jinnantonnixx

Good job the aliens forgot to renew their McAfee subscription. Jeff Goldblum would have been in real trouble.

I tell the weather with an age-old technique - a pinecone which I place in the garden. If the pinecone is wet, it's raining. If it's dry, it's going to rain. If it's gone, it's windy.

I've heard two of them. By the way, have you seen this guy's version of Daft Punk's Get Lucky? It's 10x better than the original. Behold: http://youtu.be/s6NDY8FSr9M

Correct, but that's just for your package manager (apt). It means your system can install and update itself through the proxy. By the way, my 'Proxy' in the config line has a capital P, I don't know if that makes a difference. In Ubuntu, click the Dash home bitton in the top-left and type proxy. Click the Network icon and set up your proxy settings here, either setting the proxy as above or entering a PAC file URL. Click the 'apply system wide' button. This will percolate through to other apps and Firefox.

As @CAM says, the way back in is with an administrative Windows account. Also, your backup method would get you shot at dawn for a month. Just kidding. Once you have the sa back under your control, you can use the free tool 'SQLCMD' to backup your database either from the server or a workstation. You don't need to suspend the SQL service to do this. SQL backups can run at any time, even if the server is in full flow. In the example in the link below, you don't even need sa as it uses the '-E' switch which uses a Windows account. Backup and Restore Your SQL Server Database from the Command Line

If the fault is an inherent design or manufacturing fault, your rights are further extended. I had a HP G6000 laptop with the Nvidia defect. It went faulty and I managed to get a new laptop as a replacement (from Staples), even though the laptop was over two years old.

That alc combo works for us for all our ipads and Macs. It's not just Apple, lots of software assumes no proxy is present.

I use a combination of dstdomain and browser headers and combine them in an access URL. (Squid 3.1) acl iTunes_header browser iTunes oscpd QuickTime GCSL GCSP InetURL/1.0 AppleCoreMedia acl iTunes_dst dstdomain .apple.com .gcsp.cddbp.net .icloud.com ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net .mzstatic.com .... .... http_access allow iTunes_header iTunes_dst

I'm a big fan of the Sansa Clip Sansa Clip+ MP3 Player by SanDisk They're totally open; you don't need any management software - you can drag and drop to and from the player. It works with Windows, Mac and Linux with no problems. Also, if you like, you can change the firmware for more features. Rockbox - Free Music Player Firmware And the 'clip' function (a real clip to hook onto your sleeve or collar) is excellent.

Also, there's SolusOS. This is a nice, fast distro based on Debian stable but with the classic (and very usable) Gnome 2.3. It differs from its mother OS (Debian) as it comes with pre-installed media codecs and more up-to-date versions of Firefox, VLC, etc. It's a very nice distro and well worth a look. Welcome | SolusOS

I've used JoliOS/Jolicloud with success on old bits of rubbish. It's a curious cloud-ish distro, a bit like ChromeOS is some ways. Jolicloud - Joli OS It runs like greased grease. Edit: I notice that you can now sign in with a Google ID.

It seems I spoke too soon. I had to design and print some little paper flags (don't ask) over the weekend. Time for some real-world work in Debian 7. Inkscape crashed a few times. Annoying. I set up my printer, and the print jobs simply got stuck. I tried the classic end-user technique of sending it to print again, but they kept queueing up. I was unable to delete the jobs. I had to remove and reinstall the actual printer to get the printer to work every time a job got stuck. Not good. Gnome 3 did my swede in, I installed Docky to help, but we simply didn't get along. Come back Ubuntu, all is forgiven! I reinstalled Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and it was like we'd never been apart.

I changed my home laptop to Debian last night. I was a bit annoyed at an Ubuntu regression with HDMI sound support in their kernel, so I thought I'd give Debian a whirl. There are only two applications I need to be current(ish) - Darktable and MusE - so hopefully backports will take care of that. Early days, but I'm impressed. The only work I had to do was with the wireless drivers (Broadcom BCM4313). Just connect with a wire, and follow this guide and you'll be on the air in two minutes. brcm80211 - Debian Wiki Gnome 3 and Evolution work very well with my Google mail and calendar; it's nice to have cloud calendar reminders on a native desktop app. So far so good.....

Disposable printers - the toner costs twice that of the printer. £20 Ricoh SP100e: mono laser printers are now officially disposable | ITProPortal.com

For those too young to remember why modems made those sounds, this short film explains all.

Just some randomness from my current playlist. From my favourite band The Mountain Goats. This is the first Mountain Goats song I heard. Lions Teeth - The mountain goats - YouTube Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's New Year's Kiss, a song about the morning after the night before. Etiquette is a superb album. The multi-talented Andrew Bird's Imitosis Spoon's Lines in the Suit Good classic rock - Dancing with St Peter by $ign of Four http://youtu.be/elYBtWeWE6o Tom Waits is a bit angry in Make It Rain http://youtu.be/q-aoNLdKrXs The Decemberists' Here I Dreamt I was an Architect.

Quick update for those that are interested: Scientific Linux 6.4 has been quite a success so far. I use Davmail [ DavMail POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/Carddav/LDAP Exchange Gateway ] to interface Linux's Thunderbird mail & calendar to our Exchange servers and that seems to work very well (piece of cake to configure). Davmail is started with a simple .sh script which you can set as a Gnome startup app. It provides an IMAP interface to the Exchange protocols, you just point Thunderbid's mail and calendar at 'localhost' with the appropriate ports and you're in business. For Windows stuff , I host a W7 machine using Oracle's Virtualbox (Centos/RHEL 6 rpm download) which works fine. I don't like keeping files within the virtual machine, so I use Virtualbox's mapping function to share a native Linux folder as a mapped Windows drive. Project files, code, scripts, etc are kept here, outside of the virtual machine, yet still accessible as a drive from the Windows VM. This works like a charm.

You could try the venerable ROBOCOPY with the /MINAGE flag and use of the /CREATE flag which creates a null (0 byte) copy of the tree structure, effectively reducing their size to zero. Robocopy | SS64.com

That's interesting, I suppose with Icewm you have the best of both worlds. I hadn't thought of using a WM instead of a DE then adding what I needed (e.g. Docky, if that floats your boat).

That's exactly how they work, for the basic ones at least. The Yongnuo remotes I bought can only cope with a trigger voltage of up to 12 volts, so you've got to be very careful plugging in old flashguns. Two of my guns are 6v, but another of mine I measured at 190v. For this, I have to use an old fashioned strobe sensor. Not a huge deal, but you have to have a line of sight. The ETTL remotes are a whole different story, and lots more cash. As for Canon flash, I have an old 420EX and I wasn't impressed. The build quality of the Sunpaks are much better than the Canon, but then the Sunpaks are professional grade. Perhaps newer Canon flashes have improved, the 420EX is an amateur flash in any case.

I used to run PCLOS for years. I loved their KDE 3.5 desktop and ran happily for ages. The repositories were always comprehensive and bang up to date. The move to KDE 4 threw me, I just can't get on with KDE 4 no matter what. I'm probably one of the lone voices who think that Unity is bang on target, especially for laptops.

Well, my experiment with Opensuse was a disaster. Never mind. I tried Debian 7 and that was very good, but Gnome 3 was a bit of a handful for a corporate dual-monitor desktop. I could have tried a different DE, but I've settled with Scientific Linux 6.4 and so far so good. Scientific Linux is a version of RedHat Linux, similar in many ways to Centos (and binary compatible) but more usable out of the box. It's made by Cern labs, hence its name, but it's a general purpose Linux, so don't let its name put you off. I found a slight glitch with Samba inasmuch as the gvfs plugin only works with the older Samba 3 not Samba 4. All in all, it's a solid release and the Gnome 2 is a welcome blast from the past.

Get a load of this: I love the strobist look. Just by shortening the exposure, you can radically change the sky and background, but the flash gives consistent illumination and is not affected by the camera shutter speed (flash illuminates for 1/10,0000 vs camera's 1/250 or thereabouts).

Bungee them to a tree! The flashguns, that is, not the dogs. http://www.flickr.com/photos/flyingchorse/2642886197/

Get a couple of manual flashguns, a couple of stands and some radio transmitters. For radio remotes, I use these: YONGNUO, photographic equipment, camera accessories, flash light, camera remote control, speedlite, photo equipment, LED photo light, flash trigger, camera wireless remote control, TTL cord As a plus, they come with a cable to remote-release your Canon. For flashguns, I bought three of these for peanuts from my local camera dealer. (Sunpak 555 or 4500DX) http://www.adorama.com/Reviews/pwr/product-reviews/Flash-Lighting/On-Camera-and-Slave-Flashes/Handle-Mount-Flashes/Sunpak/p/SU555-Sunpak-555-Auto-Handle-Mount-TTL-Flash-Guide-Number-150-ISO-100-ft-Requires-module-amp-EXT11-Cord-for-Dedication.html They are outrageously powerful, and lots of manual control. Believe it or not I get more consistent flash results from the Sunpak in its auto mode (with camera in manual mode) rather than my dedicated TTL Canon flash. Then looks at these Strobist sites for inspiration. Strobist photography: tutorials - Stormfront Strobist: On Assignment Flickr: The Strobist.com Pool Strobist photography is a whole new world, and it's not too expensive to get into. It's also very liberating putting your camera into fully manual mode and thinking things through.