November 1, 2009

Nokia N97 and Apple iSync

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , — James Bunton @ 10:09 am

I bought my Nokia N97 early July, just a few days after the Australia release. I’ve been enjoying this great device since then desspite its bugs. The most notable of which was that unlike my previous Nokia S60 it would not cooperate with iSync. Thankfully the recently released firmware update (V20.0.019) fixes this problem.

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August 26, 2009

Encrypted file systems on Debian/Ubuntu Linux

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , — James Bunton @ 2:06 am

Recently I set up an encrypted file system so I could do rsync backups to a secured location. What you end up with is a mountable file system that you can use to securely store data. Debian offers an easy way to set up encrypted file systems using the LUKS standard with the cryptsetup package. You’ll need to enter a decryption passphrase to mount the volume whenever the system boots.

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April 26, 2009

Fink for Mac OS X package management

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , — James Bunton @ 11:34 am

Fink is a package management system for Mac OS X. If you’re new to Fink read on for a description of how it works.

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April 21, 2009

Apple Keyboard on Linux

Filed under: Technical — Tags: — James Bunton @ 5:20 pm

The Apple aluminium keyboards are very nice. I recently bought one for an Ubuntu Linux machine, and it requires some special configuration to work as expected.

This post describes how to fix the function keys and swap command (windows or ‘super’) keys with the alt (or option) keys.

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March 10, 2009

Who wants Hulu?

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , , — James Bunton @ 12:15 am

This guide is out of date! Please see the new guide here:
Hulu and Pandora outside USA

Hulu is a website that offers commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox and many other networks and studios. Currently Hulu is only available from within the United States of America.

If you want to be notified of updates to this post, subscribe to the comments feed.

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February 10, 2009

Mercurial remote repository names

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , — James Bunton @ 7:39 pm

I just discovered that Mercurial supports named shortcuts for repositories. This is great for when you want to be pushing and pulling from several repository URLs without typing their full locations.

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OfflineIMAP IDLE support

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , — James Bunton @ 4:36 pm

I’ve implemented IDLE support into OfflineIMAP. For the last day or two I’ve been using this and I’m loving the instant email notifications. I emailed the original author and plan to work with him to get the code included into an official OfflineIMAP release.

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December 2, 2008

Linux Traffic Control – QoS

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , , — James Bunton @ 4:30 am

I recently started using VoIP, using NodePhone with Internode. This post describes how I implemented QoS on my router to make VoIP work well. It also allows me to prioritise some traffic on my network, such as SSH, while deprioritising others, such as BitTorrent and SFTP.

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November 12, 2008

HFS+ auto defragmentation of files under Mac OS X

Filed under: Technical — Tags: , , — James Bunton @ 1:14 pm

HFS+ automatically defragments files as they are used. When a fragmented file is opened, if the system has been up for 3 minutes, the file is not busy and is under 20MiB in size then it will be relocated to be in a contiguous section of the disk

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November 10, 2008

Internet Censorship in Australia

Filed under: Rants — Tags: , , , , — James Bunton @ 7:22 pm

The Australian government is planning to filter the internet to protect children. The idea is to have two tiers of filtering. The first tier is enabled by default for all internet connections and blocks all material considered unsafe for children. Adults will have the option to move to the second tier which is designed to only block illegal material.

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