I actually started on this earlier last year when I got back to school in September. I was finding myself re-setting my alarm clock every night to a different time (due to classes each morning starting at a different time). I got quite frustrated myself when I forgot to set the alarm or setting it to the wrong time. I realized that all my classes were in my Google Calendar, so if I could write an alarm app that could read my Google Calendar and automatically wake me up before that (maybe 1.5-2 hours ahead, since it takes about 1 Continue Reading
Trackball Mess
I took about half an hour today cleaning my old Blackberry trackball which was refusing to scroll upwards easily. This is the amount of dust that collected inside the trackball assembly of my old Blackberry 9000 over three years worth of daily usage. No wonder why the trackball was so reluctant to move! This is probably one of the reasons why RIM decided to go with trackpads on newer Blackberry models: no small moving parts collecting dust. Thanks to a YouTube video for helping me disassemble and reassemble the phone.
VMWare ESXi 5 Whitebox
I have 2 old computers (Pentium III and Celeron computers circa early 2000’s) that I currently use as servers for file storage, backups, and testing. I thought it was about time to consolidate these servers I had, up the performance, and set up a flexible test environment for my coding endeavours. VMWare’s free ESXi hypervisor piqued my interests earlier last year. It’s comparable to XenServer but apparently has better support for Windows virtual machines. Being a bare-metal hypervisor, it should give better performance than a usual virtual machine sitting on top of a full-blown operating system. So I set my Continue Reading
XDMCP Login from Mac to Lubuntu 11.10
My old desktops run Lubuntu (Ubuntu but lightweight!) 11.10, which just became part of the official Ubuntu release. Life is a lot zippier in Lubuntu compared to Ubuntu when you’re on Pentium III and Celeron machines. I wanted to be able to login to these computers remotely with a GUI, sort of like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop but Linux style. I didn’t want VNC because I wanted to be able to create a new login session instead of using the main console. Luckily XDMCP does exactly that and most of it is built into Ubuntu. The Setup Following one question previously Continue Reading
Hello world!
Getting back into blogging! I debated long whether to use WordPress or to code up my own blog system. I figured that reinventing the wheel is a waste of time so here I am with WordPress once again. I’m probably going to modify the homepage a bit and the theme when I have time. I’m also going to dig through some of my archives on my old site and import some of my original blog posts… again when I have time.