I'm up to three Gentoo machines around me and one elsewhere, and I've been seeing the use for nightly syncing. I've been syncing by hand about once a week, but experience shows that I tend to miss a week if I'm unusually involved in something, and there's far too much chance that the week I miss will be the one when some attention requiring upgrade hits stable. This leaves the choice of picking the simple upgrades out by hand, which uses much more time, or raising the priority of the complex upg… Continue

Unless you're superhumanly careful, if you have computer knowledge, you'll end up being the go to person for someone's computer questions. And sooner or later, they'll get a camera or a scanner and an account on Facebook or Myspace, and they'll want to rotate, crop, and resize an image before uploading it for all their friends. All the users who can handle The Gimp will probably have found it and won't be asking the question, but what to do for the ones who can't handle its complexity?

S… Continue

Fans of the web comic xkcd (warning: sometimes not safe for work) who use Firefox 2.0 are familiar with the frustration of viewing the source to read the entire title tooltip behind the comic image. Firefox 3 fixes that, but before it's released and hits stable in distributions of choice, there is the Long Titles extension. (Thanks to… Continue

I was fixing my backups the other day, went looking, and discovered rsync --link-dest. With it, rsync substitutes hard links for files that haven't changed. The result:

tria tria # du -hs backup-*1.7G backup-2008-03-1982M backup-2008-03-20

40M backup-2008-03-21

40M backup-2008-03-22

76M backup-2008-03-23

37M backup-2008-03-24

63M backup-2008-03-25

206M backup-2008-03-26

42M backup-2008-03-27

101M backup-2008-03-28

70M backup-2008-03-29

52M backup-2008-03-30

64M b

… Continue

For some time I've been running my monitors at 1152x864. I picked it because it was a standard resolution (although uncommon) and the next one down from 1280x960 which was slightly too fuzzy.

Unfortunately, it leaves me about ten characters short of three xterms across each monitor.

Today I switched to 1200x900. That three xterms across has made my world a much happier place, and you know, anything that cares about resolution is going to want 1024 or 1280 anyway.