4-bit Rules of Computing, Part 1
Here is the second part of my blog series expanding on my 4-bit rules of computing.
In this instalment: Rule 4, on keeping a notebook or journal.
Posts about tip (old posts, page 3)
What are those J and L characters in email?
Do you receive email with a mystery "J" or "L" in them?
Fabulous! Thanks very much Mike J
What the heck are they? It's actually not much of a mystery: they are
automatic emoticons inserted by MS-Outlook when someone types :-) or
variants.
Outlook substitutes the string for the letter J or L, and formats that character with Windings, which in that font maps to the smiley or the frowny glyph.
I guess if you look at J and L sideways, and pretend only half their mouth is working, it kinda makes sense for a J to be a smile and an L to be a frown...?
Well, anyway, now you know.
Rotate screen KDE shortcut
We have a few spare monitors laying about at work, and I just grabbed one with a rotating stand, so I can switch it between Landscape and Portrait. This is nice, because it's got more pixels than my laptop's built-in screen, and it's also larger.
It's also very handy when viewing pages that are narrow and tall.
All I need now is a way to quickly switch the screen's orientation
without digging through a GUI. This looks like a job for xrandr and
KDE's Global Keyboard Shortcuts
4-bit Rules of Computing, Part 0
A little while ago, I published my 4-bit rules of computing and I promised to blog about them. So here is my first instalment in a series to explain these simple rules, a bit about why I like these over others, and my own take on this wisdom (since it isn't mine).
In this instalment: Rules 0 to 3 (the first 2 bits).
How to get audio from an online video
Suppose that there is a song on YouTube and you want the audio from it. For instance: Le Freak, by Chic. Questions of potential Copyright infringement left unexamined, how do you get it?
Install Emacs24 Snapshot on Debian, Ubuntu and Windows 7
I just can't wait for Emacs24 to be released! (I know, it's in beta and it'll be officially released Real Soon Now, but my catalyst is Technomancy's ESK2 which is such an improvement over ESK1, and it needs Emacs 24).
In my last post I had steps to build emacs from source-code. This is worth following for hacker cred, but it soon gets tedious if you have a lot of systems to put emacs on. As pointed out by a few readers, there are some snapshot builds available for different platforms. This post lists steps for installing the pre-built snapshots, for the three operating systems that I use.
KDE Konsole's title bar and prompt
I spent the past hour fiddling with Konsole, trying to get it to honor my Bash prompt in the title bar (using the usual ESC char tricks you can find anywhere). Finally found it: In the Profile settings, under Tabs, change the tab tiles to %w (or pick "Window title set by Shell" from the drop-down Insert list to the right).
OpenSSH slow logins and DNS
There is a feature of OpenSSH, enabled by default, that causes the ssh daemon to do a name lookup for the client and confirm that it matches its IP address. This is supposed to check against some sort of IP spoof during SSH login attacks. However on my local network which lacks a DNS, it results in lengthy delays during logins.