It was actually very easy to fix only five screws to take out and nothing to take apart.

Three screws out and remove the cover:

Then two more screws and the fan lifts out no need to disconnect it.

I got this piece of dust out:

This was left on the filter:

After I cleaned this out the laptop is back to normal and hasn’t shut-down since.

usermod -u 1234 phil

Simple enough and it even chowned the files in my home directory. But I still have files everywhere which have my old uid. I’d like to find and own them, seems like a pain, could take ages? Easy with GNU find:

sudo find / -uid 1000 -exec chown phil \{\} \;

So the solution a mash-up Apache and psshutdown now available from Microsoft. My apache was installed through cygwin so I have all the shell powers available for my cgi scripts.
Just make some cgi scripts and off we go.

You will need to make a dummy script to accept the licence using the /accepteula switch which needs to be run once or the scripts will just all fail.

I added the sysinternals tools to my system environment path so they will get picked up without addng the path.

Then the following script is dropped into

/srv/www/cgi-bin/shutdown

#!/bin/sh

# disable filename globbing
set -f

echo “Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1″
echo
echo Force shutdown of computer
echo

psshutdown -kf

I also set up a static IP address for the laptop.

Now I just put a bookmark in my browser http://192.168.1.199/cgi-bin/shutdown and clicking on this shuts that laptop down without any arguments.

I have Wi-Fi capable mobile phone so put the bookmark in there and I can easily shut it down from there too, which is really handy as I’m not always in front of a computer screen.

So I was using my Ubuntu system and wanted to do something similar. The command it turns out is gnome-open. Bit of a mouthful so I have this aliased in my .bashrc file to cs for either cygstart or gnome-open which is much more snappy.

My favorite blog has to be Marc Abramowitz while I’m not a Mac head he has so many geeky Unix/Linux tips and tricks it’s well worth the read.

My favorite podcast has to be Technorama for their wonderful humor and light hearted look at the geeky side of things.

They have been absolutely rock solid in the last year. I forget if I’ve been with them for three or four years now.

The plan provides everything you might want.

Here’s a snip from my plan details (linux 1)

150 MB web space
- 4000 MB transfer
- unlimited email
- webmail
- unlimited MY SQL
- PHP, Perl, SSH
- cPanel control panel
- Fantastico
- online statistics

The fantastico feature is really cool you can do things like almost one click install of Wordpress

SSH is really nice as you can get down and dirty if you want to change/fix something if you want.

The first rule of backups should be :
Backup often (and before your data goes bad).

I’m not so good at this by try to get round to it as often as I can.

The second rule of backups should be:
Always verify your backups

This is where I could have had a problem. Fortunately I had the verify data box ticked and the bad media was detected. Running the backup again everything went smoothly. Wheew!

For skype out I often add someone and their mobile number. These should be organised as a single contact just like they are on my Nokia phone. Less messy and easier to organise.

There have been bugs with it in the past but it seems to be stable on the current release cool extension!

$ convert -page A4+0+0 pg*.jpg doc.pdf

And the result is a single pdf with all the images in order. Ooops page 2 was upside down

$ convert -rotate180 pg2.jpg pg2a.jpg
$ rm pg2.jpg

Convert again as above and all done.

ImageMagick is available pretty much whatever you are running Windows, Cygwin, Mac, Linux, BSD, Solaris etc.

It used to say on the front page of the website

• No usage caps.
• No traffic shaping.
• No speed throttling.

They were bought by plusnet , and suffice to say the traffic shaping and speed throtling statements are gone. The usage cap statement has been changed to cost capped. It seems obvious to me the difference. Plusnet are quite open about what they intend to do with the Metronet network. See the second to last point about traffic shaping and prioritisation.

My view is that this kind of thing is generally bad for the following:
Take VOIP for example. I use Skype quite a lot. ISPs are providing their own VOIP solutions these days so it’s in their interests that their packets get the best QoS . The next step is for a partner to come along and say to the ISP if you give our packets better QoS on your network we can come to an arrangement. We then end up with a closed fractured network, where the big boys move in and can push small VOIP suppliers out because of poor QoS.

This need not just apply to VOIP it could be any technology where there is a driver to make it happen. Taken further we could see a dual stream internet with the sponsored version working well and the regular version with poor QoS.

If you download/upload then you should pay by the bit - but it should be driven by the customers needs not by the shareholders. Use less pay less, use more pay more.

As I’m writting this Andy Abramson has just blogged about QoS but from a slightly different angle see Point 10 .

I was going to add where I’ve gone too and what I think of my new ISP but that will have to wait ’til I have time next to post.

The friends in tech have done it again! Many, many, laughs in this podcast! An absolute quality production! They all have there own quality podcasts which you can find on their website.

The old site is still around but I’ll nuke it when I have added the content that’s not outdated here. I’ll also be adding categories sorting out the theme, blogroll yadda yadda.

Comments on here are moderated by me before they see the light of day so don’t even think about sending your bots round here spammers!