July 2012

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I graph the temperature of my server cabinet (at home) and colocation room (at work) in Cacti, using TEMPer USB thermometers. I wrote a handy guide to doing this last year. Unfortunately that guide, and the software I wrote, only worked to query one device. Today I modified it to graph more than one device, and started graphing the ambient temperature of my house.

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Tonight I had a quiet night in, leaving Hackers* running on the TV while hacking a power switch into my Keysonic wireless keyboard. It’s hard to justify modding a £35 keyboard, but I didn’t do it because it was a cost-effective means of solving my problem. I just wanted to do it.

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Building a PC for the kids

Last night my 4-year-old daughter Pascale and I assembled a PC for the kids to use. I reused gozer, my former HTPC, along with a monitor given to me by my friend Soren, and a keyboard and mouse purchased for tiny hands. I installed Qimo 2.0, a children-focused Linux distribution based on Xubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”.

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Run an Ubuntu system long enough, and you’ll eventually have a large number of kernels installed. These don’t cause any harm, but they do take up disk space and appear in the GRUB menu at boot. So every now and again, I take a moment and purge the old kernels.

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Update 2013-02-18: See comments. The exclude location is now /etc/ownCloud/sync-exclude.lst, with no user-specific exclude file.

I’ve been playing with ownCloud and just set up the sync client for Ubuntu 12.04. One immediate issue I encountered is that it tried to sync files I wanted it to ignore, like Vim’s swap (.filename.swp) files.

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