I have created an email address for Frances: frances [at] tolaris.com and written my first message to her. Some of you might have things to say to her, so for the next week this email will accept messages from the outside. After Saturday, 2011-02-05, I'll disable it until she's ready to use email.

I've also enabled Pascale's email again for the same period of time, should you wish to send her a big sister email. She's doing a fantastic job, and we're very proud of her.

I'm doing this as a sort of time capsule. Maybe some of you have stories of her parents (embarassing or otherwise), or hopes for her future, or just nice things you want to say. Jamie and I will keep these messages and give them to her when she is older.

Mark asked good questions about this last time. The same rules apply.

I understand there is some interest in photos of Frances, the latest addition to our family. Behold!



More photos available as soon as Mom approves them.

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been using a Logitech diNovo Mini keyboard on zuul, the new HTPC, for three weeks now. There are plenty of reviews online, which you should read if you are thinking of buying one. These are my notes on using it with XBMC and Ubuntu.

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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

It’s been almost two years since I assembled gozer, my first HTPC. Over the Christmas holiday I replaced gozer with zuul, a Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11.

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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Minor updates to the repo for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat:

• BackupPC 3.2.0 has been added. This is the same package from Debian Sid, and works on Lucid as well. I don’t recommend a non-LTS release for your backup solution, but if your hardware requires a newer kernel, you might need this. I’ve tested it myself.
• Clementine 0.5.3 has been removed. You can now find a newer release in maverick-backports.

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Merry Christmas, everyone! We have a special card just for you:

http://www.tolaris.com/xmas

(In case you miss it the first time, try reloading or clicking the button.)

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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

Update 2010-12-06: Ray points out that you can do this with gconf-editor, which is a much better solution.

It’s a handy feature of Gnome that pressing “PrntScrn” or “Alt+PrntScrn” will take a screen capture of the desktop or current window, respectively. However, in typical Gnome fashion, you can’t do anything more advanced. You can’t capture a region, or a window area. You can’t delay the capture. You can’t save the captures with iterating, numbered filenames. However, the equivalent KDE tool can do all of those things, and you can make Gnome use it.

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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

I’m an IP network engineer. When something goes wrong, the first thing I do is sniff packets. Got a SIP phone that won’t register? Forget reading logs; sniff 5060/udp and read the SIP chatter directly. A customer complains that “Yahoo chat doesn’t work”? Sniff 5050/tcp and look for TCP hangups, login failures, or ICMP “port unreachable” messages.

Sniffing is easy when you have access to the intermediate router, but that isn’t always the case. What if you’re just another PC on the same switch? That’s impossible, right?

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I, for one, cannot wait the 5.5 years for Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenophobic Xorn".

Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there.

OpenWRT 10.03.1-rc4 has just been released, so I’m once again upgrading my Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH home router. Each release candidate in the 10.03.1 series has improved performance of the Atheros wireless chipset, but I still see occasional network interruptions when the laptop is idle overnight. How does wireless on rc4 stack up against rc3?

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