Some notes for my fellows at University of Liverpool. Quite often we’ve to manage a lot of content, which means get it, digitize it, and manage it to finally end up writing something about it. Let’s see it from where we want to have it: All content should be...
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Export from VitalSource Bookshelf
Every now and again, my University gives us a reader through the DRM black hole software that they deemed useful to license: VitalSource bookshelf. And of course, that means you’ll get encrypted content, which your operating system and document management system of choice won’t index. And just as with...
Continue reading...Small Cloudy Musings about Big Data
If we develop the topic of cloud and big data in a more general context, the first thing to understand is that this is not about any particular vendor. We’re talking open source here, the moment you remove lock-ins—see Flume, Hadoop, Hive, Impala, to name just the Apache stack...
Continue reading...How to Fix an APC UPS that’s not charging its Battery
I recently had my APC Smart-UPS 3000 RM report to me that I needed to replace the battery. Sure thing, I ordered a replacement from Ebay, plugged in and thought everything should be just fine. Well, it wasn’t. The battery was not charged, and neither reset nor power cycling...
Continue reading...apt-get upgrade failing after moving from vmware to virtual box?
Moving to VirtualBox is just a great idea when you’re coming from VMWare Server 2.0 which is no longer supported. VirtualBox is a lot more modern, also allows for a headless setup, and it is a lot faster. The only drawback I saw is that VMWare Server allows for...
Continue reading...Pay attention to disk space when you’re running unattended upgrades on your Linux boxes
Today’s one of those days where you start with a clear plan of what you want to do, and then you end up fixing something entirely different. Since I’ve built most of my virtual machines based on a small set of templates, at some point I got bored by...
Continue reading...CVS pserver on Mountain Lion
Right. I do know CVS is old and all, but I like it. Actually I’ve a ton of stuff in my CVS server. And have written all kinds of scripts that digest that stuff and do stuff with it. So no, I’ll not switch any time soon for the...
Continue reading...Move the Apple Mail Download Folder
Apple Mail seems to use its own location for downloading attachments that you double-click on. On my machine, this was in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Mail\ Downloads I wanted those to go into ~/Downloads And since Apple as a company keeps thinking about even the illiterate, it hides the Library folder, and even...
Continue reading...Solution to Mountain Lion Battery Life Problem
Your Mileage May Vary. But on my machine (TM), the battery life substantially dropped on my 2010 MBP after installation of ML. By substantially I mean really really badly. From 4 hours previously to down to about 1.5 hours. Surfing around about that problem, I did find the programm...
Continue reading...Removing Fan Noise and Heat Problems with MacBook Pro
I’ve had increasing problems with two MacBook Pro, one I5, one I7, both from 2010. Reading about badly applied thermal paste on the net, I decided to give that a try. Using this excellent walkthrough from iFixit.com, I was able to eliminate the problems entirely. Monitoring the I7, I...
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