Hackathon

On Saturday the 23rd October, the Hackers invade The Space! In association with QUESTS, Dragonslayers, and IETNI, HackerspaceBelfast will be running a series of events over 24 hours of software, network, and hardware hackery goodness, as well as screening hacker movies, DIY repair, and maybe, just maybe, how to build a laser. Running parallel to Dragonslayers’ 24 hour gaming event, which will incorporate console, PC, and tabletop games, attendees will be able to both play and make games to their hearts content. ...

October 14, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/08/2010

Why PulseAudio? The Freesound Project Aggregates Creative Commons Licensed Sound Effects [Sound Effects] ONE LAST CHANCE TO SAVE THE HOTEL PENNSYLVANIA Venting Frustration Will Only Make Your Anger Worse [Mindhacks] U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don’t Even Know It: Laurence Kotlikoff - Bloomberg -_ “So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.” ...

August 23, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Citrix Web Client with Ubuntu

Ubuntu is one of those polarising technologies; Its really easy to use on a recreational basis, or as part of a institution/business wide rollout, but heartbreakingly awkward to use ‘alone’ within an entrenched business setting. One such setting is that of Queen’s University; the only form of secure remote access that is made (quietly) availiable is through a Citrix XenApp gateway. Great in theory; everyone can take a slice of a virtualized desktop, do whatever they need to do, and that processing power and memory can be easially reappropriated when they’re done. Unfortunately, in an effort to be ‘secure’, you HAVE to use Windows, and you HAVE to have Internet Explorer installed, and you HAVE to install the propitiatory XenApp client. ...

July 24, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Stuff I've found interesting in the past month - 23/07/2010

Google Doc Mount Puts Your Google Docs in Nautilus for Editing [Downloads] Google PhD Fellowships go international Use Chrome like a pro Android Development 101 – Part 1:Hello World Rachel Maddow’s Blonde Yearbook Picture [Most Likely To Succeed] App Inventor for Android MultiBootISOs Boots Multiple Operating Systems from a USB Drive [Downloads] - Well, thats my monday afternoon sorted… I’ve been looking for just this sort of tool for weeks; drop in an ISO and it’ll work! Love it! ...

July 23, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Customised User Directories in Ubuntu

I’ve been doing alot of messing around in Ubuntu recently and there are lots of tweaks I like to make. One of them being to show the contents of my home folder as my desktop; I don’t need any more pointless folders…. Dead easy, there is a .config directory under your $HOME dir, containing several files. The one we need is user-dirs.dirs , and it looks something like this. # This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update # If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're # interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run # Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped # homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an # absolute path. No other format is supported. # XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop" XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads" XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates" XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public" XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents" XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music" XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures" XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos" And this is what I changed mine to ...

June 1, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Automagic Kernel Cleaning under Ubuntu

Sick of having dozens of old kernels sitting under your /boot/ dir? Want a simpler boot-life? Well we’ve got the solution for you. Just one course of cleankernel once an upgrade cycle will remove all previous kernel entries from your bootloader and /boot/ dir. Basically, it lists what kernels you currently have in your /boot/ and removes them using apt .

May 31, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Shared Items - 21/04/2010

Twittering pub hanging Questions to Ask if You’re Thinking of Getting Involved in Open Source Backing Up With rsync And Managing Previous Versions/History How To Write Your First Google Android Application How to Build your Wardrobe – Part 1 TeamViewer Remote Desktop Tool Available for Linux [Updates]

April 21, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Listing just dot-files

Its a problem that I’ve come across, and I’m not the only one, so heres what works for me to find those pesky files that start with a . ls -a | egrep -i "^\." This only works in the current working directory, which is the normal usage. FYI the reason that this is problematic is that the ‘.’ symbol is a single character wildcard; most people are familiar with the asterisk ‘*’ indicating ‘anything, however long’, whereas the ‘.’ means ‘any single character’. ...

April 9, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

The DE Bill, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tor

Folks, we’re basically screwed; The Digital Economy Bill recieved Royal Accent on April 9th and is officially now Law. So after barely three days of parliamentary ‘debate’ where only 20-ish MP’s actually spoke on the subject (but somehow 189 MP’s decided it was a good idea anyway), our civil rights have been sacrificed infront of the alter of copyright. Many sites have a much more indepth tretise on the subject than I could do so I’ll keep this short. ...

April 9, 2010 · Andrew Bolster

Mod_Rewrite in Apache2

Just incase you forget how to fix this the easy way: Enable mod_rewrite for URL voodoo; (Or any module replacing the rewrite ) $sudo a2enmod rewrite $sudo service apache2 restart Remember to fiddle with /etc/apache2/sites-available.*< \pre> and change "AllowOverride none" to "all" in any places that you're having trouble with rewritten URL's

April 1, 2010 · Andrew Bolster