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  1. New Home


    We did it … we got to the end of the process and we are now Home Owners :)

    Its been a rocky road right until the last minute, I hadn’t wanted to blog the completion date being today in case I jinxed the whole thing … and just as well because …

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  2. Making your blog number one


    I’ve come across lorelle’s blog challenges before but this one caught my eye. The challenge is to come us with a search phrase that you are the top hit for in google. Here’s mine:

    cowsay house

    I think that pretty much sums up this whole site in …

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  3. Fun With Unix: Go Fish!


    Following on from the other articles in the fun with unix miniseries, today its go-fish. This is a game, from the package bsdgames and its addictive :) There are a bunch of other games in the package too but this has been a personal favourite for some years. Basically its a …

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  4. Steps to Configuring Users on Mantis


    Mantis is a rather good open source bugtracker. Recently I’ve been using it across a small team working on a number of projects at once, and its going pretty well so far. It is especially useful when someone is testing something and someone else is bug-fixing. Today I’ve …

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  5. Sssh ... Thoughts of Moving


    I’m whispering. It loses something when you whisper in a blog post but just imagine that I’m whispering.

    I’m whispering because I’m going to write about the house and I’m sure that speaking too loudly will jinx the whole process! Nothing is certain in my …

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  6. Hopeful House


    I haven’t updated the house saga for a while but its been ticking along in the background. There have been the usual series of alarm and excursions – one misunderstanding about whether planning permission was needed for the basement (happily it wasn’t, as there isn’t any!) and some …

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  7. Fun with unix: Fortune


    The old ones are the best, so they say, and this is definitely the case with fortune. At the command line, type “fortune” and see what you get. Mine read

    “Next Friday will not be your lucky day. As a matter of fact, you don’t
    have a lucky day …
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  8. Posting with images in Joomla!


    The other day I was helping someone post to a website that I set up using Joomla! , and thought that others might find this tutorial helpful.

    Start with the “Media Manager” button on the front page. This is so you can add all the images. Directories can be added here …

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  9. Fun with Unix: Cowsay


    Another in the “Fun with Unix” series (see the one other post so far on mesg), today’s episode covers a little trick that goes alongside messages.

    Here it is:

     _______
    < hello >
     -------
            \   ^__^
             \  (oo)\_______
                (__)\       )\/\
                    ||----w |
                    ||     ||
    

    The code to output the above is:

    echo "hello" | cowsay
    

    You can tell …

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  10. Damn Small Linux for a Damn Small Laptop


    Tied up with the various issues we’ve had recently with houses, I’ve got a new project. Its to turn my (mother’s) very old laptop into a dumb terminal we can have in the basement in the new house. The kitchen is in the basement and I’m …

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  11. Fun with Unix: Writing Messages


    This is the first in a mini-series of articles about using Linux/Unix to do things other than view logs and edit files. I’m 26 and find that many of my peers weren’t exposed to Unix servers at university, so they miss out on this. If you have …

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  12. Mouselessness


    Not to be confused with houselessness which I have also been doing a lot of recently, today mouselessness is the name of the game. Inspired by this recent post on Coding Horror here are my thoughts on using a computer without a mouse.

    RSI Risk

    I posted a while back …

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