The Brainwrecked Tech

Yours truly got his wife to start playing Phantasy Star Universe with him on XBox 360.

My wife has always had a sliver of interest in playing video games, going back to Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis. The only problem was that she stunk. And the problem didn’t lie in the controls — control pad controls Sonic’s direction and all the buttons performed the same action, so c’mon. The problem lied in that Sonic games require parts of intuition, memorization, and quick reflexes. You went forward as fast as you could, defeating or avoiding enemies and traps and fast as you could. If that wasn’t enough, well, you’d better remember where you died and how you died so you won’t do it again after you restart from the last check point.

This is not a good recipe for a game for a person with a learning disability. Shove a bunch of information like that their way at such a high speed and only give them room for three failures? Yeah, my wife has never made it past the second zone in any Sonic game.

Continue reading Newcomer To The Gaming Fold…

I’ve used this router for years, and it’s performed dutifully until recently. With recent firmware updates however, two notable feature have stopped working correctly: listing devices that have opened ports using Universal Plug N Play (UPnP) and having the router detect and fetch firmware updates itself.

Continue reading Review: Netgear WGT624v3…

Plus (or minus, depends on the host) addressing can be a wonderful tool. In this automated world, computers don’t care how email addresses are formed, just whether or not the email address is valid. Actually, scratch that, they don’t care about that either — they’ll be more than happy to return error messages back to you if the address is somehow invalid.

But anyways, one of the things I decided to do when I got my Gmail account was to use plus-addressing to track down companies who were more than willing to hand out my email address to outside companies. Don’t want to accept the plus address? Too bad, you get the Hotmail account which will be shut down in a matter of days due to inactivity — have fun spamming that. Won’t stop spamming an account that’s bouncing messages back to you? Hope Microsoft bans your domain.

All you have to do is use your email username followed by either a plus sign (Runbox, Gmail, FastMail) or a minus sign (Runbox, Yahoo! Mail) followed by some identifying tag. So, if your email address is joesixpack@gmail.com, you can give the bank something like joesixpack+mybank@gmail.com to not only to sort out email from your bank, but to track who your bank gives out your email address to.

Let’s see how this works in the real world:

Oh my, oh my! Looks like Pizza Hut thinks it’s OK to give out my email address to third-party marketing firms. You know how I fixed that, right?

Pizza Hut can send me offers for free pizza all they want now — I don’t care and I won’t be returning any time soon.

fsck — noun
(1) File System ChecK, a utility in *nix systems for checking file system consistency.
(2) Something completely different and a whole lot more fun.

Continue reading Linux Geeks Know How To Fsck…

I’m surprised VistaSucks didn’t pick up on this first. But anyhow, if you think the pricing for Vista is outrageous here in the US, try making your dollar worth 59% less, dropping your income by 90%, and approximately doubling the cost of Vista. Congratulations, you now know what people in Brazil feel like.

Find out exactly why Brazil loves Linux.

OK, another brainwrecking day for yours truly, but I think I finally have a usable script anyone can use to back up an Apache and MySQL server. There’s some variables at the beginning so you can tailor the script to your needs.

The script will

• stop the Apache and MySQL services
• optionally mount an NFS share
• copy configuration settings to the respective server files directories
• tar and gzip the files into the backup location
• close the NFS share
• remove the copies of the configuration files
• start the services again
• log start and stop time and tell you how long the operation took

I commented the file pretty well, I think, so there should be little doubt as to what’s going on. If there’s anything that can be done better, let me know.

Continue reading Shell Script For Backing Up A Server…

While working on a shell script to automate backups of my web & database server, I accidentally deleted all files in my home directory on the server instead of in /srv/backup. Thankfully, being a server, nothing of value was lost…except the shell script.

Thank you people of recoverNet for your help.

Continue reading Undeleting Recently Deleted Files in Linux And Unix…

Looks like AppArmor isn’t the only thing causing a few headaches with the new release of Ubuntu. Seems that Ubuntu 8.04 also broke the eee-ubuntu-support script. Have no fear, though. The folks at eeeuser.com have come up with solutions.

The two biggest things I figured I’d post here: Fixing the screen resolution and fixing wifi.

Continue reading EeePC Headaches With Ubuntu 8.04…

Here we see Microsoft innovation at it’s best! No, pr0n didn’t come about from people making typos or trying to sneak past content filters, but from Microsoft itself!

Before any geniuses get any ideas, /home/paul/shared is NOT shared with any P2P file sharing networks. On my network, every user has a ~/shared that links to /home/all so users can share files between themselves.

This one drove me nuts FOR HOURS! I tried setting up my new LAMP server with the newly-released Ubuntu 8.04. When it came time to switch the configuration files so that Apache and MySQL would use /srv instead of /var/lib, Apache worked but MySQL did not.

Continue reading Ubuntu 8.04 “Bug” With MySQL and AppArmor…