Geekery Archive

  • The Holy Grail of .muttrc Colors

    The Holy Grail of .muttrc Colors

    Well, folks, it’s taken me a bazillion and eleventy years to finally decide my “killer” Mutt colour scheme, but here it is. Stick this in your .muttrc and bask in the glory. color hdrdefault yellow black color quoted brightred black color signature magenta black color...

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  • A conversation with JD

    A conversation with JD

    j.daniels: 15 minute job to move disks and filesystems? That’s impressive. What’s your secret? j.dow: no, fifteen minute job to shut down box, add disks, and bring box back up j.daniels: Ahh. j.dow: the rest of it can be done hot. This is the cunning...

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  • Syncing ratings from iPod back to iTunes

    Syncing ratings from iPod back to iTunes

    It doesn’t do this, by default, unless you’re syncing your whole music collection automatically. Which is a bit rubbish if, like me, you have an 8Gb iPod Touch and a 60Gb music library. See, what I tend to do, to make sure I actually rotate...

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  • The Strange Case of the Unexpected Fruit

    The Strange Case of the Unexpected Fruit

    Ok, so there I was standing in my kitchen and gazing with a little horror and a touch of disgust at my fruit bowl. It had, as memory serves, contained a couple of bananas, a chinese pear, and a solitary wizened looking apple. Imagine my...

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  • A conversation with Dave

    A conversation with Dave

    (15:19:21) j.dow/Home: Matey – can I schedule a two hour outage some evening to take a cold backup of live? (15:19:41) Dave: aye (15:19:54) j.dow/Home: or morning would work just as well (and be quieter) (15:20:01) Dave: get a date in mind and then i’ll...

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  • Happy Birthday Nelefa.org!

    Happy Birthday Nelefa.org!

    So, set the way-back machine to June 1996. A hairy, bearded, UNIX nerd sits in the back office of Cyberia Cafe on Hanover Street in Edinburgh. He’s been writing these games and, as he hosts web sites for a living, he reckons he should actually...

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  • The Beginning of the End

    The Beginning of the End

    So, it’s Monday morning on the week of The Grand Architecture Migration. Frankly, I’m shitting myself about it. We’ve covered everything as comprehensively as possible, but there’s always that little niggle of doubt. Thing is, we have a limited time window in which to operate...

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  • Grr!

    Grr!

    One of the FAILpods in my office has just suggested it may be time for me to “update my Desktop Environment”. I may have to stab him to death using a broken Vista install disk….

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  • Orange Ditches Phorm

    Orange Ditches Phorm

    Well, there’s a turn up for the books! It appears that Phorm are being dropped by Orange. Hopefully more ISPs will follow suit. In an interview with the Financial Times, a representative from Orange said: “Privacy is in our DNA, so we need to be...

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  • SSL with Oracle

    SSL with Oracle

    Ok, so we all know there’s The Oracle Way and The Wrong Way (at least according to Oracle DBAs who aren’t me). Well, today I had to renew the SSL cert for an iAS installation. This isn’t something that would make me think twice –...

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