We offer the articles below in the hope that they will be useful, but we cannot accept liability for any problems caused by the instructions that they contain. If you have a problem, question or feedback relating to one of our articles, please post a comment so that other readers can benefit. We regularly review comments and reply or update the articles, to ensure their continued usefulness. All articles are provided free, without any advertising or tracking, for the benefit of the technical community.
If you require paid commercial support, please contact us for assistance.
A short script to toggle compositing on or off for XFCE Window Manager (XFWM).
Compositing improves desktop aesthetics and usability, but turning it off improves compatibility (and performance) for games.
Configure your router to reserve a static IP address for your printer. This way your computer will always know which address to contact the printer on.
Here's a rough guide on how to do that: http://lifehacker.com/5822605/how-to-set-up-dhcp-reservations-so-you-never-have-to-check-an-ip-address-again
Make a note of your printer's IP address.
I bought a new webcam recently. The camera worked with Ubuntu as soon as I plugged it in but but the microphone didn't work with Skype until I set it up. This is very easy but it took me a very long time to figure out so I thought I'd make a note here in case anyone has the same trouble.
In this post, I describe how to convert a Debian i386 .deb package for Shell In A Box into a PowerPC .deb. The instructions also apply to other programs and architectures, where the source code and prebuilt i386 .deb are available, but a prebuilt native .deb is not.
In this post, I describe how to include the non-standard LaTeX maths symbols \ggcurly, \llcurly, \curlywedge, \curlyvee from the package mathabx, without overwriting the default maths symbols such as \neq.
For my dissertation, I've shown bar charts for commits in every week. I think these are x100 better for showing ACTUAL progress and it was clear where I had made less progress than some weeks (though this was entirely justified).
Unfortunately, as good as Dropbox is, it really lacks a graphing tool (I did try to find one) or any kind of statistical analysis. It's been a bit of a pain to get what I wanted, but I managed in the end. See attachment to this post for an example :)
In this post, I describe two potential pitfalls with handling session cookies in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer while developing websites, and how to avoid them. The problem in Google Chrome relates to its handling of local/internal hostnames, and the problem in Internet Explorer relates to its privacy settings and compact privacy policies.
Many of us are familiar with Java RMI but to get it working over the internet is a bit more involved, at least in my own experience of doing so. Please note that this post assumes a basic understanding of Java RMI. If you would like to start from scratch, see Oracle's official documentation.
The solution
Like a lot of people, I'm pretty excited about HTML5, particularly for including audio and video in web pages. However, while it has great potential, there's still a lot of work to be done before it's easily usable by everyone. I'm not talking so much about bugs in the way browsers handle specific elements or the ongoing codec war, which have been covered in detail in many places, but more about the surrounding ecosystem.
It's often useful to be able to find out what your external IP address is. I often check when I'm at client sites, to discover if I'm behind a NAT, remind myself whether I'm browsing through an SSH tunnel, and so on. There are a number of sites available that provide this service, e.g. whatismyip.com and myip.dk, but I recently decided to set one up on Kitserve. It's accessible at https://secure.kitserve.org.uk/ip/.