TheLedgeOfKnow

Saving myself from Nookish disaster

To do a hard reset, turn off your NookColor. Then, hold down the Home Nook button and then press the power button at the same time until your machine powers back up and gives you a choice to reset your nook. Power button will cancel it and the Nook home button at the bottom will continue with the reset. Confirm it and it will take a couple minutes and your machine will be back to square one.

edited from: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=9568755&postcount=4

That reset will clean out all your data, but it will not fix a messed up operating system.

Network Problems with KDE

Every so often, for no apparent reason, KDE kills the network manager. After rebooting or switching users, suddenly the network manager icon says that the network is "unmanaged" and if you try to right click, it tells you that network manager is disabled. I have read that this same thing can happen if you have a failed sleep or hibernation mode.

Creating a new partition on a hard drive with Linux

I have been having troubles since I started doing development for embedded software with the amount of available space in my /opt directory. You see, normally, you put all of your cross-compilers and software development kits (sdk's) underneath the /opt directory. Unfortunately, when I set up my laptop and partitioned the hard drive, I didn't set /opt into its own partition and so it was sitting in the root (/) partition.

Which code versioning system?

Git, Bazaar, Subversion...

Back at Amazon in 2000 we used CVS. It was the first time I'd ever used a command line version control system. I stayed with CVS as my versioning system of choice until 2005 when I started using Subversion on a contract. Aside from the fact that I had to alias the word "cvs" to "svn" because I kept mistyping, I decided that I really liked svn better.

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A family history of computing

Ed. note: This post is part of the Ada Lovelace Day blog posting event on March 24, 2009.

My mother's mother was not an ordinary girl of the 1930's. First off, she never should have lived. She was born extremely premature to an unwed mother in a time when premature babies didn't have any chance, and an unwed mother had no support.

Firefox always starting in offline mode?

I got a new laptop a little over a month ago and ever since the first day I've had an annoying little problem with Firefox. Whenever it started, it was stuck in "work offline" mode. I checked the user prefs in my .mozilla folder, and they said that I should be fine. (There is a setting for starting the browser offline, but it was set to false.)
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Kernel driver changes

I learned how to add in or swap out a Linux kernel module today. Kinda cool.

Let's start with the problem. My new laptop has both a wireless card AND an Ethernet card that are incompatible with Ubuntu Linux. So, after a little bit of testing and research, my ever patient friend, savior and all things *nix tutor discovered that the problem was that Ubuntu picks the wrong kernel driver for the Ethernet card on this machine and that it didn't have the wireless driver at all.
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Creating a bootable USB disk

With all the MID stuff I've been doing lately, I've had need to create bootable USB disks from img files twice now. As noted previously, I am a dork, so I always forget how to do things like this that I don't do terribly often. To save myself heartache and search time, here are the destructions instructions in short:

  1. Get .img file for the OS you need. (via download, Moblin image creator, or whatever)

  2. Find out which /dev your USB disk is.
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Compiz-Fusion: Some basic commands

So, it dawned on me the other day while I was watching a colleague zoom through windows and workspaces with keystrokes that I am not using all the juicy goodness of my desktop GUI. Compiz-fusion is installed by default on Ubuntu 8.10, but I'd never bothered to figure out how to use it properly. So, today I'm learning a bit and writing in commands I find here.

First, a definition. The super key is the Windows key on Windows keyboards. I have not the foggiest notion what it would be on other keyboards.
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When to write a script in a language you don't know

Sometimes there is a long, repetitive task that you know would be much better off if done by a small script, but the problem is that you don't know how to use the tools available at the moment.

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