better than cfengine.

So I read the existing configuration, which seemed to make sense but left a lot of open questions, read the the documentation, felt little wiser, and bought a book (Pulling strings with Puppet by James Turnbull) and (more…)

I have a Samsung SCX-4828FN printer/fax/­copier/scanner, and use it with linux and BSD. (Update: I've a follow-up posting about the printer.)

The printer is fine for black and white text, such as I usually print: Fast, crisp text with fine edges, nicely readable. Duplex printing just works. The printer can print quite close to the paper's edge, too. (more…)

WD Caviar Green disks (WD15EADS-00S2B0 in my case) like to unload the drive heads to save power. The ReadyNAS likes to load them again. This causes two problems: Frequent eight-second delays as the drive heads move away from the platters and then back towards them, and in my case, the drives would reach their stated lifetime (300,000 load cycles) in less than a year.

Several solutions exist. (more…)

Sad to say, but I recently installed ubuntu 9.10 (karmic koala) on a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S4572. I installed the minimal system followed by xubuntu-desktop and gcompris: xfce is supposed to be better for small boxes and gcompris is the whole point. (more…)

I hate it when different, independent computers all send me mail from my close friend Charlie Root. Here's an aox hack to ease the pain. (more…)

If my Benq M108 mouse is plugged into the USB hub of my Eizo S2100 monitor while linux 2.6.31 (and several others) boots on my Zotac ION-ITX-B motherboard, then the kernel freezes after this line:

[ 0.828204] io scheduler cfq registered (default)

Numlock does nothing, I need to press the any key.

If I unplug the mouse from the hub, or the hub from the PC, then the boot succeeds. (more…)

I bought a ReadyNAS NV+ years ago, and don't like it. It serves files, but does so many things badly that next time I want to add more disk space, I intend to purchase something else. (more…)

Here's what I did to get a sensibly large character repertoire for my keyboard, using ubuntu 9.10.

First, read any of the fine explanations of the compose key and configure some suitable key.

Next, explain to ubuntu that you do wish to XIM:

im-switch -s default-xim

By this time, X applications will read your ~/.XCompose file when they start, so set it up. There's a large repertoire on github:

cd ~/src git clone git://github.com/leoboiko/pointless-xcompose.git

Here's my ~/.XCompose (more…)

Zotac ION ITX B motherboard, Silverstone SG05 case, Scythe Slip Stream 120mm fan, Be Quiet SFX power supply, SSD. (more…)

After eleven years and a bit, I think I stopped.

Alt-F2 was too slow, and the application serving it ate 400MB RAM including all the shared libraries it didn't actually share with anything. (more…)