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Modern Swap Use

A while ago I wrote a blog post debunking the idea that swap should be twice as large as RAM [1]. The issue of swap size has come up for discussion in a mailing list so it seems that it’s worth another blog post.

Swap Size

In my previous post I suggested making swap space […]

Samsung Galaxy Camera – a Quick Review

I recently had a chance to briefly play with the new Samsung Galaxy Camera [1]. The Galaxy Camera is an Android device with a 4.8″ display (the same size as the Samsung Galaxy S3) that has a fairly capable camera (IE nothing like a typical phone camera). It runs Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and the […]

SIM Annoyances

My new Samsung Galaxy S3 phone takes a micro-SIM (see the Wikipedia page about Subscriber Identity Modules for details [1]). All my other mobile devices take a mini-SIM so I can’t just put the SIM from my old phone in my new phone. I’ve just made my second application to Virgin Mobile for a new […]

Finding an ATM Skimmer

A member of SAGE-AU [1] found two ATM skimmers [2] and gave me permission to publish his description and analysis of the situation. I’ve lightly edited this from a mailing list post to a blog format with permission from the author. This Courier-Mail article refers to the skimmers in question [3].

People were wondering what […]

Everyone Needs a Tablet

Care2 has an interesting article about people being offended by a picture of a poor Afro-American boy using an iPad [1]. It seems that people object to poor people having what is in many ways the greatest educational tool available because it can also be seen as a status symbol. I wonder if one of […]

Samsung Galaxy S3 First Review with Power Case

My new Samsung Galaxy S3 arrived a couple of days ago. Kogan added to the weirdness in their shipping that I documented in a previous post [1] by shipping the two phones on consecutive days with separate invoices for $789 each (as opposed to the $449 that I paid). This means that if customs were […]

Using BTRFS

I’ve just installed BTRFS on some systems that matter to me. It is still regarded as experimental but Oracle supports it with their kernel so it can’t be too bad – and it’s almost guaranteed that anything other than BTRFS or ZFS will lose data if you run as many systems as I do. Also […]

Globalisation and Phone Calls

I just watched an interesting TED talk by Pankaj Ghemawat (of which the most important points are summarised in a TED blog post) about the world not being as globalised as people expect [1]. One point is that only 2% of traditional voice phone calling minutes (and ~6% when you include VOIP) are for international […]

Dependencies in Online Ordering

I have just ordered two Samsung Galaxy S3 phones and matching cases from Kogan. The price was good and Kogan gave me 30 cents discount as part of a verification process. Instead of billing the full amount for a large order (for which the cutoff is somewhere between $25 and $1014) Kogan will deduct a […]

Links December 2012

Steven Johnson gave an interesting TED talk about where good ideas come from [1]. He starts by attributing coffee replacing alcohol as a standard drink for some good ideas and then moves on to how ideas develop.

Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel gave an interesting and amusing TED talk about the ngram analysis of […]