Windows

This was going to be a really quick post yesterday, but I’ve spent the guts of a day (between actual work) just getting the simplest bit of this working. The intent I was silly enough to say this to someone recently in work: It’s a good day when I end up with fewer firefox tabs open than when I started And a plan was hatched; Find API to query Firefox for current number of open Tabs across all window instances Send that value to my internal MQTT node (that has telegraf, influx, home assistant and grafana integrations too) Repeat Spoiler alert, number 3 was the bastard ...

The Idiot Proof Guide for Windows-host, *-guest setup. (Ubuntu in my case, and should work for any host) Make sure you’re working with a VDI, not a VDMK (if not, File>Virtual Media Manager right-click, Copy) Drop into a command line (on windows, press Win+R, type ‘cmd’) and navigate to the Virtualbox directory (won’t need to do this on *nix) Execute VBoxManage _path_to_your.vdi_ --resize _new_size_in_MB_ Download UBCD and mount it as a DVD to your VM ...

I am shamed. I’ve let this blog slip in the midst of coming back to the real world of Uni. A week without something useful going up! Terrible… stands in corner Fact is I’ve been experimenting with so many different things that nothing cogent has come out of it yet. Some of the things I’ve been working on: Virtual Lab- Walk through of the setup and playing with of a virtual computer lab using VirtualBox including Windows, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, and Debian servers/clients ...

Take one Dual-Boot laptop, with three partitions: /dev/sda1:Windows File System /dev/sda2:Linux File System /dev/sda3:Data Partition I already had Dropbox installed on the Windows side and didn’t want to have things duplicated on the linux side, problem is Ubuntu currently does not mount internal drives automatically on boot, so every time I fired up Ubuntu, I had to re-mount the drive, password and all. Easy enough fix: Make a new /etc/fstab entry for the shared drive and define a mount point. ...

As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives. This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on. ...

I must apologise for my lack of activity on the blog, but more is coming. I’ve begun working towards working with Ian Clarke on his Swarm project, that is if i can bring my Java and Scala chops up to scratch enough to give meaningful impact. Beyond that I’m heading to NJ this week to be with my partner for her graduation and have my 21st birthday while im over there (21 means absolutly squat in Ireland, so I’m expecting a repeat of my 18th…) ...

Ok, its been a bit quiet in the old experimentalism, but im just taking in Bill Gates’ CES keynote, and there are a few things i wanted to comment on. I HAVE NOT SEEN ANYTHING THAT IS NOT ALREADY EXISTING Calendars with multiple events and shared events : GCal Calendar integration with events: GCal + Facebook Video Search: Gootube Uploading Videos from cellphones: Depends on provider, but combination of twitter and a mobile email ...

So, to do most of this playing about, I need a virtualisation environment, and VMware is the easiest, simplest and, at the moment, cheapest. VMWare released their server virtualisation tool to “free"dom recently, and the newest version (2.0) is currently sitting in beta. I have tried it out before but it didnt feel as solid as the older versions so I’m sticking with the oldskool 1.0.3 The Setup itself is just a simple “next, next, finish” with a free registration key provided. I recommend also downloading and installing the client console package; this is handy both for administring and viewing the VM’s in situ, but also to administer remote installations. ...

So…. I’m Andrew, I’m a technical person, and I’m gonna use this blog to post out some of my technical musings and little experiments. Currently, I’m working off of three systems, Athena, Apollo and Hermes. Athena:Headless Ubuntu Server 7.10, 2.6 Kernel AMD Semperon 3200+, 512MB RAM, 3 Hard Drives Totalling Just Under 1TB (mostly storage and backup archives) Apollo:WinXP AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ (3GHz), 4GB RAM (32bit xp only sees 3.5 tho.) GeForce 7600 GS (512MB) and a 500GB SATA drive (My Workhorse for classes and heavy experiments eg VMWare) ...