Categories
Tech Tips

htop shows blank screen


Argh! My htop is showing a blank screen. I’m afraid of the dark…helppp!

Solution: export TERM=xterm-color before running htop

My tmux uses TERM=screen and htop didn’t like it on one particular machine while the others are fine. Setting it to the above solves it.

Categories
Tech Tips

How to extract image and text from PDF


1. Install poppler-utils

2. To extract original embedded images:

$ pdfimages -j <file.pdf> <to_dir>

3. To extract text:

$ pdftotext -j <file.pdf>

Categories
Tech Tips

Why is my Android phone disallowing me from changing ringtone or notification sound?

 
OBSERVATION: It allows me to change it, but after a while, it’ll revert back to a particular ringtone, notification sound, or “Unknown ringtone”. No matter which sound I picked, be it from internal storage or SD, it’ll always revert back after a while. It’s like the ringtone is stuck!

SOLUTION: Some profile changing app that you’ve previously set up could be messing with the sound settings in the background, e.g. Llama, Tasker, etc. Check your triggers and actions for these apps, or just disable them completely for a while. See if the problem comes back. If not, bingo, you’ve found the culprit.

Categories
Tech Tips

How to mute internal speaker of Dell Optiplex 990 so that audio plays via external speaker only

After upgrading Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) to 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), the computer started playing sound through both the internal built-in speaker and external jacked in speakers. To mute the internal speaker, run:

[shell]/usr/bin/amixer -c 0 sset ‘Auto-Mute Mode’ ‘Line Out+Speaker'[/shell]

Just make sure “Auto-Mute Mode” is not set to “Disabled”.

Categories
Tech Encounters

Linux and Open Source Applications Support Vendors in Singapore

Many companies try very hard to avoid using open source solutions in Singapore because the general impression is that support is poor.

A quick googling suggests that these vendors do provide professional support in Singapore:

Do you know of other vendors in this business? Let me know so that I can grow this list. When it’s substantial, maybe more Singapore companies will be willing to try open source solutions. 🙂

Categories
Dharma Encounters

Venerable Thubten Chodron Offers Key Strategies for Buddhist Youth Leaders

Venerable Thubten Chodron shared some useful advice about how young Buddhist leaders can benefit others and themselves in a recent dialogue with youths.

Organised and compiled by Ow Yeong Wai Kit:

  1. Think deeply and set your own priorities.
  2. Consider the advice of elders and seniors, but make your own decisions.
  3. Manage conflicts openly and calmly.
  4. Be flexible with your plans.
  5. Think carefully before making commitments.
  6. Balance time and resources to increase effectiveness.
  7. Evaluate monastic and lay teachers before accepting their teachings.
  8. Reach out to nominal Buddhists by emphasizing the Buddha’s love and compassion.
  9. Be sensitive to the differences between people.
  10. Develop self-confidence.
Categories
Tech Tips

crontab -e not saving changes

‘crontab -e’ kept telling me ‘crontab: no changes made to crontab’ even though I’ve made changes. When I run ‘crontab -l’ to check, my changes were not saved.

Turned out it’s due to my environment variable:

export EDITOR=/usr/bin/gvim

Changing it to vim solves the problem:

export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vim

Categories
Tech Encounters

WhatsApp group chat on steroids

Google+ Events 🙂

Categories
Images Our Society

含笑半步癲

I want this… bwahaha! 🙂

Source: http://mypaper.pchome.com.tw/ohya71828/post/1310780520

Categories
Tech Tips

How to create MBR for booting into Windows

I had a dual-booting laptop with Linux Mint and Windows XP on it. After deleting the Linux Mint partitions, it failed to boot into XP because grub can no longer find the MBR. This was the error message:

error: no such partition
grub rescue>

Solution:

Boot into SystemRescueCD and run this command to create a new MBR:

lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

Note: My XP resides in /dev/sda.