Category: Technology

20×2 LCD display

There are a million 20x2 characters LCDs out there, but this is one that I like: http://www.okaphone.com/artikel.asp?id=475234 Farnell code: 9448780 Read More »
By halfgaar, 9 years ago, on March 11, 2013, at 21:03 | Comments closed

Making my USB webcam not the first sound card

When I booted my system with the webcam plugged in, it was sound device 0, instead of 1. This is annoying, so I added this to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf: Read More »
By halfgaar, 9 years ago, on March 04, 2013, at 10:03 | Comments closed

Styling visited links for payformystay.com

I wanted to change the text of visited links on payformystay.com, using CSS. In the offer summary, I wanted to change the link text "Check it out!" with "Check it out again!" after the user had indeed checked out the offer. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on March 01, 2013, at 22:03 | Comments closed

Exemplary web design: danwebb.net

While investigating fragment identifiers and hashbangs for payformystay.com quite a while back, I came across this article by Dan Web, when I noticed that I really, really liked the design of danwebb.net: Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on March 01, 2013, at 21:03 | Comments closed

Creating a Xen bridge with bonding on Debian

Like this, but then with bonding: Read More »
By halfgaar, 9 years ago, on March 01, 2013, at 18:03 | Comments closed

A new Archlinux upgrade, a new unbootable system

It's that time again... First my grub broke. So I had to type my config manually: root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinux26 root=/dev/mapper/lvmopraid-root initrd /kernel26.img boot Read More »
By halfgaar, 9 years ago, on February 15, 2013, at 21:02 | 6 comments

Aihato WordPress maintenance notes

According to Brian Kernighan, “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?” With that in mind I'm re-exposing myself to the spaghetti that is the Aihato WordPress code base. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on February 09, 2013, at 22:02 | 5 comments

NFSN PHP file write permissions in safe_mode

I've been causing some (security) concerns for myself by thoughtlessly using the dreaded 777 permissions for upload directories to allow the various PHP-based websites that I host at nearlyfreespeech.net to write files there. What this drastic anti-security measure didn't allow me to is to manage these uploaded files through SSH (and SCP/Rsync). In the chroot jail which I'm allowed to enter through SSH, I am ‘me’, while the files created from PHP end up being owned by user ‘web’. However, for some reason these files didn't get owned by group ‘web’ of which the ‘me’ user is a member. Also, I got into trouble with new directories that were being created by the upload scripts. Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on February 08, 2013, at 17:02 | 3 comments

WordPress admin bar and absolute CSS positioning

WordPress 3.2 introduced an admin bar, which is fixed at the top of the window when you're logged in. An annoying side-effect that has been bugging me for some time is that, although this pushed down most of my content, HTML elements that used absolute positioning stayed in there old place. This didn't look particularly good, but I left it hanging for a long time because it only affected logged in users (that is: either me or Halfgaar). Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on February 02, 2013, at 21:02 | 3 comments

Thinkpad T61 Hardware Maintenance Manual

I thought I'd upload the hardware maintenance manual [PDF] for my Lenovo Thinkpad T61… Read More »
By Rowan Rodrik, 9 years ago, on January 31, 2013, at 14:01 | Comments closed