I was looking through wayback machine at snapshots of my website, when I came across one from 2005. It reminded me of something I had almost forgotten. At some point in 2005, the network card in my FreeBSD server started to die. I got myself a new card and set about replacing the dying one….
Category: Operating Systems
How to stop YouTube sucking on Ubuntu/Linux
Recently I’ve noticed that YouTube’s performance on my machines have been terrible. It’s constantly buffering, or it will stop randomly in the middle of a video. I’ll get a few seconds of playback and then 10-30 seconds of buffering. It’s pretty terrible. On Windows I have been able to use the helpful workaround from here…
Implementing pinch-zoom and pan/drag in an Android view on the canvas
I was trying to get pinch-zoom and panning working on an Android view today. Basically I was trying to implement the same behavior you see when you use Google Maps (for example). You can zoom in and pan around until the edge of the image, but no further. Also, if the image is fully zoomed…
vivin.net is back… mostly
So I’m sure you’ve noticed that this website was down for a while. It went down about three weeks ago when one of the (two) hard-drives on my server died due to bad sectors; it was eight years old. I didn’t panic (too much), because my WordPress database was on the main drive, which is…
Rooting the G2
As some of you may already be aware, it appears that the G2 has some sort of “magic restore” (it’s not a rootkit) function that causes all changes to /system to be reverted. This means that you cannot remove any bundled bloatware. Even more troubling, it looks like the phone will perform the restore while…
Unboxing my new T-Mobile G2 Android Phone
My wife called me at work today and told me that my new phone just came in the mail :). It’s the new G2 by HTC, which is supposed to be the successor to the G1. The specs on this phone are: 3.7 inch WVGA capacitive touch screen 5 megapixel camera with auto-focus and flash…
Downtime and System Upgrade
Sorry for the downtime. My webserver had a failing hard-drive and I figured that while I was replacing the hard-drive, I would upgrade the entire machine as well. The box was a Pentium 4 1.4Ghz with 512MB of RAM that I hadn’t upgraded since I first built it in 2002. Now it’s been upgraded to…
Download ShapeWriter APK
I tried to install ShapeWriter from the Android Marketplace yesterday and couldn’t find it (I was trying to reinstall it after flashing my phone with Cyanogenmod 5.0.8). After searching the interwebs, I found out that it had been removed from the marketplace on June 20th indefinitely (supposedly for QA issues). Luckily I had backed up…
GitHub broke my scp
I set up git on my FreeBSD box so that I can commit my code to GitHub. Today I tried to scp some stuff over and I was met with this rather unhelpful message: vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code $ scp -r [email protected]:~/code/agnostic . Password: ps: Process environment requires procfs(5) Initializing new SSH agent… vivin@serenity ~/Projects/code $ I…
Trying out ChromeOS from a VMWare image
I was pretty excited when I saw the VMWare image for ChromeOS up for download. I immediately downloaded it to try it out. The zip file I got from gdgt has a vmdk file but no vmx file. I created one from scratch to try ChromeOS out (I’ve made a new zip with the vmdk…