2011

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Update 2013-02-08: It seems that this error is triggered by many different conditions. If you have my problem, the following steps may help you. If not, please don’t post “this didn’t help, any ideas?” I cannot help you further. If you have new information to add, please do post a comment!

Recently Google offered a sale on 10 Android apps each day for 10p (or 10¢). During the sale I bought a number of apps, because 10p is practically indistinguishable from “free”. Unfortunately, my bank believed this large number of sub-one-pound purchases to be fraudulent. Normally they’d be right; that’s exactly the kind of thing criminal organisations do when testing credit cards. But in my case, it was just a case of “SALE! SALE! SALE!” madness.

I cleared it with the bank, but after that I could no longer buy applications through the Android Market application. When I attempted to do so, the Market required me to check “I agree to the Payments for Android
Market Terms and Conditions”, then failed with the message “Error while retrieving information from server.”

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Merry Christmas, everyone! We have a special card just for you.

(In case you miss it the first time, try reloading or clicking the button.)

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Immediately after the upgrade to 10.03.1-rc5, the OpenWRT team released 10.03.1-rc6. Since rc5 didn’t fix wireless on my Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH, I gave rc6 a go.

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A few weeks ago, I upgraded my Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH home router to OpenWRT 10.03.1-rc5. I followed the same upgrade process as I used to upgrade to previous releases. However, this time most settings were not restored correctly.

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I am often asked to measure the bandwidth of a network path. Many users test this using a simple HTTP download or with speedtest.net. Unfortunately, any test using TCP will produce inaccurate results, due to the limitations of a session-oriented protocol. TCP window size, latency, and the bandwidth of the return channel (for ACK messages) all affect the results. The most reliable way to measure true bandwidth is with UDP. That’s where my friends iperf and bwm-ng come in handy.

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I’ve updated Tolarski, my variable-width Tarski theme, to work with Tarski 3.1.2 and WordPress 3.2.x. This version is also downloadable as a ZIP file, and can be installed through the WordPress GUI.

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You may have read of the new 4K Advanced Format drives now becoming popular on the market. In fact, if you’ve got a drive larger than 1 TB, you probably have one, even if you don’t know it. I’ve found lots of people assembling home NAS servers using 2 TB drives, linux software RAID or LVM, and all of them are concerned about aligning various parts of the storage infrastructure to the new 4K format. But, thanks to libblkid, you don’t have to.

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I like GNU Screen. I also like SSH agent forwarding. Combining these two makes for very easy, password-less, large file transfers between two remote hosts.

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On my HTPC, XBMC outputs sound over HDMI to a Panasonic TX-37LZD70 TV. This works great in most respects. However, there is a 2-second delay between when XBMC starts playing audio (music or video with sound), and when it actually outputs from the TV speakers. The sound is in sync with the video; it just takes 2 seconds to start. It’s annoying to always hear a theme song start part-way into the first few notes.

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I acquired an Android-based tablet a few weeks back. After the inevitable period of “new toy!” passed, I started looking into ways to safely archive my data. I already use BackupPC to backup to my PCs, so why not an Android tablet?

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