Welcome to Frank's very decorative blog.
2012-02-04
I upgraded a couple of my Fedora machines from 14 to 16. In both cases
the new shiny Gnome 3 interface did not work. It would drop me into "Gnome Classic"
which is a gnome2 kind of interface with many fewer features. To get it to work I had
to install gnome-shell myself. (yum install gnome-shell).
2011-11-06
My mail service provider must have changed email authentication
schemes on me recently. Alpine would repeatedly ask me for my password
and print, "Retrying CRAM-MD5 authentication after AUTHENTICATE failed."
It was somewhat unhelpful because apparently Alpine was trying different
authentication schemes, but it kept printing the same error message.
After some fiddling around I figured out that
by putting the following line in my .pinerc file:
"disable-these-authenticators=CRAM-MD5"
things would work.
2011-11-06
Obviously I don't update my blog very often.
A couple of years ago I toyed with making my own DVR. Too
much work, so I bought a Captiveworks HD4000 DVR.
It runs Linux of course. Captiveworks had a great forum with
a wealth of information about the machine which helped me much
with using and customizing it. But then a few months ago they
took the forum offline and replaced it with an ad for their new
DVR "VeuBox". Assholes. Don't buy the VeuBox unless you want
to get shorted too.
2011-04-20
Flew to Key West on Monday. Today the family spent most of the
day snorkeling and kayaking around the keys with
Danger Charters, which
I would recommend.
The ship had a classic snarly old bearded alcoholic sea captain and a
crew that consisted of a crazy lady in a bikini with a shark and
a cheery knowledgeable girl with a permanently affixed smile.
We saw quite a bit of wild life among the keys and mangroves including
some jellyfish, a sting ray, a large lobster, some barracuda,
a cow fish, and a plush shark. It was a very good
time, particularly after a long winter.
2011-04-17
How to get an mp3 that you bought from Amazon onto your Linux computer:
Amazon does have an "Amazon MP3 downloader" for Linux, but the packages
are now woefully out of date, so out of date that I can't get it to
run on my computer without recompiling and installing
a dozen old out-of-date libraries.
So here is the easier method:
1. These steps require that you have "Flash" player and "DownloadHelper" for Firefox
installed.
2. Using Firefox, buy your mp3 file from Amazon, then save the mp3
files that you download to your "Cloud Drive," which Amazon
provides for you.
3. Fire up the "Cloud Player" by clicking on the giant button that
you can't miss. Up comes a web-based Flash
player. In the upper right there is a "Download" button. Ignore it.
That button just gives you an ".amz" file as well.
4. Start playing the tune you just purchased with the "Cloud Player".
Then the DownloadHelper installed in Firefox
will see the mp3 file that you are playing
and allow you to save it to a file on your machine.
One of these days I hope Amazon wises up and just lets people download
mp3s or tar balls or zip files like Rhapsody. Not wasting
too much time hoping, however.
2011-04-12
Yeah! I discovered Calcforge today.
It is a repository for TI calculator software for Fedora. This saves me
from having to compile a bunch of packages. Thanks, Kevin and Tyler.
Want to post a reply to my blog? Why would I want
to have to edit something that you wrote?