Could someone please tell me why, around 5pm every day for the last couple of weeks, my wireless laser mouse stops working when it’s on the mousemat, but if I take the mousemat away, and use the mouse directly on the desk, it works fine…
I could understand if it just decided it didn’t want to work on the mousemat, or didn’t want to work at certain times, but specifically at a time, and specificaly on the mousemat. It’s confusing, and REALLY annoying.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-irc/2008-April/000425.html
I’m ashamed of myself, I really am
In contrast to Martin F. Krafft and Daniel Silverstone, I personally, prefer to be called by my online nickname.
The reasoning behind this is simple. The name I (now) use for myself online actually comes from what most people in real life call me. The name “Mez” is a contraction of my surname “Meredith” (apparently) and is the name I go by as online, as well as in real life. Daniel also says that he finds it hard for his name to recognise “Kinnison” as someone trying to get his attention. I’m the opposite. I actually find it harder for my brain to recognise “Martin” as someone trying to get my attention, unless I’m in a situation where I’m expecting people to be calling me by that (usually with family, as they are the only people to call me by that name). I’m sure if you ever speak to my work colleagues, they’ll be able to confirm that my selective hearing only ever really picks up “Mez” 
I however, unlike some people I know, have no problem with people calling me by my “Real” Name (though a definition of what is real is vague, and although I can’t find a citation, I’m pretty sure that UK law defines the name of someone as that of which they are called by and respond to (given name))
But it’s all good. If you want to get my attention though, I’d try shouting “Mez” at me. (and not “Meez or Mess, cause that DOES annoy me
There are some strange people on the internet, and most of the time, they can be annoying, but after this
* bod_ has joined #ubuntu-ops
<+Pici> bod_: How can we help you this morning?
<bod_> afternoon here ;~) im fine, just seeing how many ops have a ‘p’ in their name
<bod_> 9
<+Pici> bod_: /msg chanserv access #ubuntu list will give you a list of all #ubuntu ops
<bod_> omg, theres a command for everything,. can i grep for ‘p’ aswell?
<+nalioth> bod_: if there’s nothing we can help you with, /topic
* bod_ runs away
* bod_ has left #ubuntu-ops (”Leaving”)
I couldn’t help but chuckle for a good 10 minutes or so
Online food shopping - oh the joy.
When you shop for food online, generally, something will be out of stock, so you’ll get it substituted for a similar item. This I can accept.
However, my monthly shopping came last night, and there was one replacement.
This would have been fine, it was a pasta sauce that they simply substituted for another flavour. However, for some reason, they substituted 2 x Flavour I asked for for 3 x Other Flavour.
Considering that the products differ only on their content (the flavour) and are the same price and weight, what makes them think that adding an extra one to my order is correct?
*sighs* I accepted it anyways, as it was actually the flavour I wanted, but couldn’t find on the website.
And on another note, darn Firefox for flagging up “flavour” as a spelling mistake. (even with the language set to en_GB!)
Hehe. As I’m moving soon, and I’m only going to have wireless internet, I thought I’d sit down and have a look to see whether the D-Link USB adapter I’ve had for about 2 years would actually work with Linux, which, while it had previously picked up details of the networks, never seemed to work.
After reading through a couple of Ubuntu Wiki Pages, I managed to download, compile and install the working module - and guess what - it works!
Now this is great news - I won’t have to go out and search for a new Wireless Dongle/Card, and well - seeing as the end of my ethernet cable is missing the clip, and keeps falling out of the router, I can now use wireless! woohoo! (and it’s even working with WPA!)
Oh, and hello Planet #bitfolk
When a few people in IRC noticed Daniel Silverstone’s post about his new phone number, that started a whole conversation regarding whether his number crunching alogorithm was good enough.
I made a lovely script in PHP, which told me the numbers that it could have been.
There are 67786 combinations that it could be, it took me about 27 seconds to find that once I’d written and debugged the code.
It’s an interesting puzzle, so if you’re bored, why not write some code and see whether you can get the same answer?
So, after the last blog post, I was talking to Seveas and mentioned how I thought with all the nifty and useful commands coming in on here, I might make a niftyutils package. The conversation is as follows
<Mez> thinking of compiling a few of these into a nifty-utils package
<Seveas> so we have coreutils, moreutils and nifty-utils?
<Seveas> just contribute them to moreutils
<Mez> and a few more
<Mez> patch-utils being the most obvious
<Mez> findutils, psutils …
<Seveas> dennis@mirage:~$ apt-cache -n search utils | wc -l
<Seveas> 266
Ok, so I had to get one up on this, as I only wanted fooutils, not foo-utils or foo-utils-bar, and came up with
apt-cache search utils | awk '{print $1}' | egrep '^.*[^-]utils$' | wc -l
for which I got told off. Awk can do everything, so why pipe to grep?
After a bit of back and forthing, the equivalent command, without egrep is
apt-cache search utils | awk '/^[[:alnum:]]*([-[:alnum:]])*[^-]utils[[:space:]].*/' | wc -l
I think the first version was prettier.
Oh, and another comment relating to my last post, specially going out for “Bork Fomb”:- I’ve deleted your post, and I’m glad I have approval on here - you could have done some damage to people who didn’t know what that does, so here’s a special command, just for you
sudo iptables -I INPUT -s 77.185.71.113 -j DROP
Today on the way to work, a truck crashed into the railway bridge as my train was going over it. Luckily, noone was injured, and it was right by the station I had to get off at anyway. Now at work, but have an interesting photo to add to my collection
(Click for full size image)
Sorry about the quality, it was taken on my Mobile Phone Camera… which I spent ages playing with someone else’s Vista machine so I could get the picture off of it. Damned Proprietary Software. I should go get a greenphone