Author Archives: force

Installing Windows 7 SP1 on chainloaded Windows

The Problem When I try to install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on my dual-booting computer, installation fails every time with the error 0x800F0A12. My Setup Drive 0 Drive 0 has Windows 7 installed. In the setup wizard, I … Continue reading

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Enable Hibernate on the System76 Lemur Ultra (lemu4)

I got a System76 Lemur Ultra (codename lemu4), and I love it! The build quality is a little so-so (the faux-metal plastic is kind of bendy, and, well, plastic), but I wasn’t expecing a MacBook. One of my favorite things … Continue reading

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The “Easy Way” to Add Custom DNS Servers in Ubuntu

Goal Just add a goddamned nameserver to Ubuntu. I have lxc, and I want to ssh to my containers without knowing their IPs or starting them in the foreground. Is that so hard?! Solution Install dnsmasq. sudo apt-get install -y … Continue reading

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Installing XBMC on Ubuntu 12.04 on an Acer Aspire Revo 1600

Install Nvidia Current Updates You want the Nvidia binary blob drivers to squeeze every bit of performance out of this Ion LE chipset so you can watch videos in 1080p on a $200 turd computer. sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-current-updates … Continue reading

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Quickie: Fix Missing “Downloads” Icons in Chrome/Chromium

Have you run across this bug? It’s not a huge deal, but in Ubuntu, you generally get broken icons on the Chrome/Chromium Downloads tab. There are related bug reports here and here, but I don’t see any movement on this. … Continue reading

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Prevent Virtual Machines from Saving Network Interface udev Rules

I use a lot of VirtualBox VMs. A problem that I have frequently is that when cloning an Ubuntu VM and changing its MAC address is that it won’t be able to initialize the network (as seen in a previous … Continue reading

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Compacting a VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format image)

Compacting a VMDK file (.vmdk) is a good idea if you want to share or reuse it, such as with Vagrant. If you’ve tinkered with your VM a bit, deleting cached files isn’t enough. The space in the filesystem is … Continue reading

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Render a template from a hash in Ruby

A hash is a great way to manage a list of key/value pairs, and templates are a great way to render content. So here’s a simple way to render a template from a hash. template.erb My favorite color is <%= … Continue reading

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Clone Ubuntu VMs in VirtualBox

Update: I found a permanent workaround for the udev ethernet interface problem. See this post. I installed Ubuntu from mini.iso and I want to make several copies. What are the potential pitfalls? Well, the only real problem is that if … Continue reading

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Depaginate Phoronix Articles

I sketched this for Phoronix, but you could easily adapt it to any site that uses pagination. I think it’s an interesting problem, so if you want to see another site depaginated, just ask me in a comment and I’ll … Continue reading

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