BrakeBlog

Local photography, National rants, Zero navel-gazing allowed… Blogging from Hopkinsville, KY

  • omg, my first paypal account!!!1!!1one

    Up until a few days ago I did not have my own paypal account (shocking!). What changed my mind was the talk on the Security Now! podcast about PayPal’s new keychain device. Steve Gibson and Leo recently completed a long series on authentication (SN90, SN94, SN95, SN98, SN101, SN103). Which, looking back, the security key…

  • FLAC audio CD archiving

    At one point Robert Heron on dl.tv mentioned he was converting his entire CD collection to the FLAC audio format. This is important because FLAC means lossless audio compression and it’s an excellent format for archiving. Once the CDs have been ripped to FLAC you can lose the CD, give it as a chew toy…

  • Alsasound hang on shutdown workaround

    It seems this problem first occured for me after I upgraded to kernel v2.6.20 from v2.6.19. Then since upgrading to v2.6.22 the hangs caused by alsasound have gotten much worse. Finally, I got fed up with it and just removed alsasound from the runlevel altogether. Surprisingly, sound still works without alsasound. I’m using the in-kernel…

  • Hardware review: SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS 250GB

    I got this for Christmas which was about 6 months ago. It’s probably a good device for the non-technical consumer but it has a few drawbacks for the advanced user that wants more. Some of the advantages for the SimpleShare are that it supports mirroring/striping via multiple external USB hard drives, has a built-in print…

  • Drink the sudo Kool-Aid

    In the beginning, there was the simple root logon. The Admin elevated his privileges through this simple process and all was good. This state was excellent until it was neccessary to create more users to do the work of the Almighty Himself. So the wise admin fashioned the tool called “su” that made it easy…

  • hald useless while conserving power

    hal-0.5.9 has been stablilized, which I’ve been waiting for to test changing hald’s polling behavior. powerTOP shows that hal causes wakeups on ide0 10 times per second. 13.2% ( 9.6) : ide0 Confusingly, the manpage for hal-disable-polling says in part: “The purpose of the hald-addon-storage addon is simply to open the special device file at…

  • powertop: misc causes for wakeups

    Cn Avg residency (10s) Long term residency avg C0 (cpu running) ( 1.9%) C1 0.0ms ( 0.0%) 0.0ms C2 13.3ms (67.5%) 13.4ms C3 10.9ms (26.9%) 10.5ms C4 8.2ms ( 3.6%) 8.4ms Wakeups-from-idle per second : 79.9 Top causes for wakeups: 19.0% (10.3) firefox-bin : schedule_timeout (process_timeout) 18.7% (10.1) <interrupt> : Intel ICH6 Modem, ipw2200, lan0…

  • Quote: credit to mat|gentoo in #gentoo@irc.freenode.net

    mat|gentoo left the room (quit: “The day Microsoft makes something that doesn’t suck is the day they start making vacuum cleaners”). It made me giggle. heh