November 2013
Buying a Third-Party Replacement Battery for My HP DV8T Laptop
Update: I’ve had this battery for over 18 months now, and it is still running like a champ.
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October 2013
Lightening My Laptop Bag With DriveDroid
I have some rack-mount servers out in the world, and none of them have optical drives. You never know when something is going to go wrong, so I always carry a USB DVD drive and a stack of various discs...
Read the post →October 2013
Upgrading from (X)Ubuntu 13.04 to 13.10
I decided to upgrade my laptop and desktop to Ubuntu 13.10, the Saucy Salamander, this weekend. I don’t run Unity, so I expected things to go pretty smoothly. I’m pretty sure that the operating system on my desktop was installed...
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October 2013
Some Retro Gaming Nostalgia and the Konami Code
One of my oldest friends, from all the way back in elementary school, was in town last weekend. My friend Jimmy wasn’t in Dallas very long this time, but he did stop by the house for a few hours. I...
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October 2013
Hardware Failures, the Seafile 2.0 Beta Client, and Seafile's Server Requirements
We had some server hardware problems here at patshead.com last week. At first it looked like one of the hard drives in the RAID 10 failed. It dropped out of the array, and when I added it back into the...
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September 2013
Generating New, More Secure SSH Keys
I already generated a new 2048-bit RSA key pair for SSH this year, on January 3rd, to replace the 1024-bit DSA key pair that I had been using since October 23, 2010. I’ve been putting off generating a new key...
Read the post →September 2013
Why Does the iPhone 5s Really Have a 64-bit Processor?
There’s a lot of speculation regarding Apple’s reasoning for using a 64-bit ARM processor in the iPhone 5s. Aside from the obvious fact that the 64-bit processor will allow Apple to include more RAM in future devices, there are all...
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September 2013
Ten Weeks with Seafile
I started using Seafile over two months ago for all of my self-hosted cloud storage needs. I think enough time has passed, and I figured I should report back on how things have been going so far. Seafile has actually...
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September 2013
QNIX QX2710 IPS LCD Monitors and Linux
Update: I got a bill from FedEx today for $37.20 to cover the customs fees. The invoice has no account number, so apparently I can’t pay it on their website. I sure wish they told me that before I spent...
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August 2013
Budget Linux Workstation Build - 2013
I recently built a new Linux workstation to replace my laptop, and that got me thinking that it was probably about time to upgrade Chris’s laptop as well. I did put an SSD in her very old Dell Inspiron 6400...
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