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Full system details on Ubuntu (Linux)

Sep 8th, 2011 by

I just discovered this command which displays all your system hardware details!

Especially interesting for me was to see what size memory dims where installed and which of the bays (as well as how many there are) are being used.

The base command is:
sudo lshw
This will spit out the full list of your entire system which is quite a bit.

The following command will provide all the details for just you memory
sudo lshw -class memory

By typing the following command you will see a short list of your system details which is also where you can get the list of classes to be used in the above command.
sudo lshw -short

Hope you found this as useful!

Posted in How to | No Comments »

Apple iPad – it is actually very cool!

Feb 1st, 2010 by

I have been reading so much mixed and, even bad, media & opinions on the Apple iPad.

It is quite clear that a LOT of people feel that it is just a very large iPod and well essentially it is, however it is also a whole lot more!

For example, one of the key things that I use my iPhone for, apart from music and the phone, is managing my Linux server while out and about using an SSH terminal session.  As great as this is – it is also frustrating working on such a small screen.

Now, being able to use a SSH and terminal app on the iPad is magic!
I have also seen remote windows desktop apps for the iPod and iPhone. How much better would those be on an iPad?

Another great feature would be web development or, perhaps I should actually say, web site maintenance. Imagine being able to interact with your code something like the way you interact with a web page on the iPad. I am not suggesting that this will, or even could, replace developing on a desktop, because it won’t, but the possibility of being able to do what you need in an awesome way without being at your desk is really cool!

Now all we need is a developer to build these sorts of apps for the iPad.  Personally I am hoping for someone like the Coda team to do it.

The iPhone (and iPod touch) are revolutionary because of the App Store.  With the iPad being able to use all the same apps, as well as new apps being developed specifically for it, the iPad is more desirable than people might realise at this point.

And then there is the Book store. This WILL begin to change the way people read books, not everyone but many many many people will begin to buy and read books on their iPad. I see books becoming a thing we tell our kids or grandkids about. Something like VHS. We all know many people are reluctant to use eBooks but this will change. Think about it, Apple has just made it easier to buy books: there is no such thing as “Sold Out”, “Not in Stock” and so on. This is of course great for writers too!

As you can see I am quite excited about the iPad. Perhaps people need look at it a little differently. It’s not meant to replace a laptop or desktop and it’s not supposed to replace your iPod or iPhone, it is, just as Apple have said, somewhere in the middle and a brilliant gadget.

In My Opinion, this is the must have gadget for 2010.

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Posted in Info | No Comments »

Yashica Mat TLR with Electronic Flash

Jan 25th, 2010 by

A little while ago I bought a Yashica Mat TLR and have been wanting to use my electronic flash with it. After not being able to find much on the net I thought I would share what I have done which is actually very simple and cheap.

What you will need is a Hotshoe Adaptor and most likely a flash sync pc cable.

And that’s pretty much it… You just connect your flash to the hotshoe and the pc cable / extension to the Yashica (or which ever camera has a pc flash sync connection)

The pc extension cable in the link above is 5 meters which means you can then place your flash just about anywhere you may need it.

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Posted in How to, Info, Photography | 2 Comments »

WordPress permissions

Oct 26th, 2009 by

wordpress-logo-300x282This post will help solve a number of problems I have had and seen many other people have with WordPress blogs such as problems uploading images, installing plugins and upgrading your blog automatically.

Firstly and most importantly and the reason I am writing this blog is because I have seen a lot of really bad advise around.

The top of the bad advice list is where people suggest you change the access permissions of our WordPress blog files to 777 (e.g. read and write for anyone). I find this absolutely absurd! No one should ever need to do that for anything, this is bad for many reasons not to mention security issues that is could cause but, I digress, lets get onto business…

The solution is pretty simple and will solve anyone’s problem that has root (or sudo) access to their server. This also assumes you will be using a terminal and ssh. If anyone needs help in another way please post your questions / comment and I’ll see what I can do to help.

OK, to start of you will need to ssh onto your server and browse to the parent directory of your WordPress blog and type the following:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data  MyWPblog

Obviously you will need to replace the MyWPblog with the folder name of your WordPress blog. If you logged in as root, tat tat, you can exclude sudo from the command.

Explanation of above command

chown is the command to change the owner and group of the files you specify, the -R makes the chown command recursive so it is applied to all files and folder in the directory tree under the specified folder.

For the next part of the command I have put www-data, this is the system account (on my machine) for the Apache web server. This may be different for you but from my experience this is the usually account. If you re not sure you can look in your password file by using the following command:

cat /etc/passwd

It should be fairly obvious, look for webadmin if you cannot find www-data. It also wont do any harm to change the ownership of the files once or twice and then testing your blog if you not sure which one to use.

So, why change the ownership of the files? The answer is pretty straight forward. The Apache server runs your blog and therefore the account that Apache uses is what your blog uses. Changing the file ownership to that of your Apache server account enables the site to do whatever it needs to install and update, create and copy files and folders WITHOUT changing the access permissions to 777!

Hope this helps. Please comment if I have not been clear about something or you need further help / advice that I have not mentioned here.

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Posted in How to, Info | No Comments »

Mac Keyboard on Windows Machine

Sep 13th, 2009 by

This post explains how to setup the Windows specific or missing function on the Mac keyboard that you are accustomed to, or need.

For those of you deciding whether or not to get one I would totally recommend it. You can type so much faster, it feels great under your fingers, it’s quite flat so there is no pressure on your wrists and last but not least it looks beautiful!

Firstly, lets take a look at the most common things that are “missing”:

  • Print Screen
  • Num Lock
  • Scroll Lock
  • Pause / Break
  • Start menu key
  • and that little key on the right side of the space bar which acts as a right mouse click – I use this all the time

There are however a number of other keys on the Mac keyboard that are not on the standard windows keyboards so the plan here is to remap those extra keys or Mac specific keys to Windows keys.

I searching the net for what was the best way of doing this and came across SharpKeys.

Simply Sharpkeys updates your registry remapping the keys on the Mac keyboard to whatever you want them to be on a conventional keyboard. There are a couple rules around this but nothing that doesn’t make sense.

Here are the steps I took to get the mapping setup.

After downloading and installing, open SharpKeys and click Add, the following screen then opens up.

add_mapping

The left list is your Mac keyboard keys and the right hand side list is the keys you want to map to. You can now either select from the list or click Type Key (below window pops up) which is a far nicer way of selecting the key to remap.

type_key

The registry mapping code for any key you type will appear in here. Click OK when done.

You will then need to select from the right list the key you would like to map to. If you still have your old keyboard it may be worthwhile plugging it in to make your life easier by use the type Key option.

Below is a list of keys I have mapped which you can copy if you not sure or don’t have a keyboard to find the needed keys.

main_screen

The mapping in order from the top – most are self explanatory but just to be clear.

  • F13 key becomes Print Screen
  • F14 key becomes Scroll Lock
  • Right hand side Mac Command button becomes the mouse right click button you get in the similar place on a standard keyboard.
  • This key is above the number 7 and left of the = sign on the numeric keypad, this becomes the Num Lock

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Posted in How to | No Comments »

Snow Leopard and 64bit

Sep 3rd, 2009 by

snow_box

I stumbled across an article saying that Snow leopard does not run in 64 bit mode by default (except on Xservers).

So I did some digging and this is only partly true. Here are the details of what actually happens but the crux if it is as follows:

When your Mac with Snow Leopard boots up it will boot by default with 32bit version of the Kernel, however all 64 bit applications such as the recompiled Apple apps that come with OS X will still run in 64bit mode. So applications like Finder and Mail will be running the 64bit version.
It is also worth noting that having the kernel running in 32bit mode does not affect Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL, these will run as they should.

The reason for this is that there is still a large number of Kernel extensions such as hardware & printer drivers that are have not been re-written / re-compiled for 64bit.

[Update 12:40] Here is a link worth reading too. You can “force” boot into 64bit by pressing 6 and 4 when the computer starts up. I will test and confirm tonight.

[Update 21:15] I have tested holding down the ’6′ and ’4′ keys and it does work.

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Posted in Info, Snow Leopard | No Comments »

Credit Crisis Visualised

Mar 6th, 2009 by

I really liked this clip and think it is a pretty good view of how the economy has ended up in the current situation.

http://www.vimeo.com/3261363

Posted in The Crunch | No Comments »

Reyooz

Mar 2nd, 2009 by

Reyooz is a great site for getting rid of your junk.

The site is easy to use and a great way to recycle all of you those things you no longer want or need. Whether you subscribe to the idea of climate change and global warming or not, no-one can argue that recycling your stuff is a far better way than stuffing it in some landfill that is destroying the look of the land if nothing else.

So, go check out the site and list your unwanted junk @ http://reyooz.com

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Posted in Cool Sites | 2 Comments »

Back up n running

Mar 2nd, 2009 by

I have finally found some time to get my blog back up and running.

I’ve decided not to bring my posts over from my previous blog as there weren’t all that many anyway.

So I am starting afresh and my first real blog, which I will post in a sec, is dedicated to a site a couple of my mates have written.

http://reyooz.com/

Posted in Info | 2 Comments »