LVM + ReiserFS for the win! It's so easy to add more space root@atom:~ # lvextend -L +100G /dev/vg2/local Extending logical volume local to 200.00 GiB Logical volume local successfully resized root@…

getting supybot to announce new bugzilla bugs - I've just put here the key non-obvious things that tripped me up when trying to set this up. All done on Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS Install supybot and the supyb…

If you trust everyone who has physical access to a pc (if not then you are encrypting your files, right?) then there seems little point in having to type a password just because more than one user use…

If you are like me and my coworkers, you often end up running stuff as root in your home folder and end up not able to access your own files. For the record, here's the commands to reset the permissio…

I like a new line in my prompt so that if I'm deep in a path I don't end up with 10 characters left to type in, and pretty colours so that it's easy to spot the prompt when scrolling through lots of o…

Challenge of the day was to fit as many photos as possible on a single flash card to stick in a digital photo frame. Here's how it's done. The frame from Philips goes by the memorable name of 9FF2M4 ,…

This weekend, I finally got the tv-out working under linux (Ubuntu 7.10 aka gusty gibbon) on my laptop. Here's what was involved, including some of the (time consuming) red herrings involved in gettin…

Howto prevent ubuntu locking the screen when closing the laptop lid. Thanks to jrib in irc://freenode.net/#ubuntu for this one. Run gconf-editor (with alt+F2) Go to or search for /desktop/gnome/lo…

Here I outline the solution I chose for backing up my life, er... I mean home folder. (I'm sure there's life outside /home/tim somewhere...) My requirements were: backup to dvd+rw >20GB of data to…