User Blogs

Last June 5th we broke down and bought an air conditioner. We went to Sears to buy it, because they had 'em and nobody else in town has much selection. This turned out to be a gigantic mistake. We used it throughout the summer, and then put it away in the back room. When I brought it back out the GFCI-equipped power cord's breaker decided to blow every time the unit was plugged in. I figured it was just the cord. The girl I talked to on the phone said that servicemen carry that kind of part with them, which turned out to be a lie, shock amazement.

After installing plugbox linux on my Dockstar I found that new users' passwords expired on login and forced a logout forever. To fix this for a single user use this script:

#!/bin/sh
chage -d 1 -E -1 -I -1 -m -1 -M -1 -W -1 $1

Call it with the username you want to fix. It sets the last change date to a day after the epoch but it works.

It is often asserted that series hybrids are not as efficient as parallel hybrids (citation needed) but this is only because they are being built with inefficient reciprocating internal combustion engines. The obvious solution is to use microturbines.

GoogleCL is a python-based command-line utility for accessing Google. It uses gdata-python-client for the google interface. No Windows release is planned, but this is largely irrelevant because python runs fine on Windows, and so do gdata-python-client and GoogleCL. Here are simple instructions for installing GoogleCL under Windows.

One of the big problems with Google Chrome is the lack of inline PDF support on most platforms. Google has added preliminary support for PDF to Chromium but so far it has not come to Linux. It may come tomorrow, but until then, users who would like to avoid using acroread may use the following hack, at least on Ubuntu Lucid. As always, your mileage may vary.