Category: Linux
Weather Station Excitement
August 24th, 2011, 4 Comments
I’ve sort of wanted a weather station for a long time. Lately, the ham radio hobby has intensified that, and I finally got one. When I finally got the serial link cable yesterday, well I was perhaps irrationally excited. Terah accused me of running all around the house while gathering up stuff for it. That [...]
A 4-year-old, Linux command line, and microphone
July 30th, 2011, 4 Comments
There are certain times when I’m really glad that we have Linux on the house for our boys to play with. I’ve already written how our 4-year-old Jacob has fun with bash and can chain together commands to draw ASCII animated steam locomotives. Today I thought it might be fun to install cw, a program [...]
A Proud Dad
March 16th, 2011, 10 Comments
I saw this on my computer screen the other day, and I’ve got to say it really warmed my heart. I’ll explain below if it doesn’t provoke that reaction for you. So here’s why that made me happy. Well for one, it was the first time Jacob had left stuff on my computer that I [...]
Unix Password and Authority Management
January 31st, 2011, 6 Comments
One of the things that everyone seems to do different is managing passwords. We haven’t looked at that in quite some time, despite growth both of the company and the IT department. As I look to us moving some things to the cloud, and shifting offsite backups from carrying tapes to a bank to backups [...]
Research on deduplicating disk-based and cloud backups
January 20th, 2011, 18 Comments
Yesterday, I wrote about backing up to the cloud. I specifically was looking at cloud backup services. I’ve been looking into various options there, but also various options for disk-based backups. I’d like to have both onsite and offsite backups, so both types of backup are needed. Also, it is useful to think about how [...]
Jacob: 4 Years Old, and Troubleshooting PCs
December 12th, 2010, 2 Comments
Back in April, I wrote about Jacob and I building his first computer together and how it’s running just the Linux command-line interface — no graphics at all. And he loves it. Well, as is often the case with him, his interest in various things waxes and wanes over time. He hadn’t spent much time [...]
Jacob has a new computer — and a favorite shell
April 9th, 2010, 36 Comments
Earlier today, I wrote about building a computer with Jacob, our 3.5-year-old, and setting him up with a Linux shell. We did that this evening, and wow — he loves it. While the Debian Installer was running, he kept begging to type, so I taught him how to hit Alt-F2 and fired up cat for [...]
Introducing the Command Line at 3 years
April 9th, 2010, 27 Comments
Jacob is very interested in how things work. He’s 3.5 years old, and into everything. He loves to look at propane tanks, as the pressure meter, and open the lids on top to see the vent underneath. Last night, I showed him our electric meter and the spinning disc inside it. And, more importantly, last [...]
Review: Linux IM Software
February 15th, 2010, 15 Comments
I’ve been looking at instant messaging and chat software lately. Briefly stated, I connect to Jabber and IRC networks from at least three different computers. I don’t like having to sign in and out on different machines. One of the nice features about Jabber (XMPP) is that I can have clients signing in from all [...]
Switched from KDE to xmonad
September 18th, 2008, 13 Comments
Within the last couple of days, I’ve started using xmonad, a tiling window manager, instead of KDE. Tiling window managers automatically position most windows on your screen, freeing you from having to move, rearrange, and resize them all the time. It sounds scary at first, but it turns out to be incredibly nice and efficient. [...]
