About 6 months ago our car (2008 Nissan X-Trail) started to have it’s AirBag light flash. This could be a worry we thought. After some googling we found a way to reset or go into a new diagnoses mode. This involved carefully timed ignition key turning with the airbag light showing up on the dash. (as it turns out there are at least a couple of these combinations which interact with various systems in the car) Read more

I was about to spend $500 to upgrade my existing D630, and then I found out that my $dayjob gives us $1K to buy our own laptop. I threw my hands in the year and decided I would buy a new laptop. Lots of back and forwards on whether I would go back to a Mac or buy the best Intel based laptop I could and run Linux on it. I am already pretty happy with my Dell and their enterprise range are usually well built. Read more

When testing my microphone on my laptop for use with skype and google hangouts, I need a way to route the output to the speakers. Eventually I found this bug on launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/483812 To sum it up: pactl load-module module-loopback latency_msec=10 (default is 200) this command will give you a number as output, for example 27. to stop the loopback execute: pactl unload-module 27 (replace 27 with the output of the previous command)

A little over a year ago I moved from Linux/KDE to a Mac as I was getting fed up with stuff not ‘just working’. While I wasn’t immediately happy for various reasons, it grew on me, especially the fact that you could use commercial applications and they integrated well. The thing that drove me crazy the most was context switching; you switch from app to app, not window to window. Here is my original write up: http://goo. Read more

With the recent release of the Nexus 4 and iPhone 5, I am interested in what is the expected life of a mobile phone, and I guess specifically smart phones. In the last 3 or so years I have had 4 phones: Sony Ericsson P910i HTC Dream Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Samsung Galaxy Nexus But in that same time, actually longer, I have had only one laptop; a Dell Latitude D630. Read more