Blogs of the Giant Dorks

Previously, I had setup an Ubuntu Karmic box to install Boxee from the apt.boxee.tv APT repository. Since this repository appears to be unmaintained, I'm n… more

I haven't been getting any SPAM lately, so I thought I'd turn on catch-all to see what happens. Accepting mail for invalid recepients (e.g. anything @mydom… more

Did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on an old Inspiron E1505, only to find Wi-Fi not working. Fortunately the fix was easy.

Firstly, more on… more

Following a recent update, started getting errors copying files to a WebDAV mount point:

cp: cannot create regular file `./todo': File exists

… more

Here's a simple solution to run multiple instances of Firefox, each with own user profile (and thus cookies, extensions and themes), all running as separat… more

Got thousands of tar archives being transferred from various machines to one repository. Found that some of the archives are bad, either because the networ… more

The split command is one gem of a Giant Dork tool, but it expects to be given the number of lines to split a file along. It's easy enough to fire up a calc… more

Had to setup an FTP server at work (yuck), guides I found elsewhere didn't do exactly what I was after, so it took some trial and error to achieve the setu… more

If you aren't using StartSSL for your SSL certificate needs, you should take a hard look in the mirror and ask if the outrageous prices aged established Ce… more

The largest democratizing force in technology is the falling costs.  Moore's law (and others) established that we can count on increases in performance… more

Boxee folks helpfully host an APT repository (http://apt.boxee.tv/), but, as of this writing, only for Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) and 8.10 (Intrepid). But if you… more

I'm really excited by all the new Ultra Low Voltage laptops.  They use either Intel's Core based chips designated by the SU prefix (such as the Core 2 SU… more

On CentOS 5.4, the vnstat cron job generates an error:

Error: Unable create database backup "/var/lib/vnstat/.venet0".

By default, vnstat cron jo… more

I liked Jason's solution of passing a file list to du via xargs to produce results sorted by size in human readable format, but wanted ability to limit fil… more

When syncing files over a trusted network, where speed matters more than someone's ability to see contents of the transfer, might want to run rsync as a da… more