One of the reasons I’m very excited for Rasberry Pi is that it uses micro USB for power. This is also the standard may cell phone manufacturers are settling on for charging. I would love to see more every day devices use micro USB for charging and for power. Granted, not all devices can run off the 100mA from USB 2.0 (or charge at a reasonable rate), but I can eliminate just one more of those odd coaxial chargers, I’d be a happy fellow. »
[](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Terminal-dec- vt100.jpg) My ideal workstation __Image by ClickPick, used under the ____ Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. __ Gnome 3 introduced a lot of fundamental changes to how you interact with your computer. I don’t want to hopelessly cling to the past, bemoaning the loss of my Lisp based window manager and yearning for the days when I could debate the merits of pure applets vs notification area icons, so I’ve moved on to gnome-shell. »
It’s been just shy of five years since I first blogged about my .gitconfig file, so I figured now would be a good time to revisit it. If you’re not already aware, you can set git configuration values in a .gitconfig file in your home directory, and have them apply to all git repositories you work on. This is particularly useful for aliases and to set your email address. My current .gitconfig: [user] name = James Bowes email = $EMAIL_ADDRESS [alias] ci = commit -a co = checkout st = status praise = blame br = branch diffstat = diff --stat cat = !cat @ ds = diff --stat lol = log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit lola = log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all [apply] whitespace = warn [diff] rename = copy renamelimit = 600 [pager] color = true [color] branch = auto diff = auto interactive =auto status = auto [push] default = upstream [github] user = jbowes token = $GITHUB_TOKEN I cribbed _lol _and lola from Adrian. »
If you’re like me, you’ve spend the last year wondering why your KVM based virtualization is horribly slow when doing IO. You’ve tried twiddling every available option in your BIOS, you’ve mucked about with hdparm and libvirt/qemu settings, and you’ve run more timed installs of RHEL 5 than you care to admit. If you’re also like me, you tried using ext4 instead of BTRFS to store your guest images today, and found that this resolved your issue. »
I’ve noticed after upgrading my workstation to Fedora 16 that GNOME 3’s default NetworkManager UI doesn’t expose the old UI’s import option for VPN settings. I have my old OpenVPN settings file on hand, so I’d rather not type it out again. Turns out you can still access the old UI and its convenient import button by running nm-connection-editor. »
This is just a quick update to CPSN, fixing detection of stale cookies. It will also prompt you for a username and password if you forget to put one in the settings file (or don’t want to save your password on disk). Install it with gem install –user cpsn Check the included README for details on configuration. Git: https://github.com/jbowes/cpsn Note: Using CPSN probably violates any number of Terms of Service, etc. »
For Thumbslug, we needed to open a number of SSL connections to the same server, each with its own X.509 client certificate. Thumbslug grabs the certificates from Candlepin, which stores them in PEM format. Rather than teach Candlepin to also store these certificates in a different format, or to load them first into a format that Java deals with nativley (like PKCS #12), I figured it would be best to create an SSLSession backed directly by an X509Certificate and PrivateKey loaded from the PEM file. »
I’ve finally gotten around to fixing up cpsn to work against Sony’s latest website version. CPSN is a cli app that lets you check if your PlayStation Friends are online, and what games they’re playing so you can, for example, see if anybody is playing Call of Duty without leaving the comfort of your shell. Install it with gem install –user cpsn Check the included README for details on configuration. Git: https://github.com/jbowes/cpsn **Note: **Using CPSN probably violates any number of Terms of Service, etc. »
I’ve moved my blog here, to blog.repl.ca. If the move ends up spamming any blog syndicators / aggregators, I apologize. »
Many smartphones or tablets support USB host mode (or On The Go mode) with an adapter. Unfortunately, a lot of those devices don’t supply power to their client USB devices; you can’t just plug a host mode adapter into an HP TouchPad, for example, then plug a keyboard into the host mode adapter, and expect everything to work. I put up a video on youtube explaining how to build and use a USB Y cable to inject power to the client devices. »