I am in the office today. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the building. So today I'm doing something I almost never do - I'm listening to music via my speakers rather than using my headphones.

When I kicked off Amarok I went to switch the audio from the headphones to the speakers and realized I hadn't installed pavucontrol. I pulled it up in apper and saw that it was a gtk program. Not a big deal in itself. I have other gtk stuff already installed. But it just made me th

I run a Vbox instance of Fedora on my mac. It was Fedora 20 but I used Fedup to upgrade it to Fedora 21.

When I did that and updated everything I ran into a problem where guest additions wasn't working. And I don't know about other situations but in this one when Guest Additions isn't working then the VM is pretty much unusable. So I was digging around trying to figure it out. The install would run and complain about not being able to find the kernel headers but they were insta

Having to carefully unselect crap I don't want installed on every Java update? Slimy
Rechecking the "stay logged in" button on facebook for me? Slimy
There's so much slimy stuff. Found a new one today. That Win 7 VM I mentioned, it wanted me to upgrade IE. Which I want to do - no problem. As I'm about to hit the Download button I see a small line further down "Download non-enhanced version." My gut tells me I don't want enhanced - do a quick google and I'm right. Non-enhanced means just

EDIT: I cleaned up restore points and that got the space used down to 27.4 GB - still crazy.

I have a Fedora 20 vm that I run in VirtualBox on my Mac. It gives me access to some tools I like, and it lets me run a web server that's closer to what a production environment would look like.

Yesterday I got around to setting up another VM. This one is Windows 7. I started the same as I did the Fedora image, with a 25 GB hard drive. That was fine for the windows instal

I spend a decent amount of time at Reddit. The key is finding good subreddits. I usually hop on Facebook a time or two a day as well. As an expat it is a good way to connect back to home.

Anyway what's interesting to me is that sometimes things happen and those sites just go kerbonkers. Like, for example, if it rains in Phoenix my facebook feed will be absolutely full of it and I'll see it about a million times.

With reddit it is more noticeable because certain e

This is a nice resource. It's written in Java but below the examples is a list with links to known ports in a number of other languages.

https://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/

I'm still learning a lot about my Mac and getting better at using it. Today I was going over trackpad gestures and learned that there is this "Notification Center" that I can pull out by swiping in from the side with 2 fingers. I had no idea it was there. It's mostly useless. I don't care about stock quotes. I don't use any of the Apple calendar, reminder or other stuff. But I did think that the world clock thing was a good idea.

On my living room computer that is hooked to my

The Sixth Stage of Grief is Retro-Computing

This is just a beautiful piece of writing. It doesn't match my experience perfectly but so many notes really resonate with me. It's funny, I've been on this Steve Jobs video binge lately and this just fits right in.

I had to scroll down to start reading the piece, which threw me for a second, but again - I really recommend reading this. It'