• Shut windows and pull down the shades when it is hotter outside. You can open the windows for ventilation when it is cooler.

• Stay out of the sun and don't go out between 11:00 and 15:00 (the hottest part of the day) if you're vulnerable to the effects …

• Cast aside your pyjamas and sleep naked if possible. If you do tend to get very hot and sweaty, then drape a beach towel over the bed and pillows to protect the bedding.

• Open the windows - preferably more than one, on different sides of the house - to allow more air …

This is my yasnippet template for use when building an org-mode file which will be exported into a'.tex' file and then you can use my 'pdfbuild' script to convert the latex file into a PDF file with no code lines to be entered, just follow the on-screen prompts.

# -*- mode …

This is my 'pdfbuild' bash script that converts 'tex' files to a PDF. You generate the '.tex' files in any way you want to build them. I =used= to build the latex files by hand, which was very slow and laborious, but gave extremely good results. Currently I'm building the …

I've just come back from a hospital appointment and had one hell of a job logging back in to my computer. It was almost as if my keymaps had been changed. Whilst at the login screen the number '0' opened the menu containing "shut down"! So I thought that I'd …

This rings many bells for me, after taking many months writing a book I desperately need honest criticism about it for it to be even better. So please, give me feedback?

Rule 1

Us creatives can be pretty delicate when it comes to our work and ideas. If we're honest …

A new version of the Obnam Manual that now includes both the help file, the extended help file, and the 'man' page. This is version 19.1, with the date of 17 January 2016.

Download - Obnam Manual, version 19.1

Author - MissUnderstood Genius

Doesn't this cartoon strip remind us of our everyday? Hell no!! I am not going to bore you to death with my story of the day. But, this cartoon surely urges me to help Mr. Rat create a To-Do list to prioritise his work. Because I am …

by - Ian McKenzie

One of the fundamental tools for time management is that list of things you need to get done. It consolidates all your tasks in one place. From there you can prioritise them and tackle the important ones first.

There are 5 key advantages to maintaining a to-do …

I have used a "ToDo List" for a very long time. I suppose that it initially started by using a list written down on scraps of paper, and progressed to writing things down in a very small pocket-sized notebook when I started working on the Wards. This was very useful …

How to install i386

There are some times when you want to install a package that is labelled as 'i386'. Unless your system is set up to use 'multiarch' you won't be able to install it.

1. So to set up multiarch you just do sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386,
2. Then do …

The easiest way to get a lot of themes for you to choose from is by installing them from the git repo, like this - cd git && git clone --recursive https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes This will allow you to choose from 99 themes!

So, what are they? Here are all …

Whichever pelican theme you use you will have to start customising your pelicanconf.py file, and possibly your publishconf.py file.

This is the basic pelicanconf.py file that was created during set-up in the previous post -

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I used several sites showing various static-site generators to help me choose my site generator, ones that ranked them via various means, and which you could see a demo of the site. The main one is https://staticsitegenerators.net/ which shows you 363 separate sites! You can see from it …

Beginning with his first novel in 1847, Anthony Trollope wrote at an incredible pace.

Over the next 38 years, he published 47 novels, 18 works of non-fiction, 12 short stories, 2 plays, and an assortment of articles and letters.

Trollope achieved his incredible productivity by writing in 15-minute intervals for …

Writing and how to increase my productivity has long interested me, so I’m going to introduce several articles today and in the following weeks. Starting off with Stephen Kings thoughts.

Renowned author Stephen King writes stories that captivate millions of people around the world and earn him an estimated …

Its the same site, but with a new look! Gone is all the "wordpress" cruft, and all the plugins which gave stats for various things, and the site is now using "pelican" as its background software. Pelican just generates the site, from text files on my computer, and then sends …

I've recently started using some select Ubuntu ppa repos with debian, and once you know how it is extremely easy to set it all up and get working. So, heres how to do it, using "Homebank" as an example.

Currently in the debian repos, Homebank is showing as stable = 4 …

A new version of the Obnam Manual that now includes both the help file, the extended help file, and the 'man' page. This is version 1.9.2, with the date of 6 May 2015.

Download - removed as new version uploaded.

A new version of beeb which is the source, including the manual, and a separate download of the manual only.

Its now possible to display the programme listings from within the script, and you can now download at least 67 files in one session!

Download - Documentation

Download - Documentation + source code …

The BBC are changing their radio feeds, and BBC national radio streams in both WMA and AAC+ have now been retired. This means that they are now all being sent in a mp3 format. As my previous script's BBC feeds failed to work, this is now the updated working script …

Following on from yesterday's post about getting BBC feeds working and playing with mpc, this one is used in mpd itself -

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I've long been a fan of mpd (Music Player Daemon) but recently I've been frustrated in that it can't play the BBC radio feeds for some reason. So I've been looking for various working scripts, and I've found one, actually two as its a two-parter, but this works, so thanks …

Recently there was a fire in the flat next door to me, which therefore required us to evacuate our flats whilst the fire brigade dealt with it, and lead to the flat occupants being rehoused by social services as the flat was uninhabitable due to smoke damage. But it reminded …

Recently I've been setting up an org-mode file in emacs which holds my entire "init.el" to run emacs from. As its all quite stable now and working well, I'm putting it up here in case others want to try something similar.

Installation instructions

* installation Instructions
Then copy it into …

A not so small booklet showing exactly how to download programmes using "get_iplayer" of just 11 pages, and weighing in at 200kbs. It now shows how to use the web-end and that will download programmes from a list you input.

An update to the document giving clearer instructions, along with …

[TOC]

Beeb is working again with a new 'get_iplayer', version 2.90 which you can get with this command -

curl -kLO https://raw.github.com/dinkypumpkin/get_iplayer/latest/get_iplayer

and then once you've made it executable, and copied it to /usr/local/bin you need to update your radio and …

Due to changes at the BBC, 'beeb' is no longer able to download any programmes for radio or tv feeds. This is due to the BBC having removed the programme data feeds used by get_iplayer. At the moment there is no fix available, but when, if, they replace the feeds …

The plank version in Debian Jessie/Sid is a bit old, it being version 0.6.1-1~experimental1 and the plank project has moved on since then. The current version is 0.7.1 which was released on 23 September 2014, and there's talk of 0.8.0 too.

The …

If you use 'lightdm' to log on with and Debian jessie/testing, you will have a problem at your next reboot! Yesterdays upgrade of 'lightdm' broke the configuration, with bug #762211.

The solution is to do sudo leafpad /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf and comment out both of these two lines …

As I'm now using git for version control of my latex documents that I am writing I have automated the committing to git. This is the script that I'm using, called gitcron -

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#!/bin/bash …

Debian see's a Kindle Fire as a mtp device¹, so you have to mount it as jmtpfs /media/boudiccas/k2 where k2 is your device name, which then says -

##jmtpfs /media/boudiccas/k2
Unable to read MTPZ public exponent from ~/.mtpz-data, MTPZ disabledDevice 0 (VID=1949 and PID=0007 …

Features

• Downloads MP4 streams from BBC iPlayer site with better quality than Flash player streams
• Downloads Flash AAC/MP3 and WMA streams for radio programmes
• Allow multiple programmes to be downloaded using a single command
• Indexing of all available iPlayer programs
• Caching of Index (default 4h)
• Regex search on programme …

I recently came across a rather splendid command that shows your drives and their percentage of free space. And it is -

df -hP |column -t |tee >( head -n1 > /dev/stderr ) |grep % |sort -k5nr

and in my case it shows this -

Filesystem  Size  Used  Avail  Use%  Mounted                 on
/dev/sdd1   2 …

A screenshot showing the problems that I'm having using Qupzilla with fluxbox/compton/plank. What you see there is a "ghost-image", qupzilla is not running, yet it still shows its icon in plank at the bottom, and its window outlines on the workspace. Its a mystery!

Jonathan Haddock has reworked my wallpaper script to use with gnome3, and here is his version. His original version can be found here http://www.jonsdocs.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Gnome3_Wallpaper_script.

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Another release of beeb which takes it to even greater heights! :) And just as an experiment I'm "self-hosting" the 'tar.gz' file so that it can be downloaded from here.

Documentation

This is the documentation for beeb [version 4.0] the all-singing, all-dancing, upgrade to get-iplayer!

The BBC has some …

After having quite a few problems when I did my bi-daily, i.e. every other day, build of emacs, I've reworked my script which makes it easier to use.

Source code

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This is part of a small series of postings about linux software being at the bleeding edge, i.e. the active development versions. And we kick off with emacs which went into development freeze on the 23rd December last year, and this is version 24.4.50.xx. This is …

So there I was quietly working away in emacs when suddenly the tab-bar and the mode-line started flashing purple! Disaster had struck, but what disaster? In the mini-buffer it was saying that there was no free space left on the drive, and so it was unable to save a file …

For about a month now I've been using 'QupZilla' as my default web browser and am using the development version. QupZilla is a new, fast and secure open-source WWW browser, and can be found at http://www.qupzilla.com/ and looks like this -

It has source files for most of …

Yasnippet is an extremely good system of 'boiler-plate' text for emacs which can be called on for inserting text at the cursor. So far, this post has used two snippets, 'New Post' and 'Lorem Ipsum'. 'Lorem ipsum' is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. It has been …

I thought this was a rather novel and rather easy solution to passwords that it was worth passing on.

"Most people I know tend to simply use the same password on ALL websites. Email, Paypal, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter. This is obviously a very bad idea.

Passwords are always a …

Whilst generally surfing around I came across a new launcher, which is similar to docky but called plank. And this is what it looks like -

Plank is a very lightweight and quick to launch launcher, and easy on resources. Looking at the above screenshot of plank you can see the …

I've been using this script for quite some time and it works very well and is nice and simple to use. But, it didn't log what I did and when, until now! :)

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I'm having great difficulties in getting themes to display properly, this screenshot shows the problem.

Basically I’m having a theme with a light background self-imposing on a theme with a dark background, as seen in the left fringe where the line numbers are, in essence, its a mess!

The …

I have about 57 rather nice wallpapers in my ~/wallpapers directory, most of which I hardly ever see, so I've written a script that will randomly choose and display one every thirty minutes. For once it isn't called from a cron job, but from an alias, and quite happily sits …

If you use this script you will get some amazing radio stations, from ones that just play Elvis Presley, or The Beatles, or solid Goon Shows! I'm currently listening to Elvis, and its stuff that I've never heard before, and I thought my Elvis collection was pretty comprehensive!

To use …

Having your email account hacked is horrible, but here's how to defeat the criminals by using cast-iron passwords.

It seems almost inevitable that we will have our email hacked into, or some other violation of any of the online services upon which we depend. While it may be distressing and …