main July 2009

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : McGintys, Northgate Street
by samwise 20 Jul '09

20 Jul '09

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back this coming Monday (20th July) at 20:00: P J McGinty & Sons 15 Northgate Street Ipswich Suffolk IP1 3BY Tel: 01473 251 515 Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP1+3BY WWW: http://pjmcginty.moonfruit.com/ McGintys pub is in the centre of Ipswich, not far from our old haunt - The Milestone. It's directly opposite the town's central library and has a reputation for good Irish beer. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. I've been playing with FreeBSD a little this month, so happy to chat a bit about that. Firefox 3.5 has some cool new features too. Plus I've been playing around with an ePub creator which might be of interest. Remember to call or email me, if you're arriving later and want to ensure I don't wander off, which I have a tendency to do if the turn-out hits rock-bottom ... Hope to see you there, Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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kmail
by Peter Alcibiades 18 Jul '09

18 Jul '09

It really seems that the kde team have taken leave of their senses. I just upgraded to squeeze in the continuing effort to deal with xsession errors - they have changed now in kind, but there are still a bunch of them - one side effect of which was to update kmail. The thing now comes with two 'features' which seem designed to destroy usability, and no guide on how to get rid of the things. One is that messages are separated by day and week, with drop down tabs. Why anyone would want this is a mystery. It makes scrolling through your old messages just about impossible. The other is that wherever you move the mouse these crazed popups appear, to obscure whatever you were looking at. This was probably put in in case you should persist in trying to scroll through, and make it doubly impossible! A bit of google searching revealed an obscure button and a setting deep in the bowels of the thing which let you turn them both off and get back to something that looks like a normal email client. But really, what on earth has happened to these guys? Kmail used to be, out of the box, a nice simple email client packaged with a quite decent calendar. You can still get back to that, but you have to make an effort. Al

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Re: [ALUG] kmail
by Peter Alcibiades 16 Jul '09

16 Jul '09

It is kmail Version 1.11.2. Not running KDE as a DTE - though I have in the past. I seem to have got rid of the most brain dead features now, except that for some crazed reason when you pass the mouse over the folder pane, it insists on delivering you a popup that tells you what each folder is, in case you had suffered from memory loss since the last time you did it. But of course, preventing you from seeing half the pane. This is maddening but just about manageable as long as its limited to that pane. The developers of this thing should be forced to use it as shipped for a few months, it would be enormously educational for them. This was a true Victor Meldrew moment. Another one happened in the ongoing process of this upgrade to sqeeze. Imagine this. You are running Gnome perfectly happily but notice some oddities here and there. Like for instance the screensave appears to be disconnected, and you get xsession errors about themes not being installed. So you try dpkg-reconfigure, and are told that Gnome is not installed! "I don't believe it!" you cry, before you can stop yourself. Peter

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"YouTube Medley"
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 14 Jul '09

14 Jul '09

Greetings all! What I want to do: 1. Download a certain series of YouTube videos and store them locally in a suitable format (MP3?) such that each can be viewed from the local file. 2. Merge these into a single video DVD to make a "medley" which can be played straight through from the DVD. Advice on how to do #1, and (if that is possible) how to proceed to #2, would be most welcome! Platform: Debian Etch or Lenny (both available). With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Jul-09 Time: 11:40:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] [Fwd: Re: From Ipswich Freecycle Mods: : Offer two pay as you go mobile sim and top up cards felixstowe]
by Chris G 13 Jul '09

13 Jul '09

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 03:23:30PM +0000, Martin Pike wrote: > i have a couple of observations on this. > > first, if he didn't post a taken to the previous one, then that post is > still 'active'. > It's surely not a requirement to post a taken message is it? > we could also consider adding sim cards to the same category as vouchers, > i.e. they don't save anything (much) from landfill. > > cheers > > --- On Mon, 13/7/09, Angelika <freecycle2(a)angelika.co.uk> wrote: > > From: Angelika <freecycle2(a)angelika.co.uk> > Subject: [Fwd: Re: From Ipswich Freecycle Mods: : Offer two pay as you > go mobile sim and top up cards felixstowe] > To: "Ipswich Mods" <Ipswich_Freecycle-owner(a)yahoogroups.com> > Date: Monday, 13 July, 2009, 4:16 PM > > What's the policy when someone claims that "it's a different one from > the one I offered yesterday"? > -- Chris Green

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Putting a SATA drive in standby
by Barry Samuels 12 Jul '09

12 Jul '09

I have, in the last few days, changed my 2 x 250 GB IDE drives for 2 x 1 TB SATA drives. One drive is used once a day to mirror the other. Previously I used hdparm to spin down the mirror drive after a short period of inactivity and I've tried to do the same with one of the new drives but I suspect it isn't working. If I issue the command 'sg_start --stop /dev/sdb' I hear a click from the computer as if the drive is being switched off but can't detect any difference in noise. That could be because the drive is ultra quiet but if I then try to mount a partition on the drive it mounts instantly. With the previous drives if I did that there would be a significant pause whilst the drive was spinning up to running speed. Does the fact that there is no pause of any sort when mounting the drive mean that it hasn't stopped? I've also tried 'sdparm --command=stop /dev/sdb' with the same results. If I issue the command sdparm --command=ready /dev/sdb then it comes back with 'ready'. -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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How things have changed
by Steve Fosdick 10 Jul '09

10 Jul '09

I've just bought a couple of new bits of hardware and was very pleasantly surprised how things have changed for the better. I got a wireless trackerball and a UPS both with USB connections. I plugged the trackerball receiver in, pressed the connect button and it started working. That wasn't a great surprise but obviously nice. I plugged the UPS in and, before I had a chance to check that it had been detected and then look for software for it an icon appeared telling me the UPS was fully charged and also reporting on the batteries in the wireless trackerball. For simplicity this beats having to install software from an accompanying CD in order to get the same features. It seems when manufacturers adopt standard protocols or are more open about the protocols and interfaces they do use the pace of development increases dramatically. Steve.

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Deleting from a Google Groups archive
by Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

Hi FOlks, If anyone out there is running a Google Groups mailing list, I'd be grateful for advice about the following question, which I can't seem to find the answer to myself! I have just set up a Google Group for use as a mailing list by a small group of volunteers working on a local-history project. I have not gone "live" with it yet All seems to be working, in my tests. However, this means that my test messages have gone into the archive. I would like to delete these before going "live". But I have not managed to locate any means of doing this, despite being the owner and manager! Any advice? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 09-Jul-09 Time: 09:57:17 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Linux-based information screens
by Mark Rogers 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

This is one of those things that Google would probably give me the answer if I could think of the right question. I want to create an information screen, similar to the kind of things you see in railway stations etc, maybe showing a live TV feed in one area, some headlines coming from an RSS feed, a slideshow of images in another area, etc. Ideally I'd like something that runs from live-CD, with configuration on a USB stick, so that restarting the PC just restarts the system without risking any corruption. Any suggestions, whether to what I should use or at least what I should search for? -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555 Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG

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using scponly shell
by samwise 06 Jul '09

06 Jul '09

Hi, Hopefully, not too off-topic but I'm having trouble setting up a user account on a FreeBSD server (an OS I'm not greatly comfortably with yet), to use the scponly [http://www.sublimation.org/scponly/wiki/] shell. I basically want to allow the account SFTP access, but not have an interactive login shell - so scponly looks like what I'm after. I've set the user's login shell to be /usr/ports/shells/scponly and also added the shell to /etc/shells. When I try to SFTP into the server with the user, though, I'm getting the "Received message too long 1416128883" error. Googling hasn't really helped much. Anyone got any suggestions? TIA, Peter.

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