NeutralAxis

Earlier this month I described how to make an image of a drive in a new computer using Clonezilla.  Today, I reversed the process and restored that image onto a new drive.  This thing looks so dangerous, it might eat children. (continue reading…)

Lightboxed images on a website are those where when you click on a thumbnail image, they expand into a larger image, usually with a semi-transparent background so you can still see the page behind it.  The Lightbox 2 plugins work well and are popular, but don’t have the ability to scale or resize the image if it’s larger than the available screen size, which means that high res digital photos may require scrolling to get to their close or navigation buttons. (continue reading…)

Awhile back, I bought two Western Digital Mybook World Edition 1TB network drives.  The first lasted just over a year before it died.  The second one went today, taking down my office backup.  There’s a redundant backup, so I wasn’t really hurt by the failure but at least this time I was able to use some linux knowledge to recover all the data on it. (continue reading…)

After any new computer purchase, I always use whatever means is offered to make restoration discs since none of the manufacturer’s include them anymore.  But restoration discs actually aren’t enough to get you back to square one in all circumstances, such as if you have to replace a hard drive.  That’s where an actual drive image comes in handy.  Norton Ghost is a common commercial program that can do this.  If you don’t want to spend the money, give Clonezilla a try.  Unfortunately, its not particularly user friendly. (continue reading…)

I found a fix to a Wordpress error on the site that’s been happening periodically for the last week or so. (continue reading…)

I wanted to try to put a “tweet this” icon after each post, but didn’t really want to bother with another plugin to do it, so after a little research I came up with my own.  Adding a Facebook icon was similar. (continue reading…)

As far as I’m aware, in the past, there’s been no simple method for inserting images inline into Gmail messages.  Inserting as an attachment is simple, but making an image show within the body of the message has been difficult at best.  A Gmail labs feature that I’ve just noticed has now taken care of that problem.  I’m not sure how old this feature is, but its new to me. (continue reading…)

Angelina Jolie in Hackers

OK, so maybe Angelina hacking into your computer isn’t so bad, but in general, keeping things secure is a good thing.  So thanks again to Steve from OZLUG for helping get me started accessing my Linux machine via VNC through a SSH tunnel for security.  VNC is an open source remote control program that provides the same sort of capabilities as commercial products like LogMeIn and GoToMyPC.  Unlike those products though, VNC has no built-in security encryption, so any work done through VNC is subject to eavesdropping.  These notes describe how to use SSH to generate a secure tunnel that is then used by VNC to make its connection.  They’re as much for me as for anyone else who might find it useful. (continue reading…)

After making a change to the URL for the blog, I discovered that links to all the photos broke. I figured the easiest way to fix them would be through editing the mysql database and managed to figure out how to change every affected link in every post in one step. (continue reading…)