Remember in XP when you could press F3 type in the file contents you were searching for and be confident you would be able to find all the files that contained a search term. That is no longer the case. You can dig around the W7 Search menus and tell Windows 7 to...
James McDonald
The 5th Anniversary
They really made her... Perfect. I know. Just had a wonderful anniversary weekend with my Beautiful Wife: Friday Night: Anniversary Dinner at the thevintage.com.au. This is where we had our reception 5 yrs ago. Saturday Night: Chris Isaak concert at...
Managing Dockable Dialogs with GIMP
GIMP is a great program. Once you start using more of it's features you can have a lot of peripheral dialog windows cluttering up your screen. Here is a short video I made on how to combine GIMP dockable dialogs into one dialog box and lay them out so you don't need...
LaTeX – Writing Letters
A good simple howto on writing letters and envelopes using LaTeX. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Letters
Create a CGI directory which allows Directory Listing
I wanted to create a cgi-bin directory which would allow me to execute the files and also to view a directory index of them. This is the default setup for the system cgi-bin directory but it wouldn't allow me to do what I wanted. ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/...
Performing Image Tiling Operations ImageMagick
I just had the need to take a GIMP XCF file and create several different types of output images from it: PNG File JPEG File Resize to thumbnail in JPEG format 2x2 Tiled PNG with black and white borders Using the Imagemagick and xcftools you can do it all via the...
Input Error: There is no script engine for file extension “.vbs”.
Just installed Bluefish for Windows and let it take control of alot of the files that you might want to edit including .VBS files (Visual Basic Script). After which I got the following error: C:\Users\myusername\Desktop>cscript DownloadAndConvert.vbs Microsoft (R)...
Cygwin X – failed to activate core devices
Recently updated my Cygwin install on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Workstation. Tried to run startxdmcp.bat and got a Cygwin X error - failed to activate core devices Looking in /var/log/XWin.0.log showed nothing obvious as to why the X server failed to start. Ran Cygwin...
Javascript Best Practices
I don't do a lot of programming, and the languages I use are all interpreted (Perl, VBS, Kix, PHP) and not compiled. So people can easily see the mess I make of code. But I do like to know, at least, how to do things correctly. With regard to Javascript there are many...
Adding HP Officejet Pro 8500 A910 to Linux Mint 10
I un-installed all the hplip packages on the box from the Software Manager to start with. Then I followed the instructions here http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/install/manual/distros/linuxmint.html You definately need the latest hplip tarball. (I used...
For Halitosis try Linux Mint
Just did something stupid with my home system: Started an update from Ubuntu 10.10 to the development version of the new 11.04 using update-manager -d. Saw the `don't use this on a production system' warning and ignored it, and pulled the trigger on the update. Then I...
Getting Screenshots working the way I prefer in LXDE
The default command on lubuntu-desktop for ALT-PrintScreen and PrintScreen dump the file in $HOME On my Fedora 20 LXDE install there are no preconfigured screen shot options. So the following needs to be added to the openbox config xml. Before you start install scrot...
Removing the ‘quiet splash’ options from the Ubuntu 10.10 kernel boot command line
Remember the old grub? When you could just go into /boot/grub/menu.lst (on Debianesque OS's) or /boot/grub/grub.conf (on Redhatian OS's) and edit & save the file raw. Those days are gone the new grub version 1.98+20100804-5ubuntu3 on Ubuntu 10.10 is now fully...
uuencode is in sharutils
Problem: Just transferring data from RH ES 3.0 to RH ES 5.6 and while testing a cron script it failed complaining about missing uuencode The fix: yum install sharutils
Playing around with WordPress Twitter Tools
I finally have a twitter account jmcd73. Not sure what it does. Just playin' really
Linux `at’ command – Part II
I am looking at the Linux at command again. I used to think that you couldn't create commands with arguments and feed them to at without using at -f filewithcommandsinit but I have discovered it's quite easy using STDIN e.g. # to add a new command to run 1 minute from...
Quick, Dirty and Insecure Mysql Access via Apache Web Server
I am mucking around with creating a mysql web application When trying out all sorts of queries it's sometimes nice to have them output to HTML for viewing in a web browser This file (named myscript.sh) shown below goes in your cgi-bin or other directory which has a...
LXDE Desktop for Ubuntu
If you miss simple and fast. If XFCE isn't your bag. If you just want a simple UI without the massive over head of KDE or GNOME. Give LXDE Desktop for Ubuntu a go. sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop I'm currently enjoying it because it makes my P4 seem snappier....