Craig Mayhew’s Blog

Although WQUXGA doesn’t quiet roll of the tongue it is the next size up for 5:4 displays. In anticipation of screens with this many pixels I thought I better start the search now for a desktop background…

Google does actually have a few images at this resolution:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?imgsz=huge&q=3840×2400

Flickr has just one:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=3840×2400&m=tags

Wow, IBM built some! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

I needed to copy across my favorites when I got a new phone recently. In order to do this you simply need to copy across 2 files to the “/copilot/EU/Save/” folder on your new phone:

/copilot/EU/Save/favorite.lst
/copilot/EU/Save/stopfavs.lst

I did this on CoPilot 7. The folder structure may be slightly different on later versions.

By Default Ubuntu will move data in RAM onto the swap file/partition on the hard disk long before it runs out of memory. It will pick data that isn’t accessed often but this can still be an annoying slow down on the system. To prevent the over use of SWAP space and speed things up all we need to do is change one setting… swappiness.

Swappiness can be set from 0 to 100. The default is 60 and the lower it is the more the computer will try to keep everything in RAM.

If you want to temporarily change the swappiness then run this command with desired swappiness level:

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

Alternatively if you want the change to be permanent then edit this file:

sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Set swappiness to the desired level (in this case 1) by either modifying this line in the file “/etc/sysctl.conf” or if it doesn’t exist, add it at the end.

vm.swappiness=1

Reboot the computer for the change to take effect.

To block Google analytics from recording anything about you visiting a website simply add the following lines to your hosts file. This will also give you slightly faster page load times on websites that use Google analytics.

# [Google Inc]
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com

Autumn is now upon us in the UK and in my opinion it’s cold. Some people might remedy the problem by turning on the central heating but not I. I’ve turned on more computers and set them running folding@home or World Community Grid. This warms the house just like the central heating except that instead of just generating heat that then seeps out of my house and is slowly wasted, I’m helping to cure cancer too. It would be good if more heating systems were able to make use of the energy before just turning it into heat.

Now imagine if everyone did this? Suddenly folding@home might have 1000x the processing power and would do the same amount of protein folding this winter as it would normally do as a whole over the next 8 years (taking into account processor performance increases).

So what do you say? Will you join me in this protein folding endeavor?

I found the ntfs-3g process was using 100% cpu. Apparently VMWARE can thrash the hard drive so the workaround is to set “mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE” in the virtual machines .vmx file and VMware will perform faster.

Shortly after logging into Gnome I was getting the following error:

“The application “gnome-panel” attempted to change an aspect of your configuration that your system administrator or operating system vendor does not allow you to change. Some of the settings you have selected may not take effect, or may not be restored next time you use the application.”

Clicking the “details” button brings up the following message: “No database available to save your configuration: unable to store a value at key ‘/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/expand’, as the configuration server has no writable databases.”

I had messed up my permissions in the .gconf directory that stores many of Gnome’s settings. In my case the execute permission was missing from the folder and all files within it so Gnome gave that error.

To fix this run the following commnd on your gconf directory. It will give your user read, write and execute permissions to the gconf folder and all files/folders within it which should solve the problem.

sudo chmod -R  u+rwx ~/.gconf

E text editor recently started instantly crashing no matter how I opened it. The fix was to delete or rename the “config.db” and “e.db” files in the following directory (be sure to replace %username% with yoru actual windows username):

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\e