Posts
Foundation
Getting the foundation installed was a pretty stressful job. Nearly all of the work had to be hired out to other people, and we spent a lot of time being the general contractors: lots of phone calls, scheduling work around the many dependencies, etc. This foundation required extra care because our hillside has a very high water table. So we spent lots of money on crushed stone to be used liberally under and around the foundation.
May 18, 2012
FirstDay Cottage under way
Last summer we had planned to start building a new FirstDay Cottage kit on a rural piece of land in central Vermont. The plans were halted by hurricane Irene, which blew in the day after we were supposed to start digging the foundation. The foundation never happened, and by the time the roads in our part of Vermont were fixed, it was too late to start digging or building. So we had to put off the building until this year, after mud season.
May 11, 2012
Downloading / backing up Gmail messages by date range
#Gmail#Linux#Linux Mint#Software#Ubuntu
I currently use fetchmail to download my Gmail email via POP3 to my laptop, where I read it with a text-mode email client called sup. But for a couple of months back in 2009, I was in the middle of a cross-country move and temporarily switched to using the Gmail web UI. Then when I switched back to using fetchmail, it wasn’t able to read those two months’ worth of email, which remained missing until today.
August 18, 2011
Linux Mint / Ubuntu tweaks
#Linux#Linux Mint#Software#Ubuntu
Each time I install Linux Mint on a new machine, or upgrade an installation, I have to perform a set of tweaks to get the system to look and behave the way I want. After doing these tweaks yet again over the weekend, I decided to write them down for posterity.
April 27, 2011
Extracting a subset of pages from a PDF document
For an upcoming plane trip, I wanted to extract one chapter from an Intel IA32 Architecture Software Developer manual for reading on my Kindle. In the past, I would have used pdftk for this purpose, but this is an old, unsupported tool that cannot handle the AESV2 encryption used in Intel’s manuals. I then tried to use the Multivalent tools, which supposedly contain various PDF manipulation tools, but this package seems to have suffered from software rot, and the supplied .jar file no longer contains the necessary classes.
January 21, 2011
Reading non-DRM ebooks using the Amazon Kindle app for Android
[Update: According to recent comments (thanks!) the procedure described below no longer works and there is apparently no workaround.] The new Amazon Kindle app for Android stores its books in the “kindle” directory on the phone’s SD card. I naively assumed that I could copy any non-Amazon but Kindle-compatible books into that directory and have the app recognize them. I tried this with a mobipocket Jane Austen collection (a .prc file) that works just fine on the Kindle, but the Android app crashed immediately after display the book’s title and author.
June 30, 2010
Enabling fingerprint reader in Linux Mint 9 / Ubuntu 10.04
#Linux#Linux Mint#Thinkpad#Ubuntu
It looks like the upgrade to the latest Ubuntu is going to keep me busy solving problems for a while. Today’s second problem has to do with the fingerprint reader in the ThinkPad X41. There’s a good source of information here, but there wasn’t a definitive set of instructions for Ubuntu 10.04 that actually worked. Most of the uproar about the fingerprint reader in Ubuntu 10.04 has to do with a bug where the Enter key has to be pressed after swiping your finger. I couldn’t even get to that point; the trouble was getting logins to prompt for a finger swipe.
June 8, 2010
Fixing Logitech (pwc) webcam hang in Linux Mint 9 / Ubuntu 10.04
I have an old Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks that uses the pwc (Philips Web Cam) driver on Linux. This camera has always worked flawlessly on Linux Mint 6 (Ubuntu 8.10). But on Linux Mint 9, the camera only worked the first time it was plugged in; on subsequent plug-ins, no programs could read images from the camera. The fswebcam utility reported a timeout trying to read the frame buffer; other programs like Cheese or Skype simply displayed blank images.
June 7, 2010
Sharing a VPN connection on Linux
My employer’s VPN system doesn’t allow more than one login at a time. But there are occasions when I’d like to be able to use the VPN from two different laptops simultaneously. The solution, most of which I found here, is to use iptables on the machine running the VPN to forward packets from the machine not running the VPN. In my case, the Juniper VPN software (ncsvc) sets up a connection on the net device tun0, and the network address is 10.0.0.0. So after I start the VPN on one machine, I run the following script on that machine:
June 2, 2010
Booting Linux Mint 9 from a USB key
I just spent many hours getting a 4GB USB key into a state where it can be used to boot Linux Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04). Here are some notes on the problems I had to solve. In the past, I’ve used unetbootin to create bootable USB keys. When I did this with the Linux Mint 9 ISO image, the resulting USB key booted up just fine, but the installer application hung when trying to run the partition editor. I narrowed this down to an assertion failure in libparted. Apparently it doesn’t like the geometry on some USB keys. This is a known bug.
May 30, 2010