I came across Pen Drive Linux a few days ago, when I was looking for information about building a persistent LiveCD that would run from a USB drive. I tried out Ubuntu first and was reasonably impressed. Both Gnome and KDE are pretty hardware intense as far as DE go, so I’m wiping the drive and trying again with xfce (using Xubuntu) to see if I can boost performance. With Ubuntu I was able to keep the persistent area on the drive to around a gig and a half (which on the 16 GB thumb drive I picked up is chump change), but I suspect I can do better.

This obviously only works for systems that allow booting to USB drives, but I wanted to share it with my sysadmin friends. Load ClamAV, a password reset utility, and set the remainder of the drive as a FAT32 partition (or HFS+ for the Mac users) and you have a great recovery disk for most ocassions. Very useful if you’re supporting multiple environments.

Originally published at The Monkey Guild. You can comment here or there.

Tags: tech tips
Current Mood: geeky

Finally got around to upgrading monkeyguild to the latest Wordpress version.  WAU borked the site something fierce and I had to work some database ninjitsu to get things back up and running properly.  Essentially it got locked in maintenance mode and wouldn’t allow me to take it out of that mode.  Here’s how you fix it:

Head over to the database and open up the wp_options table.  You’re looking for an entry called “plugin_maintenancemode2,” select to edit this record.  Change the autoload from on to off.  After that you should be in good shape.  OK so perhaps it wasn’t quite fiercely borked, but it took me a bit to figure it all out.

Originally published at The Monkey Guild. You can comment here or there.

Tags: tech tips
Current Mood: relieved

I don’t think this was heavily advertised (or I missed it) but you can set a YouTube video to display in HD quality sound and video. For most of them it just appears to upsample, rather than give you a true HD image/audio track. Anyway just add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL you are watching. For instance, in the Bill O meltdown video I posted, the URL is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2YDq6FkVE

for the HD version just type:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2YDq6FkVE&fmt=18

Originally published at The Monkey Guild. You can comment here or there.

Tags: tech tips, youtube
Current Mood: geeky