After activating the service and paying my first lot of credit (pre-paid – there is a post-pay option), I was up and running in a couple of days. The only hitch was getting the 3G data connection to work on my iPhone 4…

The answer for this is the same as for getting any alien data service working on a smart phone: change the access point name (APN) profile. Amaysim actually provide instructions for changing your APN:
http://www.amaysim.com.au/help-support/troubleshooting.html/#mobile-phones.
It seems, then, that updating the APN is easy on configurable phones, e.g., HTC. The iPhone, however, is always more tricky… more closed.

The Amaysim troubleshooting page suggests updating the phone via iTunes in order to get the latest APN for the inserted SIM. I hate iTunes and avoid it whenever I can. A quick and easy alternative is to open the iPhone’s Safari browser and point it to: http://www.unlockit.co.nz. This site can automatically generate an APN for you based on the SIM’s service provider.

I found that, for this Amaysim plan, these setting worked:
– Go to http://www.unlockit.co.nz in Safari.
– Go to Custom APN
– Profile name “internet”
– Name: “Amaysim”
– Leave the password blank
– Carrier: “AU – Optus”
– Select Create profile
– Select Install
– Select Install Now

That’s it! The APN should install and open up the Optus 3G connection for the Amaysim SIM card.

When I first did this, I received an error message: The UUID for the profile “APN carrier settings” is not unique. This is easily fixed by removing any existing APN profiles by:
– Settings
– General
– Profile (APN Carrier Settings)
– Remove
– Follow steps above to install custom APN

Good luck!

The adapter I bought was from the eBay store Console Mate (a popular Australian, NSW, power seller) and was listed as “WIRELESS GAMING RECEIVER – Xbox 360 Controller on PC”. the store was easy to deal with and the device arrived in under a couple of days via express post.

A genuine wireless adapter will have “Microsoft” written on the top of the adapter itself. These knock-offs (at least mine) say only “XBox 360″ with no branding, copyright, etc. Otherwise, they look like the real deal.

My issues began when trying to install the adapter in an install of Windows 7 64-bit. I tried using the software bundled with the device, but had the same experience with the official software (which I ended up getting to work). Using the driver on the CD that came with the adapter, I kept getting the error message:
Windows found driver software for your device but encountered an error while attempting to install it. PC Wireless Gaming Receiver. The system cannot find the file specified.
I then turned to the official drivers. After installing the official Microsoft software (http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/xbox-360-wireless-controller-for-windows) I then plugged the device into a USB port. My install of Windows 7 64-bit couldn’t install the device; ultimately, the adapter always ended up being listed as “Unknown Device”.

Googling will bring up a few solutions for this issue, but I found only one works. These are the steps I took to install the drivers for the device:
- Install the official software: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/d/xbox-360-wireless-controller-for-windows
- Start -> Search for “Device Manager” -> Open it
- Find the “Unknown Device” -> right click -> properties
- Driver -> Update driver -> Browse my computer -> Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer
- Double click “All devices” -> Search for “Microsoft” in the left pane and select it -> Search for “XBox 360 Wireless Receiver for Windows Version: 2.1xxx”
- Choose “Next” and complete the install

The “Unknown Device” should then disappear from the devices list. I was then able to sync my existing wireless XBox 360 controller (which came with my XBox 360 console) with the adapter by pressing the large “X” button on the controller to wake it (it should start blinking), then pressing the button on the adapter (its light should start blinking), then pressing the receiver sync button on the controller (a small button in between the left shoulder button and the central top port of the controller). After a few seconds, the controller and adapter lights stopped blinking, leaving the top left light of the controller lit (the Player 1 state). Viola! Done.

These links helped me:
http://www.dealextreme.com/forums/Forums.dx/Forum.31881~threadid.504450
http://www.ehow.com/how_6745166_360-controller-won_t-connect-pc.html

I also highly recommend XPadder: http://www.xpadder.com/
It allows you to fully customise the way the controller interacts with the OS and applications.

Of course this is an issue with acroread and not Crunchbang

1: Make sure the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file is spelled correctly, i.e., don’t spell it “authorised”. Easy to do with Australian or British English.

2: Make sure the .ssh folder and its contents have the correct access permissions. The folder on the remote host I was wanting to connect to didn’t have the correct permissions. A quick chmod -R 755 ~/.ssh did the trick.

Thanks to this Arch Linux forum entry.

It turns out that my aspell-en package had either not been installed or was uninstalled at some stage. Re-installing it with:
sudo pacman -S aspell-en
fixed it

Thanks to http://community.livejournal.com/emacs/11730.html

I was finding that the default program that Chromium was using to open pdfs was FireFox with the acroread plugin; strange, but each to their own… It turns out that Chromium just uses the xdg-open command to load files with the user’s preferred applications. How to choose these preferred applications? The xdg-mime command must be used, e.g., to set acrorread as the deafault pdf reader:

xdg-mime default acroread.desktop application/pdf

However, I noticed that when I first tried this, I received four error lines telling me that various processes couldn’t access the configuration file:

/usr/bin/xdg-mime: line 625: /home/kris/.local/share/applications/defaults.list.new: No such file or directory
grep: /home/kris/.local/share/applications/defaults.list.new: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/xdg-mime: line 627: /home/kris/.local/share/applications/defaults.list.new: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/xdg-mime: line 629: /home/kris/.local/share/applications/defaults.list.new: No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat `/home/kris/.local/share/applications/defaults.list.new’: No such file or directory

This was easily fixed by manually creating a blank file in that directory which (I had to manually create the applications folder, but the ~/.local/share folder already existed for me). Now it seems xdg-utils works like a champ.

To make opening using default programs in the terminal a little easier, I created an alias in my ~/.bashrc by adding the line:

alias open=’xdg-open’

so that all I have to do is say open [file] and it opens the file in my preferred application set using xdg-mime default [application].[environment] [filetype].

Full worked example:

What about determining the filetype of a given file, determining the application it is opened with by default and then changing the default program? I just did this when I realised I didn’t have a program set to open locally saved/cached html files.

Say the local file is called test.html. To determine the filetype xdg associates with this file, run:

xdg-mime query filetype test.html

The output was:

text/html; charset=utf-8

So that the filetype is text/html. To determine the current program set to open this filetype, run:

xdg-mime query default text/html

I received a blank line after this; there was no default application set. To set a default application (e.g. the Google the Chromium browser), run:

xdg-mime default chromium.desktop text/html

… and that’s it. Now the command xdg-open test.html will open test.html in the Chromium browser. Again, if you bound xdg-open to just open as I showed above, you just need to type open test.html for the same result.

planner for Gantt charts
cmus for music
OpenOffice 3 (starts with the soffice command, looks v. nice)
Midnight Commander nCurses file manager (mc)

warning: /etc/hosts.allow, line 15: can’t verify hostname: getaddrinfo(work.host.com, AF_INET) failed

where work.host.com is the DNS name the ssh request returns when querying my work machine (actually the firewall/proxy address — as we’ll see). This particular error was fixed when I changed the host name for the host I had listed in my /etc.hosts.allowed file to a bare IP, not a DNS name. I still want to see if this can be worked around. I then unmasked the real problem after logging in again:

reverse mapping checking getaddrinfo for work.host.com [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] failed – POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT!

It turns out that, I guess because my work likes to keep my behind a proxy and firewall, that a reverse DNS request back to my work computer didn’t match the IP from which the ssh login attempt was sent. To fix this I just added the “work.host.com” (not the real name) to my /etc/hosts file in order to map the host name back to my real IP. I added a line like this to my /etc/hosts file:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx work.host.com

where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of my work machine.

Incidentally, since my machine was behind a firewall/proxy, I had to determine its “real” external IP using the great site: ifconfig.me. The “IP Adress” item gave the IP of the firewall/proxy server, which is of no use when a DNS callback is wanting to find my machine. The “X-Forwarded-For” item, however, gave an external IP address for my actual machine; this was the IP I used in the hosts file above.

Thanks to ElectricToolbox for the tips!

I can now ssh in to my home server from work almost instantly.

pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qqtd)

$(pacman -Qqtd) provides a list of orphaned packages.

-Rs removed these packages and their dependencies that aren’t required by other packages.

From Phlogi: second reply here.

Nice ^_^

A great post on GNU Screen and the scrollback buffer: here.