Category Archives: Uncategorized

Setting contact’s group in Android 2.3 Gingerbread

A huge issue I have with Android is its contact management. I have a lot of contacts, many of whom I only have an email address for. I have created a “Mobile” group for those contacts I do actually want … Continue reading

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Irrefutable proof: two spaces after a period on the web is evil

I noticed a few years ago that Americans often type two spaces after a “period”. I’ve always thought it was a practice that should have died years ago; valid when all that was available was a typewriter’s monospaced typeface, but … Continue reading

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Windows-7–like window management with Ubuntu (and Compiz)

Windows 7 introduced great window management keyboard shortcuts. Pressing (and holding) the Windows key and then tapping the arrow keys allows the window to quickly be maximised, restored and docked to the left/right half of the screen. One of the … Continue reading

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Check HTTP headers (specifically MIME type) for file downloads

A client called us up saying they had problems downloading files from our e-learning portal. After some back and forth on the phone I found out the problem was their browser and/or the files’ MIME types. Either the MIME type … Continue reading

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Red X next to Dell DAT72 tape drive in libraries container

Our tape backups haven’t been working properly for a few months. I’ve been really busy and we have nightly off-site backups anyway so I haven’t taken a look at it until now. Initially I thought the backup script had gone … Continue reading

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Close frozen SSH session without closing terminal

The VPN connection to my university often drops, leaving me with frozen SSH sessions. I’ve found out how to close the connection without closing the terminal window. One just has to press these keys in sequence: ENTER ~ . Source: … Continue reading

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Ubuntu middle dot compose key sequence

I use Programmer Dvorak as my keyboard layout and can never remember the compose key sequence for the middle dot (or interpunct) character “·”. The key sequence is Compose-key ^ . Note: it’s the circumflex character, not the control key.

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Thunderbird and S/MIME certificates: fixing “Unable to sign message.” error

I had to generate some SSL certificates and use them to sign emails for a class recently. After creating the PKCS#12 file and importing it into Thunderbird I tried sending an email, which resulted in an error message: Sending of … Continue reading

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Date formatting not working after installing qTranslate

I just installed qTranslate to have multilingual entries. It’s a really good internationalization plugin, I’ve used it on other WordPress installations before with great results. After installing it with WordPress 3.0.1 though, the date format for posts wasn’t being parsed, … Continue reading

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Merge Excel spreadsheets with common columns

Today I had a problem that is a non-starter when dealing with relational databases: I needed to do an inner join on two sets of data. Instead what I had was two Excel spreadsheets, and it ended up taking much … Continue reading

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