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Android Screen Saving

Just over a year ago I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 [1]. About 3 months ago I noticed that some of the Ingress menus had burned in to the screen. Back in ancient computer times there were “screen saver” programs that blanked the screen to avoid this, then the “screen saver” programs transitioned to […]

Desktop Publishing is Wrong

When I first started using computers a “word processor” was a program that edited text. The most common and affordable printers were dot-matrix and people who wanted good quality printing used daisy wheel printers. Text from a word processor was sent to a printer a letter at a time. The options for fancy printing were […]

Sound Device Order with ALSA

One problem I have had with my new Dell PowerEdge server/workstation [1] is that sound doesn’t work correctly. When I initially installed it things were OK but after installing a new monitor sound stopped working.

The command “aplay -l” showed the following: **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: Generic [HD-Audio Generic], device […]

Advice for Web Editing

A client has recently asked for my advice on web editing software. There are lots of programs out there for editing web sites and according to a quick Google search there are free Windows programs to do most things that you would want to do.

The first thing I’m wondering about is whether the best […]

Google web sites and Chromium CPU Use

Chromium is the free software build of the Google Chrome web browser. It’s essentially the same as the Google code but will often be an older version, particularly when you get Chromium from Debian/Stable (or any other Linux distribution that doesn’t track the latest versions all the time) and compare it to getting Chrome straight […]

Advice on Buying a PC

A common topic of discussion on computer users’ group mailing lists is advice on buying a PC. I think that most of the offered advice isn’t particularly useful with an excessive focus on building or upgrading PCs and on getting the latest and greatest. So I’ll blog about it instead of getting involved in more […]

Geographic Sorting – Lessons to Learn from Ingress

I’ve recently been spending a bit of my spare time playing Ingress (see the Wikipedia page if you haven’t heard of it). A quick summary is that Ingress is an Android phone game that involves geo-location of “portals” that you aim to control and most operations on a portal can only be performed when you […]

Conversion of Video Files

To convert video files between formats I use Makefiles, this means I can run “make -j2” on my dual-core server to get both cores going at once. avconv uses 8 threads for it’s computation and I’ve seen it take up to 190% CPU time for brief periods of time, but overall it seems to average […]

The Death of the Netbook

The Age has an interesting article about how Apple supposedly killed the Netbook [1]. It’s one of many articles with a similar spin on the news that the last two companies making Netbooks are going to cease production. The main point of these articles is that Apple decided that Netbooks were crap and killed the […]

Servers in the Office

I just had a conversation with someone who thinks that their office should have no servers.

The office in question has four servers, an Internet gateway/firewall system, the old file server (and also Xen server), the new file server, and the VOIP server.

The Internet gateway system could possibly be replaced by a suitably smart […]